Steven Pinker has a new op-ed in the New York Times where, ever the gallant hero of relativism in the way that most linguists and social scientists are, he defends new forms of mass and social media from their loudest detractors. His two salient examples are Powerpoint and Twitter. While the former has been a [...]
Download the PDF. Economic models of the traditional and well-known sense usually describe either manufactured physical goods or services performed, both of which are scarce resources: only so much grain can be grown, for instance—or widgets churned out of an industrial plant, or pipes plumbed by professionals. Short of espionage, even the market for Information [...]
Though I’m not the sort of person who believes that native 64-bit compilations of programs will automagically make them perform faster or better, I do like to keep an eye on the state of the art, since I was an early adopter of native 64-bit OSes (I’ve been using 64-bit Linux since about Fedora Core [...]
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My familiarity with Neal Stephenson began with Cryptonomicon, which at the time came much more highly recommended to me than Snow Crash. The former doesn’t quite count as “science fiction”; it was more like a techno-thriller consumed by comp.sci and technological masturbation, with a bit of historical intrigue thrown in for good measure. Snow Crash, [...]
¶ JPod
JPod is considered the spiritual successor to Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, a boom-era tech novel about the joys and perils of working at Microsoft in its heyday. As you can read in my review of the book, I was not particularly fond of it; perhaps I simply can’t appreciate Coupland’s treatment of that era. I personally [...]
I read Accelerando earlier this year; it was my first experience with Charles Stross, and it was a bit of a mindjob. While Stross is known for “hard” scifi, Accelerando quickly vaulted into a plausible-but-fantastic realm that probably wasn’t very indicative of the Stross that was recommended to me when I read Daemon.
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