Rough Drafts

“E-mail alone has some while ago turned us all into cyborgs in ways that are increasingly difficult to feel and name, now that the medium has completely assimilated us.” From Blogistan, a link to this amazing short story by Richard Powers about what might happen if someone used artificial intelligen

A U.K. writer has been given a grant of 2,000 UK pounds “to use sheep to create random poems, which also utilise the deepest workings of the universe.”

The NYT has a piece that examines why poetry readings are so excruciating: It’s that ubiquitous poetry voice: “a sort of quivering, nasal incantation, in which the voice trails upward, uncertainly, at the end of a line … as if the poets were delivering dire prognostications or trying to awaken in th

Beliefnet is recycling an old but intriguing article by Gregg Easterbrook, in which he points out that Jesus reduced the number of commandments to six. The Six Commandments? Basically he took out all the God stuff. The remaining six are pretty non-specific in terms of religion: You shall not murder.

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 endle

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 offic

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?”

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

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