The Map that Changed the World, somewhat of a disappointment; I expected better of the author of The Professor and the Madman, but he was too busy squee-ing over the Vast Historic Importance of the map, and deploring the Horrid Mistreatment of the Genius what Drew it, to do a very good job of either biography or pedagogy.
Sorcery and Cecilia, back in print again, yay! (Does anyone know the status of a reprint of Pam Dean's Tam Lin? I have a friend who must read it, but she lives too far away to come over and read my copy, and it doesn't leave the house.)
Big stack of Lee and Miller chapbooks.
Ooh, Jack Dannisms! I wrote down a fabulous one the other week intending to email it to pnh, but I may as well just post it here:-
The powers of the word René Daumal
I saw an article somewhere, an interview with an elections official from (I think) Argentina, who saw the lack of a paper trail as a desirable feature -- because this made it impossible for the poll workers (who are in a position to see the human-readable audit trail printout) to intimidate or bribe the voters into voting their way. This was considered a much more serious problem than the potential for meddling with the machines.
Careful arrangement of the voting stations ought to eliminate this problem, however. For instance, instead of having one ballot box for an entire polling place, one could put a box in each voting station (they're just fiberglass suitcases with slots in the side, can't be that expensive compared to the cost of a small computer) so the voters can check their printouts and then squirrel them away, before ever leaving the curtained station.
It also seems to me that thoughtful design of computerized voting machines might produce a system that was harder to tamper with than the alternative. For instance, suppose that all the voting machines are programmed to communicate with each other, in peer-to-peer fashion, and they all maintain running totals for the entire election. And when you go to shut the polls, each machine prints out its idea of the grand total. That should thoroughly scupper any after-the-fact tampering.
I make a habit of paying cash for books purchased at any of the local bookshops, because then the merchant doesn't have to pay transaction fees to the credit-card company. Since many of these places are running on razor-thin margins, especially with the recession, it does make a difference. (The Other Change of Hobbit was having trouble making rent, late last year -- act now! act without hesitation! buy lots of books from them!)
Leaving no record is a nice fringe benefit.
Andrea: I haven't read any really old Wired, but I certainly do find current print issues difficult to read. My biggest problem is the color choices for headings, which are frequently a delicate shade of silver or magenta with basically no contrast with the white page background. Illegible except under ideal lighting conditions, with young, wide-awake eyes.
Also, everything is in sans-serif fonts; I can live with this, but my mother has old tired eyes and can't read anything in sans-serif fonts anymore, unless it's also huge. I suppose the Wired designers do not consider my mother their target market.
The online edition, oddly enough, is easier to read than the print edition. At least, it is if you habitually go select "Printer-friendly version" (am I the only person who does that to just about every news website on the planet? Why do they all think it's a good idea to split up the articles into several pages, forcing you to pause in the middle for the next one to load?)
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 1 |
| 2004 | 2 |
| 2003 | 2 |
| 2002 | 6 |
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