Year: 2004
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Neal Stephenson: “Every culture can be kind of defined by what they drink in order to avoid dying of diarrhea.”
Salon has a wide-ranging interview with author Neal Stephenson. The emphasis is on his most recent work, The Baroque Cycle. I’m reading The Confusion, the second volume in the trilogy (my notes on Quicksilver, the first volume). A few quotes from the interview. On the 17th century version of establishing authorship in the science realm:…
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New version of NNW vs. PulpFiction
So, new RSS reader called PulpFiction is coming soon (May 15). And that post prompted Brent to detail some of what’s coming in the next release of NetNewsWire. No date promised yet, but sounds imminent. I love that the developer of Shrook posted in the comments of the PulpFiction post. Lots of talk… it’s early…
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Book: Free Flight
Unlike the previous book, Free Flight, by Jim Fallows, is a joy to read. Instead of two months of staggered, sporadic efforts, I started and finished this book about the possibilities for general aviaton in a day. As a partial coincidence, I had enough time to read this book yesterday because I was flying home…
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Spread the meme
Why not?
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Book: Empires in the Sun: The Rise of the American West
Empires in the Sun: The Rise of the American West by Robert Gottlieb and Peter Booth Wiley is a clunker. I borrowed the book two months ago from my father-in-law, who warned me it wasn’t perfect. It was worse than that limited recommendation. The idea of looking at Western history through the politics of water…
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Calm before the storm
I often wake up before my kids. Sometimes, I get out of bed, come downstairs, sift through accumulated news and email, and type here. At every moment, I’m listening, wondering when either kid — or both — will be fully awake and no longer content to mumble away quietly. They cross the threshold of wakefulness…
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Will Amazon “amazon the news”?
In 2001, the folks at Hypergene created a delightful thought piece, Amazoning the news. The presentation demonstrated the potential power in delivering the news with the same interactive threads that Amazon has woven throughout its commerce platform (and it is a platform). I read this piece three years ago, and I still harken back to…
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Making mistakes in public
Earlier today, Mark Pilgrim took CNET to task for presuming to create YAML (Yet Another Markup Language). That was decidely not the case, but there was cause for confusion. The culprit? An old feed, not RSS, which was mistakenly listed on the CNET Download.com RSS page and presented as if it were RSS, like the…
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Almost makes me want to buy a new cellphone
Matt Haughey encourages everyone with All Hail Bluetooth, a description of his recent phone upgrade. I have the same 12″ PowerBook, and this desktop Mac, but my cellphone is very 1999 (if that). I’m not in a hurry to switch, but I can see (more of) the appeal.
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Marginalia
Jon Udell writes about the lack of margins in electronic documents. His blog post doesn’t add much, which is unusual… he often explores a theme or a tangent more fully there, which I appreciate. Margins offer room for shared experience and interpretation. We’ve started using a Wiki as our shared project list and organic documentation…