Books

I was invited to speak at an internal Wiley-Blackwell seminar. Before the seminar, they interviewed me for their Publishing News. I can’t find a copy of the interview online anymore, so I have reproduced it below. I made several predictions in this interview, and it’s interesting to see which ones played out. As I review this (in 2024), I’m reminded of how insistent certain researchers were that publishers should make their articles easily available for text mining so that we could analyze the literature at scale. Of course, now we see researchers aghast that giant, well-funded AI companies have done precisely that to feed their LLMs. ...

Seems we are all reminiscing. Went to the Tate Modern recently and, embarrassingly, emerged from the gift shop with the following: “Digital Retro: The Evolution and Design of the Personal Computer” (Gordon Laing) I remember lusting after practically every machine in here. Sad geek that I am- I particularly lusted after the Jupiter Ace because it came with FORTH as the built-in language. I must have read some article about FORTH, because I was obsessed with it and eventually used in on my Commodore 64. I was also inexplicably enchanted with the language MUMPS. What was wrong with me? ...

I am astonished at the current “anti-expertise” zeitgeist that seems to have taken hold of the US and UK. Recently Neil Stephenson summed up the prevailing mood in the February issue of Reason Online: “It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn’t care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don’t belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.” ...

A book about memes that is in itself a meme. Devious. Now my brain hurts. “The Meme Machine” (Susan Blackmore)

One of those books that I wasn’t too impressed with when I was reading it, but now I keep thinking about it… Probably going to contribute to my ongoing slide into socialism. “Jennifer Government” (Max Barry)