Anthony Braxton has sat on the fringes of music for as long as I can remember. It’s overly reductive to call him a jazz musician whose inspiration comes from the European avant-garde, but it’s as good a place to start as any. I don’t remember a time when he wasn’t, at best, c...

In my Guide to English Language Usage I say information technology (IT): The word informatics appears in dictionaries but is not in common current use. True the COD defines it as the science of processing data for storage and retrieval but I have always thought of it as falling into the category of ...

To Noah’s thoughtful post below I want to append two quotations from Stanley Fish, who, for all his other failings, is one of the sharpest commentators on the set of issues that Noah raises. The first passage is from an essay called “Vicki Frost Objects� (from his book The Trouble with Princip...

This is the sixth in a series of interviews with Christian bloggers. In the hot seat today is... Iain D. Campbell GD: Hello Iain Campbell and welcome to Exiled Preacher. Please tell us a little about yourself. IC: I am a pastor in the Free Church of Scotland, currently serving a congregation in the ...

When did the technological menace that stalks popular culture shift from being carbon-based to entirely silicon? When did we evolve the perception that fictional computers could receive human-type personalities? When we reviewed Ray Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines , eight and half years ago, we...

Urban renewal: approaching sites as ecosystems [David Barrie] "But the unifying element of all three initiatives is that they see/saw physical development sites as an opportunity to create or support new ecosystems of economic, social and cultural activity. And a process was designed around tho...

Photographer Filip Dujardin challenges the viewer with some bizarre buildings, "combin[ing] photographs of parts of buildings into new, fictional, architectonic structures." [Via] Photojojo offers up the very cool bottle cap tripod for $10. (On a somewhat related note, David Pogue points out "It tur...

President-elect Barack Obama told the Chicago Tribune, "I think we've got a unique opportunity to reboot America's image around the world and also in the Muslim world in particular." He pledged an "unrelenting" wish to "create a relationship of mutual respect and partnership in countries and with pe...

"And be aware that the dogs of Afghanistan have found the flesh of your soldiers to be delicious, so send thousands after thousands to them." Al Quaeda to Obama. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." Unidentified Bush advisor, 2002. I can't help but think that until the...

A bi-weekly collection of linky goodness. Apple - Movie Trailers - Up Looks to be a pretty colorful Pixar movie! Tags: movie, pixar, up, via:mento.info Help, We’re Being Digitally Bombarded | Mark Evans This is a good encapsulation/description of the “information abundance” problem/opp...