Orson Scott Card has written some of my favorite books, and his ideas have influenced my own in various ways. So when I came across his World Watch column, which he writes on a weekly basis, I was pretty excited. Until I started actually reading the columns. I knew Card was a devoted Mormon, but […]
Intellectual hair salon
My friend Wilfred and I were chatting via IM, and he was lamenting the lack of intellectual discourse in his life. I replied that we needed to start a salon, then added “intellectual, not hair”. But the more I thought about it, the more the idea of an intellectual hair salon amused me. “Today’s topic: […]
Monkeys at Many-to-Many
I was catching up on the articles at Many-to-Many recently, and saw this entertaining one about “the monkey-mind, that primal and social part of our brains that evolved long before the human species emerged.” I particularly like this rant about the Monkeysphere, where a guy uses the idea of Dunbar’s number (Dunbar postulated that our […]
Social networks and rejection
I wanted to follow up on my recent post with more thoughts about social networks. I was thinking about the networks I’m part of, and how they interact, and realized that a component that is often missing from social software is the requirement for rejection. Nobody ever turns down a friend request in Orkut. But […]
Esther Dyson on LinkedIn
After reading danah boyd’s post about autistic social software a couple weeks ago, it was interesting to read this CNET commentary by Esther Dyson on LinkedIn, discussing several of the same issues. Since Dyson is one of the high-powered elite of the computer world, she is looking for a tool to help her manage her […]
Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology, by Paul Rabinow
Amazon link A friend lent me this book, purporting to be “an ethnographic account of the invention of PCR, the polymerase chain reaction” at Cetus, one of the first biotech companies. Unfortunately, I think that the book fails at both of its primary tasks. As somebody who still doesn’t understand a lot of biochemistry despite […]
Television ads
The American Museum of the Moving Image has put together a repository of campaign commercials, dating back to 1952. The commercials of most interest to me, of course, were the current commercials being run by Bush and Kerry. Since I live in California, which both parties are ignoring, I yet to see a single campaign […]
The Living Web
I came across this article called “10 Tips on Writing the Living Web” today, which I really liked. Some things to think about when writing for the web. It’s good to help me reflect on what I am doing with this weblog. On the occasional days when I actually write something. I should at least […]
Seven Seasons of Buffy, ed. by Glenn Yeffeth
Amazon link This is the third book analyzing Buffy that I’ve bought, after Reading the Vampire Slayer and a Buffy philosophy book. This one takes the angle of inviting other authors (the book is subtitled “Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Discuss Their Favorite Television Show”) to analyze the show. There wasn’t actually a lot of […]
Hypertext thesis
While talking to somebody today, I made a reference to the Panopticon, an idealized prison, but couldn’t remember the details of it. So I typed it into Google, and found this page describing it. The page turned out to be part of a collection of pages that was this guy’s master’s thesis in English, titled […]
