The answer, until we get wall-sized displays which can simply display all your book covers, like iTunes displays album covers, is to make blog posts advertising just what you’ve been reading. Clearly.

Update: Kevin Drum explains some of the reasons trees will keep dying for a while yet.

Then I watched the James May on the Moon documentary, and was struck by how much was lifted from the book, even the catchphrase, without any mention of Wolfe. They neglected to pick up the “astronaut as champion” role as well. And maybe Wolfe felt it was time to raise the point again, because his editorial in the New York Times today focuses solely on that point, and how once the combat was complete, the Soviets vanquished, there was no longer the same psychological need for the manned space program.

via Jalopnik, the Daily Dish

With the folks I work with, every time Apollo gets mentioned, we come back to the point that the computers on board were significantly less advanced than the cell phones in everyone’s pockets.

via sparkfun.com

What’s really interesting, though, is the link to “an extremely long article on the subject by Neal Stephenson, the well-known writer of extremely long things”, a 62-page epic Stephenson wrote for Wired about the places in the world which are important only because of the cables which run through them. The article was published in December of 1996, three years before Cryptonomicon, and seems to be, if not the root, an early cut of many of the ideas which feature prominently in the novel.

There’s one particular point he makes which is not only flawed, but really quite sloppy. He’s discussing if the World Wide Web has the potential to form a self-organizing emergence like a metropolis or Teillhard’s noosphere, and points out:

“Plenty of decentralized systems in the real world spontaneously generate structure as they increase in size: cities organize into neighborhoods or satellites; the neural connections of our brains develop extraordinarily specialized regions. Has the Web followed a comparable path of development over the past few years? Is the Web becoming more organized as it grows?

You need only take a quick look at the NASDAQ most active list to see that the answer is an unequivocal no. The portals and the search engines exist in the first place because the Web is a tremendously disorganized space…”

OK, so first, the assumption that the Web is unorganized and has no structure is just wrong. See Albert-László Barabási’s Linked, or any one or the multitudes of visualizations of interactions between blogs to disprove the proposed lack of structure.

The killer is what Johnson goes on to discuss, which is the various projects to track people’s surfing habits, as a way to “introduce” that structure which cities have and he claims the Web lacks. He never seems to make the connection that the sidewalks of a city, like the links between websites, would never exist without the decisions of people interacting with the system as a whole. People need to choose to visit a website and link to it, just as they need to choose to visit a particular section of the city. The major portals, that link to a few experts, and that everyone else links to and reads, serve as the “neighborhoods” of the web, and their emergence follows the same mechanisms as the emergence of shopping districts where all the goldsmiths are on the same block.

C’mon, can we please have the book now?

“Every night, electrons, forced to lick the screens of our television sets with frenzied speed, show us the world chopped up and crammed into the Latest News” – Stanislaw Lem, One Human Minute

There’s a lot of cultural momentum with the image of TV as a rounded rectangle, some 50 years worth.

flickr image from Roadsidepictures

I wonder what will pass first, the icon of TV as the tube, or the separation between media presented as “TV” and media presented as “internet”

Other people got Infinite Jest for Christmas, apparently. I really thought it was supposed to be here, next to Comm Ave.