the tweney review

Via Joho: BeliefNet has emerged from bankruptcy and is now back online. This is the home of the nifty Belief-o-matic, a quiz that asks what your beliefs are and then tells you which religions most clearly mirror those views. Last time I took this test, it told me I was a Theravada Buddhist. Today, it told me I’m a Unitarian Universalist. I wonder what John Calvin would have said if he’d been born a Theravadin, or a Unitarian.

Steve Waldman, Beliefnet’s editor in chief, has an online diary about his company’s reincarnation.

“You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man’s age-old dream — the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path.”

– Ronald Reagan, October 27, 1964 (via Dave Farber)

Dan Gillmor: The control freaks are winning, and your privacy is just about gone.

More info on Poindexter’s Information Awareness Office, which should be getting plenty of funding now that the Homeland Security Act has passed, from the Washington Post. (thanks to Dan Gillmor)

“The Information Awareness Office, run by former national security adviser John M. Poindexter, aims to develop new technologies to sift through “ultra-large” data warehouses and networked computers in search of threatening patterns among everyday transactions, such as credit card purchases and travel reservations, according to interviews and documents. “

Kevin Kelly has written a rousing, entertaining survey of recent thinking in cosmology, physics, and informatics in the latest issue of Wired: God Is the Machine. In a nutshell, a lot of thinkers — including Mathematica founder Stephen Wolfram and self-educated intellectual Ed Fredkin — are starting to notice similarities between information theory and physics. At bottom, they say, the universe is built out of information — actual bits, 1s and 0s — and binary computations are the building blocks of reality, making the entire universe, in effect, a giant computer.
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The International Children’s Digital Library debuts today with 200 books; 10,000 to be made available online in the project’s next phase.

“You’re the most intellectual and thoroughly intense theologian on the block. You know what you’re talking about and you recommend people to ignore you at their own risk. Yeah, baby, you know your stuff. You speak in riddles and confuse people for fun. Still, this hurts your social skills a lot… and you end up always appearing arrogant and rude.” So, how about you? What Christian theologian are you?

David Weinberger reports on his talk to a bunch of librarians. The discussion eventually turned to “whether there can be librarians without books,” D.W. says.

The librarians proposed a continued role for themselves as “gatekeepers of information.” Weinberger is unconvinced: If information is widely abundant, who needs gatekeepers?
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Since the beginning of National Novel Writing Month, I’ve written about 12,000 words of “Fatal Exception” - my dot com murder mystery. Not bad for two weeks. The first week went great guns, but then my mom was visiting, I got sick, and there’s that nasty work thing, so I’ve only written 2,000 words since November 6. Will you get to read this novel once it’s completed? I doubt it, but maybe I’ll post some excerpts if you’re really really nice. Meanwhile, you can read more about the collective madness known as Nanowrimo.

I’m looking forward to the arrival of this book on the freelance writing life by Mat Coward: Success and How to Avoid It. Here’s an excerpt . Said excerpt is formatted, annoyingly, in tiny un-resizable white type on a black background — I had to copy it and paste it into Word in order to read it. But it was worth the effort.

“In fact, so confident am I of this book’s unique appeal, that if, as a direct result of reading Success and How to Avoid it, you do indeed make a million pounds from the comfort of your own lounge without really trying, I hereby undertake to refund in full the price of the book.”