Three-Toed Sloth

Assorted Reading

Latest in an irregular series. No attempt at order or arrangement.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden reminds us that the Web was once but a scientifictional dream. The post is hilarious, but of course, it's also literally true. Murray Leinster's 1946 story "A Logic Named Joe" did an astonishingly good job of imagining networked personal computers ("logics"), even --- this is the most impressive part --- guessing how they'd be used, from encyclopedias and games through finding friends to, err, other stuff which the young ones aren't supposed to see. He even realized that working tech support was going to suck. Remarkably, Leinster's story came out less than a year after "As We May Think", its only plausible non-fictional predecessor. --- Also fun recently from Making Light: Dressed to the Nines.

Good stuff in The American Prospect:

• E. J. Graff on gay marriage (don't miss the quote from St. Bernardine of Sienna)
• Stephen Kinzer on Turkey (written before the horrible recent bombings), and how Islamist political parties are pushing through reforms to deepen democracy and move Turkey into the European Union. (This was the kind of development which led Gilles Kepel to say that groups like al-Qaeda represent a failed branch of Islamist politics.) "A truly democratic Turkey, committed to humane values and anchored in Europe, could be a bridge between the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds such as has not existed since the days of Moorish Andalusia. The example of a pro-Islamic party pushing a country toward modernity, rather than away from it, would certainly resound throughout the Muslim world."
• Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay on "Bush's Flawed Revolution"; Morton Halperin on the need to respond to long-term problems by building institutions; and Juliette Kayyem on what a useful Department of Homeland Security would be like, and why it wouldn't have sponsored terrorism futures markets. All three articles were part of a special section of the "Foreign Policy Emergency", which is basically Exhibit A for the continued radicalization of moderate technocrats.
• Matthew Yglesias talks to social scientists and does the numbers on prison. It's good to see a philosopher with the courage of his consequentialist convictions ("you ought to be asking an economist or a sociologist or a political scientist what to do and not a philosopher"), especially one so tough-minded.

• Ruy Teixeira on the myth of the investor class.

Danny Yee's Icelandic Travelogue, with pictures.

I'd like Christianity better if more Christians were like whoever writes Slacktivist, seen here in fine form smiting an idolator, and fewer were scary, graceless people who want us to suffer so they can say "I told you so". Joan Didion's latest essay on those same people is more elegant than Slacktivist's, but almost as blunt, and more scary.

Nine years later, it is still true that nothing banned in Singapore can be all bad. [Via MaxSpeak, among others.]

A nice Discover profile of feminist sociobiologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. I can hardly recommend The Woman That Never Evolved or Mother Nature too highly, and the profile is actually reasonably accurate as to their contents. Via misbehaving.net, an interesting-looking group blog about women in technology, in turn via Sappho's Breathing.

Linkage; The Natural Science of the Human Species; Scientifiction