Category: Technology
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The Monk and The Academic: How to be Happy
Interesting piece in The Times yesterday about the meeting of two of the happiest men in the world. Well, one of them – the monk Matthieu Ricard – is apparently the happiest (on average, surely – I doubt he’s ever been happier than me when United won the Champions League in the last minute of…
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Whitey On The Moon: Not Any More
Occasionally two things from the news catch your ear and resonate together. Today it was the news that Obama has cancelled Nasa’s new moon programme. And [ht Barry Taylor] that Gil Scott-Heron is back with a new album. The connection? I’ve always loved Scott-Heron’s early, hard-hitting social commentaries. And the lyrics of ‘Whitey on the…
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Looking Into The #iPad and Seeing Our Own Reflection
[Cartoon by Dave Walker.] In the last couple of posts I’ve been thinking about what the form of texts add to their meaning, springboarding from a book reviewing experiment in The Believer in which the reviewer was given a novel to read which had been stripped of its cover and all meta-data about the author.…
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Once Books are Gone What Will Our Vanity Object Be?
One interesting repercussion of the advent of the e-reader may well be the disappearance of the bookshelf. Before you scoff and say never just remember how resistant I/we were to putting our CDs and vinyl away. But away they have been put, and the solitary ipod is now the norm. So if e-readers become more…