Your Inner European is French! Smart and sophisticated. You have the best of everything – at least, *you* think so. Who’s Your Inner European? Via Ritu, whose Inner European is Italian.
Month: April 2005
Would experiences come with royalties?
Um, something seems to be up with the F5 Questionlog, since this week it put out another question by me: I was rereading a short story by Orson Scott Card, called “Angles” (in the Silverberg/Haber Best of SF 2002 collection), when I ran into a machine that’s familiar to all of us, I’m sure. The trope is all too common in SF: the machine that can capture others’ experiences and let you experience them for yourself. Imagine if such a machine were built to capture the experiences of others, as they were happening, and store them for later re-experiencing by …
Book #11: The Verb For What Visionaries Do
I finished this text a week ago, but I’ve been too busy and also too stunned by it to find anything to say about it until today. Here it is… book #11 of my Lunar New Year readings: Tomorrow Now: Envisioning The Next 50 Years by Bruce Sterling. This is a work of futurism. Any resemblance to the future, real or imagined, is not wholly accidental, but of course any and all correspondences will come as surprise. Futurism, after all, is a strange and dicey game. Envisioning it is even harder than talking about it, but envisioning it is what …
Some cool NPR stuff
Recommended by my co-worker Mike, this episode of American National Public Radio (NPR)’s This American Life is worth a listen. Did I ever mention I went to school with Jonathan Goldstein, who shows up on This American Life Sometimes? I did. And from my friend John, fun on NPR with Harvey Pekar. Anyone who tears into Wynton Marsalis for being uncreative, derivative, boring, uncreative, and overcelebrated—a Jazz Nazi, as an old friend of mine called him—anyone who publicly declares disgust with ol’ Wynton is alright by me.
A Foretaste: What We Can Learn From The Yellow Dust From China
It’s that time of year again. If you want a good look at the future, according to the course we have set right now, this is it. Take a good look. It’s someone else’s grandfather on a bicycle, wearing a facemask. Someday, that’s going to be your grandfather—or your mother, or you—wearing a mask. Your eyes are going to be burning too, but you won’t pay it as much mind after the first few toxic springs. At least, I haven’t. When I snapped the picture of him as he passed by, my eyes were stinging, but I wasn’t paying it …