-
Infinite Summer, Finite Reason
·
4–6 minutes·
1 comment on Infinite Summer, Finite ReasonInfinite Summer is a challenge to read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009. On their website, they say: You’ve been meaning to do it for over a decade. Now join endurance bibliophiles from around the web as we tackle and comment upon David Foster Wallace’s masterwork, June 21st to September 22nd.…
-
The Right Media at the Right Time
On Wednesday night, I was invited to a Wired UK dinner about ‘The Future of Entertainment’. At the end of the night, we were asked what we thought entertainment would look like in 15 years; some people predicted the death of copyright, others talked about the rise of videogames and live experiences. In a nod…
-
Some thoughts on Apple
My current desktop is a 2006 iMac – the first generation of Intel desktops, with a Core Duo 2.0ghz processor and ATI X1600 card. Strip away the numbers, and what you get is a computer that still handles everyday tasks like watching videos and browsing the web with perfect ease. Unfortunately, when it comes to…
-
Redcoats
Being a fan of Sharpe, I’ve long wondered why the standard British Army uniform was a ‘redcoat’ – surely the bright colour made the soldiers into obvious targets? I finally discovered the truth behind this (oddly, via a Metafilter comment about the F-22 fighter): From the modern perspective, the retention of a highly conspicuous colour…
-
A New York Times Dream
This is a real dream I had, about four hours ago: I was with a friend in a shop of gadgets and curios – the sort of place that has soap dispensers attached to D-ring clips, or electronic scales with keyboards – when I spotted a odd device on the bottom shelf. It looked like…
-
The Quick Rise of Reading
A mere two weeks after I wrote about The Long Decline of Reading, which drew largely on the US National Endowment of Arts’ (NEA) 2007 data, the NEA promptly released a report (Reading on the Rise) showing that fiction reading rates significantly increased from 2002 to 2008. Not just for certain age groups or ethnicities,…
-
Mastery of Games
Chess is not a game I’ve ever been a big fan of. I played a little at school, but I never had the patience or concentration to really study the game or learn the moves. I’d often look at better players and have absolutely no idea what was going on or why they were making…
-
Ernst Choukula
There’s been some ruckus about a History class at George Mason University in which students created a hoax about an ‘Edward Owens’, the “Last American Pirate”. They made a blog, put up some YouTube videos, and most annoyingly, created an article on Wikipedia. I find these hoaxes tiresome. We all know that it’s easy to…
-
The Long Decline of Reading
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” – Steve Jobs on eBook readers and the Amazon…
-
The ‘Chinese Rejection’
Probably an urban myth, but the ‘Chinese Rejection’ letter from publishers is a good laugh: “We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower standard. And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we…
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
mssv 