I was going to call Gladwell the PT Barnum of science journalism, but that isn’t fair to him or to Barnum. Maybe he’s the Spielberg of his field, tossing out smooth, easily digested entertainment that leaves us satisfied but essentially unchanged. That doesn’t make Blink a waste of time, though the reader may be left wondering what the takeaway is supposed to be.
Gladwell is a master of the breezy style that eliminates all turbulence from the flow of reading – most people could whip through Blink on a plane flight. There’s some light-weight discussion of research into snap-judgments, but the author seems compelled to focus on the upside of intuition, only occasionally admitting that sometimes these judgments lead to terrible decisions. While it’s interesting that they sometimes don’t, the book seems to have a huge blind spot when it comes to explaining why we go to such lengths to question our intuitions. If the most he can say about the Amadou Diallo shooters is that they should have been more experienced, he’s missing a huge chunk of the story.
Mika Brzezinski is my new top-shelf hero. Watch her try to wipe Paris H off the lead while Joe Scarborough and his henchman amuse each other with their idiotic pseudo-slams. Really, watch the whole thing, hard as it may be to endure the guys pretending they’re the grown-ups. The expression on her face when they cut back after the remote footage is heartbreakingly wonderful.
May I please have a shoebox you’re not using? Thanks ever so much.
Saw this on a car outside my building the other day. Is it a rival space agency?
I swear I’ll read some non-genre one of these days. Until then:
Vernor Vinge is the leading candidate for inventor/foreseer of cyberspace, though as we all know William Gibson coined the word while he was busy making life easy for the next generation of movie designers with Neuromancer. Vinge got his start in the 60s, and this collection is (or seems to me – what do I know?) a pretty good reflection of what science fiction editors were buying from that point to the present day. From whimsical adventure to darkly libertarian futures and on beyond the Singularity, dude surfed the zeitgeist. His style is pretty uniformly friendly and engaging, if occasionally dipping into the genre in-jokes that I am too humorless to enjoy.
Given his strong push to popularize the concept, I was a little surprised that he wrote so few stories that touch on the Singularity (that point in technological history at which we surpass our ability to understand or cope with the rate of progress, sort of – there’s a lot of weird ideas out there). I’m pretty drawn to that concept, poorly defined and unsupported as it may be, as it moves fiction beyond the mushroom-cloud eschatology of my childhood into something much, much scarier. Maybe Vinge is moving on to some newer end of all things?
I’m late to this party, and I doubt I have much to say that’s of any value. If you somehow haven’t read it yet, push it up to the top of your queue, borrowing it from me if you like. It’s good stuff, quite readable and kick-starts some really interesting thinking about human history.
Do you see a giant “Get Firefox” banner up there? If so, would you let me know, and also tell me what browser/OS you’re using? Supposedly it’s only visible to those using IE – which, yes, is obnoxious enough – but I hear others might have to endure it also. My adblocking kung fu is the best, apparently, and I can’t see it on Firefox on this machine, but maybe…maybe…you?
The guy who designed this theme says he’s dumping the banner in the next one, which is fine by me. Maybe one of you design goons can come up with a super-awesome theme?
Check out this YouTube playlist of Look Around You, a British series of short (about 10 min) films sending up old educational films. The tone and look are perfect, and there’s an equal mix of science humor, weird wordplay and unfathomably wonderful absurdity. Old Science Center folks should dig them for sure.
It’s the same old internet story: the fussy old guard defenders of the dead-paper status quo (etc., etc., see back issues of Wired or Mondo 2000 for additional terms of slander) heap scorn on a wildly popular web tool or phenomenon, most likely fearing that their own cherished institution is doomed. This is certainly the case those who take issue with Wikipedia, which I must confess to using with increasing frequency and thus being inclined to defend – not that it’s threatened in any way, of course.
The argument against it reduces to accountability. Authoritative sources of information (like Brittanica) offer a model of error correction that seems to yield ever-increasing accuracy thanks to their centralized responsiveness to public demand. Wikipedia can’t offer that, of course, because it skips the step of centralization, and its accuracy isn’t (and can’t be) ratcheted so it never slips backward. Though it offers ever-increasing accuracy in aggregate, at any given instant any given fact may be less accurate than the one it replaced. This point would have greater merit if Wikipedia competed directly with Brittanica and its ilk for their real clients, which include professionals such as journalists, historians and other serious researchers, but it can’t and won’t. If anything, the rift reveals that most of us have little need for traditional encyclopedias.
I think the difference is clearer if we pretend there is no written language. If you need a fact of some kind, how do you go about getting it? In most cases, you’re fine by asking your friends who are best informed on whatever subject you’re interested in, but every now and then – maybe because your friends are ignorant of recombinant DNA or the history of Palestine, or maybe because it’s vital to your reputation that you are accurate (or can blame an authority figure if you’re wrong) – you need to find and ask an expert in the field. Traditional encyclopedias harness the power of writing to make the latter process easier, while Wikipedia uses writing and high-speed communications networks to vastly improve the former – to the point at which its value for most nonprofessional uses equals or exceeds its predecessors.
So there is a place in the 21st century for old-style encyclopedias, but they are valuable only for academic research and ass-covering. Publishers are rightly worried about shrinking readership, but institutional purchases should remain steady for quite a while, so they should relax about their job security. Maybe Jimmy Wales should have tried a different name to avoid controversy, though finding a snappy way of saying “a vast, high-speed, increasingly reliable network of knowledgeable friends” without sounding like an idiot is a tall order indeed which I leave as an exercise to the commenter.
You said it, sister