The Puget News

Look out iPhone, now there’s something even more useful. Imagine being able to touch your data while not blocking it from view on a small screen. This new interface concept allows you to use the fingers that are wrapped around the back of a device as input you can view on the main viewing screen. Just check it out!

First of all, congratulations to Doris Lessing.

I’ve never read her work before but I’ve been thinking about starting a series of blog posts where I read all of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature and write about the experience. Have any of you read Doris Lessing? Any thoughts on what book I should start with? I read in her wikipedia entry that she considers the Canopus in Argos series to be her most important work to date.

If you have ideas on which Doris Lessing book I should start with, please suggest it in the comments.

Update: You can check out the New York Times article here. I love the photo of Doris Lessing sitting there in disbelief on her front porch.

Stout, sharp and a bit hard of hearing, after a few moments Ms. Lessing excused herself to go inside. “Now I’m going to go in to answer my telephone,” she said. “I swear I’m going upstairs to find some suitable sentences which I will be using from now on.”

Update 2: With everyone getting in on the action, it was only a matter of time before Kakutani weighed in.

I saw a comment piece over at The Guardian entitled “You can’t use the O-word” and was persuaded to click through. What was this mysterious “O” word? First thought? “Oprah.” Yeah, that has to be it, she’s got a big name and needs to protect it. Then I thought, maybe this has nothing to do with trademark and everything to do with censorship. “Orgasm.” Yeah, that must be it.

Even before the resulting commentary could load, I was experiencing negative emotions about the word - most likely a legitimate word with legitimate literary associations that was about to be removed from that pool of words we can all liberally use. As it turns out, the word is “Olympics,” especially if you use it conjunction with “2012″ as a title. I kid you not.

How did we come to this? I doubt the original organization committee of the Olympic Games cared much about where their moniker was used. In fact, that’s probably what passed as “word-of-mouth” advertising. Somehow, however, now that we’ve reached a time and place where the Olympics truly are the world games, somebody (or at least certain entities) seems interested in controlling these associations. I guess nobody wants to hear about “Jihad at the [insert trademarked phrase here] Games” or “Terror Strikes the [insert trademarked phrase here] Games.”

I keep wondering what can be done about the privatization of language (and if you have thoughts on it, please eel free to add them in the comments section below). It seems too steep a cost for artists to produce meaningful and the be required to change it, often in substantive ways so that private and corporate interests are protected. The worst part of all of this is that the self-censorship has already begun. You will never see a murder novel entitled “The Cleaning Company [facial tissue brand] Killings.” What a shame.

The folks at Blimp TV posted this snarky phony commercial for Vista, Make sure to stick with it to the very end!

• Quiet Please: Architectural Representations of City in Science Fiction Cinema - It is exactly what it says it is, a wonderful collection of science fiction cinematic analysis pertaining to representations of cities.
• This Dilbert Blog post discusses the possibility that economists are immune to cognitive dissonance and explores a particular issue on the Bill Maher show, “Real Time” where economist Bjorn Lumberg spoke about global warming. I too watched that interview but I thought Bjorn Lumberg laid out his case clearly and beautifully. Bill Maher and the panel didn’t come to the same conclusion. Rob Thomas said the interview “…confused the shit out of me” and they all took turns taking pot shots at a guy who had just agreed that global warming was occurring but had a different, non-histrionic approach to prioritizing the issues that the others could not hear.
  

  The primary skill of an economist is identifying all of the explanations for various phenomena. Cognitive dissonance is, at its core, the inability to recognize and accept other explanations. I’m oversimplifying, but you get the point. The more your brain is trained for economics, the less it is susceptible to cognitive dissonance, or so it seems.

• Wired has a great interview with Ridley Scott where they speak about the evolution of Blade Runner and the forthcoming 5-disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition (which is on my Wish List btw!). [Tip to Bookninja]
  

  When you see an explosion that no one could have survived and the person is still running, then it’s bullshit. And that’s frequently why digital effects are not as good. Whereas when you do it physically, you’ve got to be careful — like, really careful. With digital, the painting book is unlimited; the world in, say, Lord of the Rings would not have been nearly as impressive 30 years ago as it is today.