November 22, 2003

Assorted Reading

Latest in an irregular series. No attempt at order or arrangement.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden reminds us that the Web was once but a scientifictional dream. The post is hilarious, but of course, it's also literally true. Murray Leinster's 1946 story "A Logic Named Joe" did an astonishingly good job of imagining networked personal computers ("logics"), even --- this is the most impressive part --- guessing how they'd be used, from encyclopedias and games through finding friends to, err, other stuff which the young ones aren't supposed to see. He even realized that working tech support was going to suck. Remarkably, Leinster's story came out less than a year after "As We May Think", its only plausible non-fictional predecessor. --- Also fun recently from Making Light: Dressed to the Nines.

Good stuff in The American Prospect:

Danny Yee's Icelandic Travelogue, with pictures.

I'd like Christianity better if more Christians were like whoever writes Slacktivist, seen here in fine form smiting an idolator, and fewer were scary, graceless people who want us to suffer so they can say "I told you so". Joan Didion's latest essay on those same people is more elegant than Slacktivist's, but almost as blunt, and more scary.

Nine years later, it is still true that nothing banned in Singapore can be all bad. [Via MaxSpeak, among others.]

A nice Discover profile of feminist sociobiologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. I can hardly recommend The Woman That Never Evolved or Mother Nature too highly, and the profile is actually reasonably accurate as to their contents. Via misbehaving.net, an interesting-looking group blog about women in technology, in turn via Sappho's Breathing.

Linkage; The Natural Science of the Human Species; Scientifiction

Posted at November 22, 2003 16:38 | permanent link

Three-Toed Sloth