(7,170 words)
This online EDGE edition, with large graphic images, is available at:
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THE THIRD CULTURE
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Imagine telling Ansel wait for new algorithms, so your pictures can improve. It's a very different world today. ...
PANORAMAS AND PHOTO TECHNOLOGY FROM ICELAND AND GREENLAND Photo Essay By Nathan Myhrvold
The previous messages about my Iceland/Greenland trip were about conventional pictures. This feature contains some panoramic shots that are created by stitching together multiple frames into one picture. These were mostly taken during my recent trip to Iceland and Greenland.
[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge251.html#myhrvold
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THE REALITY CLUB
ON "IS GOOGLE MAKING US STUPID?" By Nicholas Carr
W.DANIEL HILLIS
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BRITANNICA FORUM This is Your Brain on the Internet
Clay Shirky, Nicholas Carr, Larry Sanger, Matthew Battles, Clay Shirky
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Why Abundance is Good: A Reply to Nick Carr
Clay Shirky
... As Carr notes, "we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice." Well, yes. But because the return of reading has not brought about the return of the cultural icons we'd been emptily praising all these years, the enormity of the historical shift away from literary culture is now becoming clear. And this, I think, is the real anxiety behind the essay: having lost its actual centrality some time ago, the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture as well. The threat isn't that people will stop reading War and Peace. That day is long since past. The threat is that people will stop genuflecting to the idea of reading War and Peace. ...
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Why Skepticism is Good: My Reply to Clay Shirky
Nicholas Carr
It's telling that Shirky uses gauzily religious terms to describe the Internet—"our garden of ethereal delights"—as what he's expressing here is not reason but faith. I hope he's right, but I think that skepticism is always the proper response to techno-utopianism. ...
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A Defense of Tolstoy & the Individual Thinker: A Reply to Clay Shirky
Larry Sanger
In Clay's view, it seems, the new speed and deeply social nature of intellectual discourse means that, soon, the only relevant discourse will occur in blog- or Twitter-sized chunks. Is this the hip "upstart literature," proudly "diverse, contemporary, and vulgar," that is now "the new high culture"?
If so, God help us. ...
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Yes, the Internet Will Change Us (But We Can Handle It)
Matthew Battles
Nick Carr's Atlantic essay has also prompted a discussion over at publisher John Brockman's blog The Edge. Brockman's authors include computer science visionaries, evolutionary biologists, and cognitive scientists, and Carr's concerns about the cognitive effects of the Internet are very much their cup of tea. ...
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Why Abundance Should Breed Optimism: A Second Reply to Nick Carr
Clay Shirky
...Carr calls me an optimist, which is true. Here's why: Every past technology I know of that has increased the number of producers and consumers of written material, from the alphabet and papyrus to the telegraph and the paperback, has been good for humanity.
Carr argues that our period of abundance is different. The worries are numerous: the increased volume and availability of writing is leading not to wisdom but to triviality and distractions. The young are abandoning the classical in favor of the vulgar. Venerable institutions are under possibly crushing new pressures. These complaints are not just familiar, they are accurate. However, they also have an inevitable feel about them, having been made at the beginning of every such expansion, from the printing press to the comic book to the act of writing itself. ...
[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge251.html#rc
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W. DANIEL HILLIS:
For those of you who have not been following the action on the ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA BLOG, here is the latest: Clay Shirky dissed Tolstoy and Nicholas Carr zinged back with a smackdown about Clay's "highbrow form of philistinism". Ouch.
Clay Shirky is not just questioning Tolstoy, he is questioning the culture of literature. He asks, What's so great about WAR AND PEACE? Maybe it does have themes of power, fate, and personal responsibility, but it is really any more enriching than, say, a season of THE WIRE? And Shirky is not alone in his blasphemy. Back on the EDGE, George Dyson is speculates, "Perhaps books will end up back where they started, locked away in monasteries (or the depths of Google) and read by a select few". For a readership of bibliophiles, this is treason. ...
[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge251.html#rc
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IN THE NEWS
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
Costly Toys, Or A New Era For Drivers
By Joe Nocera
"In and of itself," said Elon Musk, "a $100,000 sports car is not going to change the world."
Mr. Musk is a 37-year-old technology entrepreneur who became extremely wealthy when eBay bought PayPal, which he had co-founded. A lanky South African, he is using that wealth to finance two quixotic efforts. The first is SpaceX, a company he hopes will one day make it possible to colonize Mars. (I kid you not.)...
[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge251.html#nyt2
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
Let's Get Rid of Darwinism
By Olivia Judson
...But his giantism has had an odd and problematic consequence. It's a tendency for everyone to refer back to him. "Why Darwin was wrong about X"; "Was Darwin wrong about Y?"; "What Darwin didn't know about Z" — these are common headlines in newspapers and magazines, in both the biological and the general literature. Then there are the words: Darwinism (sometimes used with the prefix "neo"), Darwinist (ditto), Darwinian.
Why is this a problem? Because it's all grossly misleading. It suggests that Darwin was the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of evolutionary biology, and that the subject hasn't changed much in the 149 years since the publication of the "Origin."...
[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge251.html#nyt
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NPR ON THE MEDIA
Search and Destroy
The ability to search through massive amounts of data, Google-style, is having far-reaching effects. And, according to Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson, one of the most significant casualties may be the venerable scientific method. He explains why in the age of the petabyte, scientific testing is forever changed and why the numbers now speak for themselves.
[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge251.html#npr
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THE TELEGRAPH
Amazon Tribe Has No Words For Different Numbers
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
... The study, which appeared in the journal Cognition, offers evidence that number words are a concept invented by human cultures as they are needed, and not an inherent part of language, said Prof Gibson, who did the study with Michael Frank, Dr Evelina Fedorenko, and Prof Daniel Everett, of Illinois State University.
The work builds on a study published in 2005 by Prof Everett, who lived with the tribe for much of his life between 1977 and 2007, which found that the Pirahã had words to express the quantities "one," "two," and "many." ...
[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge251.html#telegraph
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AXESS
The Return of Religion By Roger Scruton
... Richard Dawkins is the most influential living example of this tradition, and his message, echoed by Dan Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, sounds as loud and strident in the media today as the message of Luther in the reformed churches of Germany. The violence of the diatribes uttered by these evangelical atheists is indeed remarkable. After all, the Enlightenment happened three centuries ago; the arguments of Hume, Kant and Voltaire have been absorbed by every educated person. What more is to be said? And if you must say it, why say it so stridently?...
[MORE]
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge251.html#axess
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This online EDGE edition, with large graphic images, is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge251.html
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Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under
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EDGE
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Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant
Copyright (c) 2008 by EDGE Foundation, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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