Rough Drafts

Dickens’ novel Great Expectations was published serially starting in December 1860 — a new episode appearing each week, just like The West Wing. Now, in December 2002, you can read Dickens’ Great Expectations as Victorians did — except you’ll be viewing .PDF facsimiles that look like the original ne

David Weinberger writes: “I realized why I’m not as happy as I should be given the externalities of my life: I’m never done with anything. … Now everything is a goddamn thread.” My reaction: I think people do need to finish things, maybe not all the time, but sometimes. And they need to be able […]

WSJ CareerJournal: Demand Explodes for Librarians With High-Tech Research Skills. There’s a newfound respect for librarians — due mainly to the information overload that’s afflicting many businesses worldwide.

UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering publishes an outstanding magazine highlighting new research. Called Lab Notes, it’s written and edited by David Pescovitz (a BoingBoing contributor among other things). Cool stuff!

I’ve been thinking for a couple weeks about a Derrida quote that somebody put into this AKMA’s blog awhile back: “Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: ‘here are our monsters’, without immediately turning the monsters into pets.” (here’s the link) One of the reasons I’ve thought so much abou

“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