Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what’s fun?
By: Alan Jacobs
November 19, 2009
November 19, 2009
November 18, 2009
In my own personal “little things that annoy me more than they should” file, most entries concern the European past — especially the European Christian past. I’ve added two entries today. First, I’ve been enjoying James Gleick’s concise biography of Isaac Newton, but I scratched my head at this sentence: The very existence of...
November 17, 2009
Chris Sullentrop writes about his experience playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 — in particular, a scenario in which his protagonist goes undercover, pretending to be a terrorist: The game had instructed me to follow the lead of my fellow terrorists, and I had been told that preserving my undercover status was important for the...
November 16, 2009
Read James Poulos’s post on lists. Done? Okay, now read these selections from W. H. Auden’s essay “Infernal Science”: All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. (Bertrand Russell). If so, then infernal science differs from human science in that it lacks the notion of approximation: it believes its laws to be...
November 16, 2009
Having mentioned in the previous post the always-valuable work of Ann Blair, I think I’ll add a reference to an article of hers on the history of note-taking. I am not sure whether this is freely available online — I get access to a lot of stuff when I’m using the college internet connection that I can’t get at home, thanks to...
November 16, 2009
Over at Snarkmarket, Tim Carmody is meditating — here and here — on Kenny Goldsmith’s claim that “with the rise of the web, writing has met its photography.” Tim rightly finds this statement pleasingly epigrammatic but historically inaccurate, and tries to come up with a better formulation. I think he does — it’s kinda...
November 13, 2009
A famous Borges story visualized, here. Click the photo for a larger version. Thanks again to Matt Frost.
November 13, 2009
This will be old news to some of you, but: today I came across an article listing “15 Google interview questions that will make you feel stupid,” and among them was an old chestnut: Why are manhole covers round? The official Business Insider answer: “So it [sic] doesn’t fall through the manhole.” Apparently...
November 13, 2009
I’ve made it clear that I think Edward Tufte is great, but I can’t help but smile at this comment on his use of T. S. Eliot: “There are many wonderful lines in Four Quartets and I simply glide over the heavy-handed religious material.”This could be a useful approach elsewhere: “There are many wonderful lines in the Aeneid...