Ephraim Schwartz notices that mobile technology isn’t exactly giving us more free time. Glenn Fleishmann follows up with with this rueful reflection on the erosion of personal time. My grandparents’ generation fought tooth and nail to win a 40-hour workweek. And now we’ve pissed it away in the endless pursuit of higher personal productivity. When did we lose track of the off button?
Xeni Jardin cracks me up. First she wonders, What if Spiderman had been a Bollywood epic? The result: Dancing Spidey. She adds that the cardinal rule of Bollywood filmmaking is “more is better.” Put in a few Japanese anime characters, and you get this. But wait, there’s even more.
DARPA’s Information Awareness Office has a really creepy logo: a pyramid surmounted by a floating eye, which is shining a beam of light onto the Earth. Now that the Homeland Security Act has been signed into law, these guys are going to town, and $243 million has already been earmarked for the office’s snoopy “Total Information Awareness” project. “This could be the perfect storm for civil liberties in America,” says Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), in this Asia Times story.
Read the rest of this entry »
Librarians in Washington: Kicking butt and taking names.
Hartford, Conn., Nov. 25– A militia of handgun-toting representatives of religious groups trying to get major gun manufacturers to build smaller guns stopped at Colt Manufacturing headquarters today. Their bumper stickers asked: “What would Jesus shoot?”
Read the rest of this entry »
Justin Hall investigates the convergence of weblogs and mobile/wireless technologies, and concludes that future moblogs will replace today’s weblogs as well as today’s newspapers. “So weblogs in the future, on our phones, might not exist as an old media analogue: discreet publications, edited by one discreet group of people. Rather they might be something more organic: particular headlines or stories are flagged or read or marked with exclamation points by people listed in our phonebook, important news elected by a related plurality.”
Stanislaw Lem is alive and well and still writing in Poland, and Steven Soderbergh is making a movie based on Lem’s 1961 novel Solaris. “He knows it’s coming,” Mr. Soderbergh said. “I hope he’s in good health when he sees it.”
Xian on Userland’s John Robb: I was picturing him commenting on NASA’s new space planes, by posting something like: “Those bureaucrats are crazy building a new round of smaller space shuttles. What they really need is a Manila server and just give all the astronauts Radio weblogs and bang, zoom– off to the moon!”
Joseph Duemer is a philosopher, a poet, and a damn thoughtful weblogger. (via Matrullo)
Via bookslut: The Major Fall, the Minor Lift is a weblog of culture, literature, music commentary. I think. Looks interesting.
