Last week’s Long Now talk was by Stewart Brand, one of the organizers and author of the book How Buildings Learn. This talk was about cities, and how cities learn. He started off the talk by talking about demographics. Within the next couple years, more than 50% of the world will live in cities. And […]
New blog software
In case any of my readers were wondering why I haven’t updated in a while, the reason should now be evident. I finally broke down last week and admitted to myself that I was never, ever going to set up my own server at home, so I should just pay somebody to do it for […]
Links of April 4th, 2005
Three links of interest that I came across today. Thomas Friedman wrote a long article about outsourcing for the New York Times magazine, making the point that with new technology, the world is flattening out such that anything can be done anywhere. While I believe outsourcing may be good, and while I am amazed, as […]
Conversational Alignment
This is a post I’ve been thinking about for a while, partially wrote, but never got around to finishing. And I’m only finishing it today because I want to write another post that refers to it. Welcome to the wacky world that is my mind. Here’s the question of the day: why is it that […]
Context sensitivity
I’ve talked about the importance of context to cognitive subroutines before, but I wanted to pick up on it again this morning. I’ve just spent most of the last three weeks in New York City, living a very different kind of life in a different place. I walked almost everywhere I went, I was going […]
The last days of New York (March 29-31)
Nothing too exciting to report on my last few days in New York. On Tuesday, March 29, I wrote up a few book reviews in the morning, and headed over to see the Guggenheim Museum in the afternoon. I don’t think I’d visited the Guggenheim before, so seeing the space was a wonderful experience. I […]
Look Up More
Damn. I just read about this awesome performance art piece called Look Up More, performed here in New York a week ago Saturday. And I missed it! Damn! I needed better contacts here, apparently. I was about five blocks away when it went off, watching a play. Ah well. They put volunteers in each of […]
Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, by William J. Mitchell
Amazon link I mentioned in this post how I picked up Me++ at the Whitney Museum, and started reading it. Some interesting ideas here. I found out later from Jofish that Mitchell is the current head of the Media Lab at MIT, which explains a lot about the book. There’s nothing particularly innovative about his […]
Only Forward, by Michael Marshall Smith
Amazon link While we were driving up to Cornell, Jofish recommended this book. I’d read another of Smith’s books, Spares, borrowed from the library, but it made absolutely no impact on me, and I didn’t remember a single detail. But, in the mornings, while waiting for others to wake up, I picked up Only Forward […]
Finite and Infinite Games, by James Carse
Amazon link After seeing James Carse speak, I was eager to read his book, which I finally got around to doing on this vacation. It’s a deceptively simple book, with lots of short, simple sentences. But there’s a lot of thought packed into those sentences. I covered his overall gist in that previous post, where […]
