Rough Drafts

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

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.

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, i

“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 […]

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 de

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