‘Technology’ Archives
Eye care: the artist’s most precious asset
I love my optometrist. His name is Dr. Michael Rotholz and he's just opened a new office called View Eye Care. You might say he is very good at "reading" eyes, which is my excuse for plugging his practice here, because this site is all about that kind of reading: interpreting what we see. I love getting my eyes "read." First there's the sense [...]
Site upgrade
Captacha is one of the new security features we're adding to the site. Captcha is not merely a security feature that makes you type out two words shown in a picture, but by typing those words you are helping with the digitization of books by feeding back correct spellings of words that are not clear in their original digital scans. Every Captcha [...]
Book Publishers Responsible for Recession
It's amazing what some people will say to get a little attention. Lawrence Osborne's article, with its designed-to-provoke title Why Publishers Fail, on Forbes.com doesn't exactly blame publishers for the whole of the recession. What he does suggest is that publishing is a paradigmatic industry, so arcanely enigmatic that no one, not even the [...]
Lions 3 Christians 0
Winter Olympic events like luge and downhill have become so absurdly dangerous you might as well take a bunch of elite athletes and shoot them out of cannons! This guy might weigh a bit more, that one have a sleeker body suit. One might open up too early for landing or another put an arm out for balance, and those factors [...]
Border Crossings
With the entire publishing industry howling around them, it's nice to see somebody taking a counter-intuitive approach. Border Crossings magazine has enlarged its pages while continuing to pack 160 of them with rich text and images reproduced in full colour. It is also is somehow able to produce artists' projects; in the current issue a multi-page [...]
What if Jane Jacobs was wrong about the Spadina Expressway?
Someone once gave me a copy of Christopher Hitchens' Letters to a Young Contrarian, which surprised me because I'd never really considered myself a contrarian. Contrariness has a derogatory connotation: to be contrary is to be critical without justification, petulant, like a child. In fact the book seeks more simply to encourage critical thinking. [...]
TweeBooks
"It was a dark and stormy night." Thus opens Snoopy's perpetually-in-progress novel, an agglomeration of plot beginnings that Snoopy promises to, but never does, bring together. Snoopy's novel is a lot like Twitter, or twitter-ready you might say. Twitter has slim social networking value but is interesting just because it can be done; you [...]
