This is the complete archive for the Reading Category. [Show full posts]
p.41, on reading the ‘news-in-brief’ section of the daily paper: Tragic end for Verona lovebirds: after mistakenly thinking his sweetheart dead, a young man took his life. Having discovered the fate of her lover, the woman killed herself in turn. A young mother threw herself under a train and died in Russia after domenstic problems. [...]
[Keywords: Alain de Botton, books, Boring, How Proust Can Change Your Life, non-fiction] [No comments] [Permanent link]
Trees have roots; I have legs. And believe me, that is a huge advantage. [...] Is it possible to read Plato while wearing a Walkman? [...] Books are a great bulwark for private life. [...] Imagine a world where neuro-chemistry could explain Mozart… It is conceivable, and I find it frightening. From Telerama, via Presseurop [...]
[Keywords: articles, culture, dichotomy, George Steiner, Reading, roots, silence] [No comments] [Permanent link]
[Keywords: books, fiction, P. G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim] [No comments] [Permanent link]
I knew Kernighan and Plauger were forward-thinking, but hadn’t realised they were 22 years ahead of their time! (Oh, and for my own future reference: How to tear in Gimp.)
[Keywords: books, Brian Kernighan, Code Complete, non-fiction, P. J. Plauger, Programming, Reading, Steve McConnell] [No comments] [Permanent link]
[Keywords: America, books, dogs, non-fiction, Reading, travelling, Travels with Charley] [No comments] [Permanent link]
[Keywords: books, non-fiction, Oxford University Press, Pink Dandelion, Quakerism] [No comments] [Permanent link]
[Keywords: books, Carnival, Compton MacKenzie, fiction, hiking, Scotland] [No comments] [Permanent link]
[Keywords: books, Walter Scott, Waverley] [No comments] [Permanent link]
Believing we have all the technology we’ll ever need, we seek to draw attention to its destructive side effects. This seems foolish… —Neal Stephenson, Innovation Starvation It is the first day of a new month. Does that mean anything? Not really, but it’s a convenient thing to kick me in to writing again. Can we [...]
[Keywords: doubt, imagination, Neal Stephenson, optimism, technology] [No comments] [Permanent link]
Kevin Kelly, in The European: Most of the problems today have been generated by technology, and most future problems will be generated by technology as well. I am so technocentric that I say: The solution to technological problems is more technology. Here’s a tangible example: If I throw around some really bad ideas in this [...]
[Keywords: future, Kevin Kelly, technology, The European] [No comments] [Permanent link]
Own your identity by Marco Arment: If you care about your online presence, you must own it. I do, and that’s why my email address has always been at my own domain, not the domain of any employer or webmail service. … Sadly, most people don’t care about giving control of their online identity to [...]
[Keywords: Blogging, email, gmail, identity, Marco Arment, social networking, web] [No comments] [Permanent link]
…When I asked Feal and Carol Saller, who oversees the Chicago Manual of Style, if there was a chance their organizations would go over to the other side, they both replied, in essence: “How about never? Is never good for you?”… — The Rise of “Logical Punctuation”, Ben Yagoda, May 12 2011, Slate.
[Keywords: Ben Yagoda, Chicago Manual of Style, logic, punctuation, quotations, Slate] [No comments] [Permanent link]
“Machines should work, people should think.” The message repeats itself several times; it’s the core of the film’s techno-utopian vision. We can imagine IBM executives and lawyers and public relations agents sitting across a table from Jim Henson telling him to make sure he includes these lines in his film. What if, following William Empson’s [...]
[Keywords: Ben Kafka, IBM, ICT, Information Technology, paperwork, technology, Work] [No comments] [Permanent link]
I’m not actually all that enthusiastic about this silly address book plugin, y’know. I’d rather be back fiddling with a little idea I had a while ago for a distributed bibliography thing for WP. Something a bit like LibraryThing, except that all the book data is stored within one’s own database, and importing other people’s [...]
[Keywords: bibliography, books, LibraryThing, Reading, wordpress] [No comments] [Permanent link]
I yearn for quiet (I’m a Quaker, after all, and feel silence to be a necessary precondition for hearing the ssvw). Especially when I’m reading. But public libraries are not silent. Libraries, you see, are meant to be fun. In the morning, there are creches that consist not of storytelling but percussion-accompanied singalongs. Foreign language [...]
I haven’t posted for a few days because I have not been doing much worthy of note. A bit more playing with boxboard pidgeonholes, a bit of reading (Morris mainly, this morning the first book of The Prelude, as well as sundry other texts relating to the… [gotta go...]
[Keywords: art school, pidgeonholes, Reading] [No comments] [Permanent link]
