Excellent essay by Cory Doctorow
Friday, August 31st, 2001Excellent essay by Cory Doctorow on what ebooks mean for authors.
Excellent essay by Cory Doctorow on what ebooks mean for authors.
Douglas Adams’ analysis of technology:
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn 35 is incredibly exciting and creative and, given opportunity, you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really. I’m glad 35 is more than a decade off. We better invent some really cool stuff in the next ten years.
Salon has an entertaining interview with Ray Bradbury:
There’s so much competition for a young person’s attention nowadays. For the record, why is reading still important?Sounds like a great reason to keep a weblog, discovering what a fool you were. Of course, Caterina has an even better reason to keep a weblog. [Update: That Caterina link is fixed now. Thanks Ev.]
Are you kidding? You can’t have a civilization without that, can you? If you can’t read and write you can’t think. Your thoughts are dispersed if you don’t know how to read and write. You’ve got to be able to look at your thoughts on paper and discover what a fool you were.
After a many-month hiatus, RageBoy is back and blogging with a vengeance.
Principia Mathematica III. Stephen Wolfram thinks he’s close to discovering the program that generates the Universe. I just keep thinking of Pi.
NASA image processing software coming to the desktop. “With it, amateur photographers, armed with nothing more than their personal computers and a desire to get the most from the images they capture, will have the ability to increase the brightness, scene contrast, detail and overall sharpness of images with much more ease than they can today.” There are pretty dramatic examples.
My new hobby: find a mix on Art of the Mix, download the MP3s from Audiogalaxy, burn it to a CD and listen in the car. I think I can write a perl script with expect, gnut, and cdrecord to automate the entire process but it would be so much easier if Art of the Mix and Audiogalaxy had XML-RPC APIs.
Why Gnome and KDE are misguided. This should also be titled “Why everyone who thinks Unix is harder than Windows is wrong.”
Reunion pictures are up. Gallery code was lifted from evhead.
I’m off to my summer camp reunion. See you on Monday, I’ll take pictures.
Report predicts thirstier world. One in three people will not have access to enough water by 2025. Suggested solutions include consumers rethinking their diets: it takes 16 times as much water to produce a ton of beef as a ton of grain.
Slashdot is reporting that Loki is filing for bankruptcy. I went to the site thinking I should order those games I’ve been meaning to buy but it appears to be slashdotted. It looks like bankruptcy could be a very good thing for Loki.
My hometown is in the news recently because a 15-year-old girl who goes to my high school was kidnapped and raped by a Long Island couple she met on the Internet. It’s a sad and creepy story. This Globe article has more detail but probably won’t be free for long.