Posts by matt

This trailer for The Shining has made my year. I don’t think I’ll ever look at another movie trailer the same way again. Wow. (Via.)

I really hope this happens. I really hope this happens. The folks at the MIT Media Lab have been talking about this $100 laptop for what seems like forever. Today they released some photos of their prototype (see the gallery). Nicholas Negroponte calls the project the most important thing he’s ever done in his life. I think I agree. How awesome would it be if millions of very poor people could have WiFi-enabled laptops with their regenerative power supplies? (Via if:book.)

Fellow Web design geeks take cheer! It’s soon going to become very, very easy to flow text into multiple columns on a Web page using only CSS. In fact, it’s apparently not that difficult now, using a JavaScript that the folks at A List Apart have cooked up. See examples. (Via Gadgetopia.)

So Robin got to hear Ray Kurzweil. Jealous? Want some of that Kurzweil action for yourself? Try listening to a lecture he gave in May in Boston. WGBH, Boston’s super-awesome public radio station, podcasts its weekly lecture series on its Web site. The lectures are all over the map, from panel discussions with the folks behind The Little Prince opera to interviews with some pretty cool authors. A handy alternative to C-SPAN’s Booknotes, which also rocks. (Via Learning the Lessons of Nixon.)

I’m not sure exactly what John Blossom’s talking about, but he mentions EPIC. Must be something brilliant. (Via Read/Write Web.)

Chief among the tics of humankind that drive me to distraction is Oprah-bashing. She’s too rich. She doesn’t help the world enough. Her book club popularizes cheap literature.

That last one makes me absolutely insane. Not just because it unforgivably devalues some amazing authors, and not just because it bespeaks an unsufferable elitism, not just because it feels like a deep, indirect insult to the folks I know who got a lot out of the club.

It chafed me most because what Oprah was doing — constructive an alternative, contemporary canon — thrilled me. I’m kind of an inveterate detractor of The Canon, in general. Lists of recommended texts are useful, of course. But anything purporting to be The Authoritative List of Greatest Works is simply a religious artifact, founded entirely on faith. The way I see it, we each have a canon. The task of constructing it, work by work, to form a lens onto the world is part of why we keep reading our entire lives.

Of course, the idea that each person has her own canon subverts the Canon entirely. Of course, I’m all for that, ’cause I think the idea of the Canon subverts literature entirely. The idea that there’s one complete list of Works To Be Read strikes me as anti-literary. (I understand the Canon is intended to be a basis for further enlightenment or whatever, but I don’t think that’s how most people who are not Harold Bloom treat it. His Western Canon is long enough to occupy most people for the majority of their lives.)

I was disappointed to hear that Oprah was abandoning the initial contemporary focus of her book club for a seemingly safer “classics” approach. It felt like she was retreating from the exciting business of creating her own canon and falling back on this boring old Canon that already exists. So I’m delighted to hear the real Oprah’s Book Club is back.

Yes, there are great books. No, The Celestine Prophecy is pretty inarguably not the literary equal of, say, Remembrance of Things Past. But I can imagine a canon that includes the former and not the latter. And cheers to that.

Watch in realtime as people add bookmarks to del.icio.us. (Via SolutionWatch.)

Interesting. Some of the Gawker Media blogs (LifeHacker, Gawker, and Gizmodo) have started including comments, but only by invited users. It’s a Gmail-like invite system, the FAQ explains, where these special invitees get more invitations to give to trusted friends and cyberacquaintances. (Via Steve Rubel.)

Font junkies like me will love Typetester, a Web-based font comparison tool. (Spotted all over, most recently at Lifehacker.)

This is an old link, but seeing as I need to decorate my workspace, I’ve been casting many a curious eye at the Rasterbator, which lets you make giant, nicely pixellated mosaics of any image you’ve got.

OK, I’ve written exactly six posts so far in September, and the month is almost over. For those of you who didn’t know, this is because I’ve been in the process of moving to Minneapolis. Ruminations on moving will happen once I’m sitting at my computer in my apartment, which won’t happen for at least a week. For now, Robin does a pretty good job, no?

The Singularity begins the moment when humans create a technology more intelligent than themselves. Singularity theorists like Ray Kurzweil argue that the rate of innovation on earth has been increasing exponentially since before we got here, and now rests on the brink of outpacing human ability to keep up with it. When that happens, the theory goes, humans become obsolete and machines take over, innovating faster than we can possibly imagine.

For a primer on the concept, try this Vernor Vinge essay, what some call the first articulation of the Singularity. Vinge is something of a Singularity pessimist; in most of the outcomes he posits, life gets pretty bad for humankind. Kurzweil, whose new book is the catalyst for this post, takes a much cheerier view; the Singularity means humans will pretty much be over mortality, poverty and disease.

The kicker? Whenever they estimate how soon we’ve got till the Singularity, Vinge, Kurzweil and others talk in terms of years. Not millennia, not centuries, barely even decades. (Vinge: “I’ll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.” Kurzweil: “By 2030, a thousand dollars of computation will be about a thousand times more powerful than a human brain.”) Folks like Kevin Drum think 30-40 years are a generous estimate. (Drum: “Seems to me that the Singularity should be right on our doorstep, not 40 years away.”)

Of course there are critics of these ideas, including folks like Jonathan Huebner, who actually think technological innovation is slowing to a halt. (Some criticism of the criticism.)

Interestingly, the Long Bet between Kurzweil and Mitchell Kapor on this topic (the very first Long Bet) has folks split exactly 50/50 as to whether it will play out like Kurz says.

More on the Singularity and Kurzweil’s book:

• KurzweilAI.net:: Tons of articles from Kurzweil and his fan club.
• InstaPundit: An interview with Kurzweil.
• Acceleration Watch: More Singularity theorists.