Rough Drafts

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

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

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

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

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 […]