Tag: history

  • What’s wrong with atheists?

    I’m an atheist. Just getting that out of the way. Because this is about a problem that I have with atheists. Not all atheists. Just the strident ones, the humourless…

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  • Tim Berners-Lee’s most important decision

    Of the dozens of design decisions that TBL made during 1989, all of which continue to shape the way we build and use the web twenty-five years later, the most…

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  • Seven things it’s worth remembering about Wikileaks

    Before its inglorious founder takes it down with him or before it’s chased off the Internet by enraged governments, it’s worth remembering what Wikileaks was before it became a cause…

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  • NTK: “exactly the same thing, 15 years late”

    Fifteen years ago, when it was all fields round here, Danny O’Brien and Dave Green – who were well-known in underground gaming/comedy/tech/confectionery circles – began to publish an email newsletter…

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  • Bowblog is ten years old today

    I adapted the name from Kevin Werbach’s Werblog, which seemed like a cool thing to do at the time. I’d been blogging for a few years before that (since the…

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  • Igor Stravinsky, Tupac Shakur and the uncanny

    (a post from 2012, which is pretty uncanny in itself) The Player Piano was the Tupac Hologram of its day. — The most thrilling of our inventions are the ones…

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  • You know, actual curation

    Everyone’s going on about curation these days. We’re all curators now. But yesterday I witnessed some of the old-fashioned variety, the kind they do in art galleries, and I was…

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  • The second-best book about twentieth century music

    Everybody knows the best book about Twentieth Century music is Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise but there’s another brilliant book set in the same period – Wilfrid Sheed’s The…

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  • Is that it for the PC?

    The latest Mac OS is the first that can only be bought from an app store, from a tightly-integrated, locked-down, official source. I reckon that’s pretty much it for the…

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  • Really suffering for your art

    Everyone says music is getting more physical again. We continue to get our daily sounds from ever more insubstantial sources, floating above us like those glittering landscapes in Neuromancer, but…

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