Alex Abad-Santos has a couple of interviews in Vox with the creators of God Loves, Man Kills, the seminal X-Men graphic novel that debuted 35 years ago. For many avid comic readers at the time –including myself– this was an eye-opening paradigm shift in what stories “comics” could tell. (For ardent comic/graphic novel historians raising their hands to point out the work of Will Eisner, I was too young to read A Contract with God when it came out in…
The saying goes that you know you’re a book lover when you still get upset thinking about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. As many as 400,00 scrolls and whatever wisdom they contained have long since been ashes. What to feel then, about a modern day collection of knowledge that not burned, but nevertheless hidden away? James Somers has a long-form article in The Atlantic that tells the tale of Google Books: the catalysts behind its creation…
When I talk about automation with people, I often like to point out how the scope of automation now appears to encompass what knowledge workers do. Indeed, from what I’ve read, various implementations of automation, algorithms, and artificial intelligence are already coming into play in both the legal and healthcare sectors of the economy. In other words, well beyond traditional notions of automation, which usually involve manufacturing and factory work. While I had heard of algorithms…
As mentioned in a post last month, I’m very interested in addressing gerrymandering, the political practice of dividing up voting districts in a way that would befuddle the designers of Tetris. Last month, I highlighted Brian Olson’s algorithm to make voting districts more compact. However, in this article by Erica Klarreich, she suggests that a district’s compactness is not the sole criterion for gerrymandering and talks more about ways to address the problem. Hopefully, this…
For many of us writing science fiction, a common decision point is how hard or soft we should make the world(s) we’re building. A perennial area is whether we allow faster-than-light travel or not (i.e., warping, folding space, entering stargates, traveling through hyperspace, etc.). Scientist and science fiction author Catherine Asaro explains her own journey in coming up with a way to have interstellar ships that can move at the speed of narrative without willfully ignoring…
Although I’ll frequently list articles worth reading on the blog –such as the changing dynamics of film financing or the automation of work— I rarely do “listicles” not only because they’re usually slick, quick pieces designed as clickbait, but also because they don’t give me too much upon which to reflect. Perhaps it’s the timing, but this Forbes(!) listicle by Jessica Hagy made me reflect about what I know now that I don’t think I understood…
Following the film industry is something I do frequently enough to merit a tag. One article in Wired, by K. M. McFarland, that particularly caught my notice last July noted how the expensive fantasy epic Warcraft did miserably in the United States, yet comfortably in the rest of the world. So now we have an article by Todd VanDerWerff in Vox that also explores that divide between the U.S. and global box office. Look at those lists…
I could say I was always interested in space law, but honestly, I didn’t think about it too much until my Dad decided to do his law school thesis on the laws relating to geosynchronous satellites. It made me appreciate how complex space law can be. However, much like Burkina Faso‘s strident claims to the geostationary space above it, many of the issues seemed the epitome of academic. When would there be the possibility of any case? So it was…
David Sims has a longer piece in The Atlantic about how Martin Scorsese’s next film, which sounds very much in the tradition of his gangster epics Casino and Goodfellas, will be coming from… Netflix? I’ve read several pieces about this news over the past few days and all of them mark how this seems to herald a change — but this piece goes a bit more in-depth in terms of what this might mean or…
Writer, and fellow GTD fan, Terri Huck passed along this thoughtful piece by Oliver Burkeman about the modern obsession with “time management.” It’s a great read, as it goes back into some of the origins of what is now something of a cottage industry on making us ever-more productive. The article delves into the origins of time management — which goes back way more centuries than you might, at first, imagine, and moves forward to today. It…