The Empusium: a Health Resort Horror Story (Book Review)
I finished reading a few days ago, and can still feel my admiration building. In many ways traditional in structure, it is a tale of a character transformation, from the point a young man...
Training robots?
LinkedIn advertises quite a few job opportunities in the “AI training” area. Please, fellow writers, don’t squander your hard-earned human skill on robots! Writing is a way for humans to discover, invent and evolve,...
Luigi Ghirri: The Complete Essays 1973-1991. Book Review
I had already read a few of these essays when I realised that no one would try to persuade me that photography “records” or “represents” reality. A reader is credited from the start, that...
The Domestication of the Savage Mind: Book Review
I didn’t like the title very much, but understand, in retrospect, the intended irony: it expresses the kind of thinking Goody does his best to discredit, an old, ugly pattern encoded in the terms...
Individual Development Repeats Species Development
The title refers to the theory “Ontogeny Repeats Phylogeny”, credited to the German biologist Ernst Haeckel. Since Stephen Jay Gould’s detailed investigation of it in 1977, it has some standing as a framework for...
homo interneticus
What a discovery (never mind that it’s been under my nose for years.)! I learned about Michael H. Goldhaber and his contrasting terms homo interneticus and homo typographicus in the journal The Economist just...