January 06, 2007
One Long Argument by Ernst Mayr
One Long Argument by Ernst Mayr
Initial Rating: **
Final Rating:
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December 31, 2006
How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer
How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer
Initial Rating: ***
Final Rating:
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October 14, 2006
The Foremost Observer of American Society
Craig Finn is the new Tom Wolfe.
Related: The new Hold Steady disc confirms my pet theory that a truly American rock band must have an organ. Not keys, not synths, but an organ. Think of any song you consider American rock par excellence. It has an organ in it. Absolutely required. J. S. Bach smiles from above.
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August 11, 2006
The Mapmakers by John Noble Wilford
The Mapmakers by John Noble Wilford
Initial Rating: ***.*
Final Rating:
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June 13, 2006
Annotation Microformat
I was reading a book today. This particular book has been borrowed from a friend, so I didn't want to mark in it. However, the book was good enough to merit buying, and marking, myself. But what if I want to underline and doodle on the pages now, but have the marginalia be digitally searchable and transferrable to other books? Sounds like a web service.
My ideal use case: a web service that may be queried by etext readers to pull down a store of my personal annotations for a given book, which the reader then accurately layers on top of the actual text. Microformat captures underlines, marginalia, etc.
The chief problem: how to create something that will do the layering described above accurately and decomposing gracefully?
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May 05, 2006
A Dead Guy
A kid just wandered up to me at lunch and asked, "What book are you reading?"
I was stumped.
I said, "a book about a dead guy." It's The Cambridge Companion to Pascal.
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March 21, 2006
A Cathedral, a Sailboat, a Heaven: Tom Wolfe's Cadillac
Only one man has The White Stuff.
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March 07, 2006
Truth and Method by Hans-Georg Gadamer
Truth and Method by Hans-Georg Gadamer
Initial Rating: ***
Final Rating:
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March 01, 2006
Heidegger and the Problem of Hermeneutical Violence by Joseph Partain
Heidegger and the Problem of Hermeneutical Violence by Joseph Partain
Initial Rating: **.*
Final Rating: ***
Yes, this is his doctoral dissertation. Available at the Tucke Shoppe.
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February 15, 2006
The Borges Reader by Jorge Luis Borges
Preliminary Rating: ***
The Borges Reader by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Emir R. Monegal
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February 12, 2006
The Importance of Bourbon in These Uncertain, Modern Times
Mesh and I recently discussed the wonders and glories, the ineffable qualities that make themselves sparklingly apparent, the virtues that delight and enjoy the reader of the Walker Percy essay on drinking bourbon.
The world is a broken place. Words like his are important to hear and follow in these uncertain, modern times. The consumption of bourbon has become integral in thinking, discussing, and responding to current world events, whether you do so alone or with the companionship of others.
Last night was another miserable experience with scotch, and caused me to long for the bracing, wholesome embrace of a few fingers of Kentucky's finest. Percy converted me to bourbon with this essay, and damn if I cannot testify that it all isn't true.
It appears that the University of North Carolina holds the original manuscript, which would be a treat to examine. I'm keeping a copy of the entire essay in the extended entry so that it doesn't slip away from me again.
This is not written by a connoisseur of Bourbon. Ninety-nine percent of Bourbon drinkers know more about Bourbon than I do. It is about the aesthetic of Bourbon drinking in general and in particular of knocking it back neat.I can hardly tell one Bourbon from another, unless the other is very bad.
Some bad Boubons are even more memorable than good ones. For example, I
can recall being broke with some friends in Tennessee and deciding to have
a party and being able to afford only two-fifths of a $1.75 Bourbon called
Two Natural, whose label showed dice coming up 5 and 2. Its taste was
memorable. The psychological effect was also notable. After knocking back
two or three shots over a period of half an hour, the three male drinkers
looked at each other and said in a single voice: 'Where are the women?'
I have not been able to locate this remarkable Bourbon since.Not only should connoisseurs of Bourbon not read this article, neither
should persons preoccupied with the perils of alcoholism, cirrhosis,
esophageal hemorrhage, cancer of the palate, and so forth--all real dangers.
