June 2008
14 posts
That Spatial Anomaly Near IC 2497 →
Switching feed source
I’m dropping the old RSS feed and switching to Feedburner. There’s a chance the old one will still work, but it’s safer to just switch over to http://feeds.feedburner.com/Backstrip
Wired's End of Logic
I hope Chris Anderson gets a big cookie for his obviously provocative piece, The End of Theory. His latest cover feature for Wired asserts that, with a large enough data set, you can pull out correlations upon correlations that overshadow the need to pin down causation, test hypotheses, build theoretical models, and ultimately, employ the scientific method.
There is now a better way. Petabytes [of...
“What happens to book consumption when books become social objects, commented...”
– Seth Godin on what the Kindle needs to achieve before it becomes a killer app.
Game A Week: HansaQuest
Logan from Kotaku AU either has enormous testicles, or tiny ones and wants to appear as though they’re big. In any case, Game A Week is an act of titanic bravery. The premise is just like the 7DRL comp, but the RL is optional, the concept is provided by someone else, and he has to blog about it. Logan’s also given himself some restrictions:
1) No amazing graphics, they take too much...
Butts, Sacks, and Women Don't Mix
The Independent has just posted one of those stories that highlights how strange the world is, at least to me. Apparently, if you were chosen to be the Queen’s poet — the Poet Laureate — you’d be up for 5000 pounds a year and a ‘butt of sack’ (or 600-odd bottles of sherry). I’d be happy with just having my name alongside Spenser, Chaucer, Skelton, Jonson,...
Cute: Read at Work →
King Kull Fights Postmodernism and Wins
Before Conan, Robert E Howard wrote about another throned barbarian, Kull. The stories weren’t as refined as Conan, but they were clever, original, a little more introspective, and philosophically prescient. Take, for example, The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune. It opens with Kull on his throne, suffering some kind of existential boredom about being a king.
“They moved before him in an...
“E-books smell like burned fuel.”
– Ray Badbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, at BookExpo America.
Tools of Disruption
As an ongoing project, I’m interested in the concept of disruption*, particularly as it relates to the future of books. Here’s a starting list of what I’d call disruptive books, helpfully compiled by conservative movement, Human Events. It’s titled The Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries:
The Communist Manifesto
Mein Kampf
Quotations from Chairman Mao
...