Ruby Slippers and Yellow Brick Roads
According to the Optical Society of America, it is possible to identify somewhere between 7.5 and 10 million distinct colours. “Ruby” is presumably one of them, but how would we agree on which one it...
View ArticleStatus Update: “Literature for the Focus-Challenged”
Brian J. Davis wrote a great piece on status update in the Globe Books section online: Status update: ‘Emily Brontë and her Playstation are overly friendly these days’ Facebook’s status update bar may...
View ArticleGoodbye To All That: The Death of Bookstores
“Poetry laments the loss of physical space not only for book stores, but for actual physical space: it is not ready for virtual.” — Sina Queyras The last year of the first decade of the 21st century...
View ArticleJames Gleick’s The Information
My review of James Gleick’s new book, The Information, recently appeared in the Globe and Mail. Like all good storytellers, Gleick begins in the middle, with Claude Shannon. Along with Warren Weaver,...
View ArticleTwo Early Internet Theory Books
At the end of the 20th century, I was writing and publishing a lot of books about the Internet. (Everybody has to pay the rent somehow.) Some parts of these books still hold up reasonably well; others...
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