I’ve got kind of a miscellaneous set of things to read for this month, without much of a theme, so I will just get right to it: 1) “The Rotting Internet is a Collective Hallucination”, by Jonathan Zittrain Once a year, I teach a class on technology and democracy. One of the ideas that I …
Phoenix is sometimes referred as the most ecologically unsustainable city in the world. A city of millions in the the middle of a desert, it says something about what human effort and ingenuity make possible but also perhaps about how long impossibility may require to manifest itself. Needless to say, the city depends entirely on …
Once, during the summer that I worked in the campus computer store, a chatty customer began talking to me about science fiction books. One he mentioned specifically was The Mote in God’s Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. This stuck in my mind only because he was impressed that I knew what the word …
Kind of a long one this week, so lets get right into it. Fist, while you’re reading you can listen to… Mix: FACT Mix 505 by Alessandro Cortini I’m not sure exactly how much of his own imprint Cortini is putting on the tracks here, though I think it must be quite a bit. In …
I missed posting these last week, because we were still on the road and our access to the internet was inconsistent (why can’t hotels figure out how to provide decent WiFi?). To make up for it, here’s a whole bunch of stuff, including quite a bit of new music. Article: “Life of Pi: How …