A Critique of Bush’s Address Preparing for War
The following is An Annotated Critique of President George W. Bush’s March 17 Address Preparing the Nation for War. A very interesting read indeed.
Pictures of Civilian Casulaties
Having returned from my holiday, I am going over some blogs and Scot Hacker’s birdhouse.org has an interesting post entitled lucky. Two interesting links from there. For one, these pictures are of civilian casualties in Irak. No, we didn’t see those on TV. The second one is an Iraq War Justification flowchart by megnut. Still trying to keep an open mind here.
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix was a great movie and The Matrix Reloaded is just arround the corner. If you can get your hands on the latest WIRED then I highly suggest getting it because it includes a great article about the making of The Martix. The second one now includes a fully computer animated fight scene in which they put the faces of Neo and Agent Smith back on the computer animated figures because this is the part of the human body that people notice to be fake the fastests. With the help of this technology, they can now fly the camera arround the scene at will, finding the best angles.
Nick Denton, Blog Mogul
This was the title in WIRED about what Nick Denton is currently doing. What he is doing is coming up with ideas for blogs, having them designed and then paying an editor to handle the site. It’s an interesting concept, even though I do not know if it will ever be profitable. Actually, I doubt it, but it largely depends on the return of the advertising industry in termf of revenue. You can read more about the current sites here on his blog.
Interface by Neil Stephenson
Based on the other books by Neil Stephenson, especially Cryptonomicon, I was looking forward to this one. It’s writting together with Frederick George and I couldn’t put it down until I was finished, reading it the entire trip back in the plane from the US, which made the trip back seem a lot shorter than it was.
To keep this short, the book is very good. Without giving anything away, it’s about somebody wanting to be president of the united states, a lot of money, interaction of chips and brains, understanding human emotions, demographics and great characters. As always, the characters are layed out in great detail, which allows the reader to feel part of the story to some extent.
If you like Neil’s other books, you will like this one, even though it might be called a bit simpler than his previous ones. I actually like that though because I feel that Snow Crash was a bit too complicated. Sure, it was an amazing book, but I felt that Neil Stephenson was trying to prove his writing skills with that book, moving to just writing a great book in Cryptonomicon. With Interface he has simply written a great book, with the help of Frederick George, or vice versa, whoever was taking the lead in the writing of the book.