I, too, deplore these afflications. But, as between these evils and the
aesthetic of Bourbon drinking, that is, the use of Bourbon to warm the
heart, to reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cut the cold
phlegm of Wednesday afternoons, I choose the aesthetic. What, after all,
is the use of not having cancer, cirrhosis, and such, if a man comes home
from work every day at five-thirty to the exurbs of Montclair or Memphis
and there is the grass growing and the little family looking not quite at
him but just past the side of his head, and there's Cronkite on the tube
and the smell of pot roast in the living room, and inside the house and
outside in the pretty exurb has settled the noxious particles and the
sadn ess of the old dying Western world, and him thinking: 'Jesus, is this
it? Listening to Cronkite and the grass growing?'If I should appear to be suggesting that such a man proceed as quickly as
possible to anesthetize his cerebral cortex by ingesting ethyl alcohol,
the point is being missed. Or part of the point. The joy of Bourbon
drinking is not the pharmacological effect of C(2)H(5)OH on the cortex but
rather the instant of the whiskey being knocked back and the little
explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the cavity of the nasopharynx and
the hot bosky bite of Tennessee summertime--aesthetic considerations to
which the effect of the alcohol is, if not dispensable, at least secondary.By contrast, Scotch: for me (not, I presume, for a Scot), drinking Scotch
is like looking at a picture of Noel Coward. The whiskey assaults the
nasopharynx with all the excitement of paregoric. Scotch drinkers (not
all, of course) I think of as upward-mobile Americans, Houston and New
Orleans businessmen who graduate from Bourbon about the same time they shed
seersuckers for Lilly slacks. Of course, by now these same folk may have
gone back to Bourbon and seersucker for the same reason, because too many
Houston oilmen drink Scotch.Nothing, therefore, will be said about the fine points of sour mash,
straights, blends, bonded, except a general preference for the lower proofs.
It is a matter of the arithmetic of aesthetics. If one derives the same
pleasure from knocking back 80-proof Bourbon as 100-proof, the formula is
both as simple as 2 + 2 = 4 and as incredible as non-Euclidean geometry.
Consider. One knocks back five one-ounce shots of 80-proof Early Times or
four shots of 100-proof Old Fitzgerald. The alcohol ingestion is the same:5 X 40% = 2
4 X 50% = 2Yet, in the case of the Early Times, one has obtained an extra quantum of
joy without cost to liver, brain, or gastric mucosa. A bonus, pure and
simple, an aesthetic gain as incredible as two parallel lines meeting at
infinity.An apology to the reader is in order, nevertheless, for it has just occurred
to me that this is the most unedifying and even maleficent piece I ever
wrote--if it should encourage potential alcoholics to start knocking back
Bourbon neat. It is also the unfairest. Because I am, happily and
unhappily, endowed with a bad GI tract, diverticulosis, neurotic colon,
and a mild recurring nausea, which make it less likely for me to become an
alcoholic than my healthier fellow Americans. I can hear the reader now:
Who is he kidding? If this joker has to knock back five shots of Bourbon
every afternoon just to stand the twentieth century, he's already an
alcoholic. Very well. I submit to this or any semantic. All I am saying
is that if I drink much more than this I will get sick as a dog for two
days and the very sight and smell of whiskey will bring on the heaves.Readers beware, therefore, save only those who have stronger wills or as
bad a gut as I.The pleasure of knocking back Bourbon lies in the plain of the aesthetic
but at an opposite pole from connoisseurship. My preference for the
former is or is not deplorable depending on one's value system --
that is to say, how one balances out the Epicurean virtues of
cultivating one's sensory end organs with the greatest discrimination and
at least cost to one's health, against the virtue of evocation of time and
memory and of the recovery of self and the past from the fogged-in
disoriented Western world. In Kierkegaardian terms, the use of Bourbon to
such an end is a kind of aestheticized religious mode of existence, whereas
connoisseurship, the discriminating but single-minded stimulation of sensory
end organs, is the aesthetic of damnation.Two exemplars of the two aesthetics come to mind.
