Thursday, 26th of August, 2004

I’ve been gradually reading my way through the posthumous Douglas Adams book The Salmon of Doubt - as you no doubt know, not the Dirk Gently novel he’d been in the process of writing, but rather a collection of Adams writings and a cobbled-together version of as much of the book as had been written. I haven’t gotten up to the sort-of-novel bit but have been enjoying immensely the various essays and little grabs of stuff that precede it.

And I’m posting this missive now because I’ve just been reading an interview with DNA (that’s Douglas Noel Adams, christened such some time before Watson & Crick discovered the significance of deoxyribonucleic acid) from American Atheist, so imagine my pleasure on finding via Google that it’s available online!
Very very very strongly recommended, simply because our Douglas was not only such a marvellous wordsmith, but also happened to be a marvellous thinker. His arguments about why it makes sense to call himself an atheist (as opposed to an agnostic, that is) are so perfectly and logically expressed that I have nothing further to add. He explains why calling oneself an atheist isn’t just as unjustifiable as subscribing to some faith or other, putting it into a strong philosophical context of what it means to believe something.
Wonderful stuff.

Tuesday, 24th of August, 2004

Interesting! I was doing a big spring clean (converting special characters to escaped ASCII-code, in keeping with my move to utf-8, since you ask) and as I rummaged back through my blog, I discovered that I only moved from Blogger to Movable Type on Saturday, 23rd of November, 2002! So it was less than two years later, on Wednesday, 2nd of June, 2004 that I decanted everything into WordPress. Bizarre - I thought I’d been with MT for sooo long.

Well, WordPress rocks for so many reasons. I’m lovin’ it.

Wednesday, 18th of August, 2004

Bruce Sterling, veteran cyberpunk and futurist, gave the keynote (I think) address at computer graphics nerdfest SIGGRAPH a few days ago, and the guys at BoingBoing have just put the entire text online: “When Blobjects Rule The Earth” (or, as I like to think of it, “The Spimes are Coming! Quick, Find a Spime-Wrangler!”)

Not only is Sterling an absolutely sterling word-wrangler, he really knows what he’s talking about. The link is strongly recommended for cautionary-yet-inspiring (and dare I say visionary) futurism… I quote:

It’s possible to live in a cleaner way. We live in debris and detritus because of our ignorance. That ignorance is no longer technically necessary. Those who know, know. Instead, our problem is becoming obscurantism, which is a deliberate hiding of the facts by vested interests who know they are injuring us. Such acts of evil must be combated. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Wanting to know, wanting to do it, that’s half the struggle right there. Our capacities are tremendous. Eventually, it is within our technical ability to create factories that clean the air as they work, cars that give off drinkable water, industry that creates parks instead of dumps, or even monitoring systems that allow nature to thrive in our cities, neighborhoods, lawns and homes. An industry that is not just “sustainable,” but enhances the world. The natural world should be better for our efforts and our ingenuity. It’s not too much to ask.

You and I will never live to see a future world with those advanced characteristics. The people who will be living in it will pretty much take it for granted, anyway. But that is a worthy vision for today’s technologists: because that is wise governance for a digitally conquered world. That is is not tyranny. That is legitimacy.

Tuesday, 3rd of August, 2004

Ooh, look! I got mentioned in Pitchfork!
It’s a review of Oren Ambarchi’s new album Grapes From The Estate, on which I happen to play a small amount of cello. They even got both Veren’s and my names spelled entirely correctly. Lovely. Now to get my music reviewed by them *grin*

Bleedin’ ‘eck. I wanted to write: Zionist ≠ Jewish
However, WordPress has a thing about “&” in the title when it’s doing its RSS feed. So, back to “!=” for ≠ (not equals)…

Margo has an interesting webdiary entry on her struggles with how to talk about the Zionist lobby (such as it is) without being branded an anti-Semite.
It is, of course, hard for moderate, often non-practising, left-wing Jews to talk about the policies of Israel, especially these days… I’m not sure that I completely sympathise with Margo’s “what did I say wrong?” attitude, but I’m entirely convinced that she understands the difference between “fundamentalist Zionists” (who include many Christians in the USA and here too) and Jews.