Imagine Clifton Webb, scarf at throat, sitting at Cap d'Antibes on a perfect
day, the little wavelets of the Mediterranean sparkling in the sunlight,
and he is savoring a 1959 Mouton Rothschild.Then imagine William Faulkner, having finished 'Absalom, Absalom!',
drained, written out, pissed-off, feeling himself over the edge and out of
it,
nowhere, but he goes somewhere, his favorite hunting place in the Delta
wilderness of the Big Sunflower River and, still feeling bad with his
hunting cronies and maybe even a little phony, which he was, what with him
trying to pretend he was one of them, a farmer, hunkered down in the cold
and rain after the hunt, after honorably passing up the does and seeing no
bucks, shivering and snot-nosed, takes out a flat pint of any Bourbon at
all and flatfoots about a third of it. He shivers again but not from the
cold.Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
1926: As a child watching my father in Birmingham, in the exurbs, living
next to a number-6 fairway of the New Country Club, him disdaining both
the bathtub gin and white lightening of the time, aging his own Bourbon in
a charcoal keg, on his hands and knees in the basement sucking on the
siphon, a matter of gravity requiring cheek pressed against the concrete
floor, the siphon getting going, the decanter ready, the first hot spurt
into his mouth not spat out.1933: My uncle's sun parlour in the Mississippi Delta and toddies on a
Sunday afternoon, the prolonged and meditative tinkle of silver spoon
against crystal to dissolve the sugar; talk, tinkle, talk; the talk mostly
political: "Roosevelt is doing a good job; no, the son of a bitch is
betraying his class."1934: Drinking at a Delta dance, the boys in bi-swing jackets and tab
collars, tough-talking and profane and also scared of the girls and
therefore safe in the men's room. Somebody passes around bootleg Bourbon
in a Coke bottle. It's awful. Tears start from eyes, faces turn red.
'Hot damn, that's good!'1935: Drinking at a football game in college. UNC versus Duke. One has a
blind date. One is lucky. She is beautiful. Her clothes are the color of
the fall leaves and her face turns up like a flower. But what to SAY to
her, let alone what to do, and whether she is 'nice' or 'hot' -- a
distinction made in those days. But what to SAY? Take a drink, by now
from a proper concave hip flask (a long way from the Delta Coke bottle)
with a hinged top. Will she have a drink? No. But that's all right. The
taste of the Bourbon (Cream of Kentucky) and the smell of her fuse with
the brilliant Carolina fall and the sounds of the crowd and the hit of the
linesmen in a single synesthesia.1941: Drinking mint juleps, famed Southern Bourbon drink, though in the
Deep South not really drunk much. In fact, they are drunk so seldom that
when, say, on Derby Day somebody gives a julep party, people drink them
like cocktails, forgetting that a good julep holds at least five ounces of
Bourbon. Men fall face-down unconscious, women wander in the woods
disconsolate and amnesiac, full of thoughts of Kahil Gibran and the
limberlost.Would you believe the first mind julep I had I was sitting not on a columned
porth but in the Boo Snooker bar of the New Yorker Hotel with a Bellevue
nurse in 1941? The nurse, a nice upstate girl, head floor nurse, brisk,
swift, good-looking; Bellevue nurses, the best in the world and this one
the best of Bellevue, at least the best-looking. The julep, an atrocity,
a heavy syrupy Bourbon and water in a small glass clotted with ice. But
good!How could two women be more different than the beautiful languid Carolina
girl and this swift handsome girl from Utica, best Dutch stock? One thing
was sure. Each has to be courted, loved, drunk with, with Bourbon. I
should have stuck with the Bourbon. We changed to gin fizzes because the
bartender said he came from New Orleans and could make good ones. He could
and did.They were delicious. What I didn't know was that they were made with raw
egg albumen and I was allergic to it. What a lovely fine strapping smart
girl!And thinking of being invited into her apartment where she lived alone and
of her offering to cook a little supper and of the many kisses and the
sweet love that already existed between us and was bound to grow apace,
when on the Brooklyn Bridge itself my upper lip began to swell and little
sparks of light flew past the corner of my eye like St. Elmo's fire. In
the space of thirty seconds my lip stuck out a full three-quarter inch,
like a shelf, like Mortimer Snerd. Not only was kissing out of the question
but my eyes swelled shut. I made it across the bridge, pulled over to the
curb, and fainted. Whereupon this noble nurse drove me back to Bellevue,
game me a shot, and put me to bed.Anybody who monkeys around with gin and egg white deserves what he gets.
I should have stuck with Bourbon and have from that day to this.POSTSCRIPT: Reader, just in case you don't want to knock it back straight
and would rather monkey around with perfectly good Bourbon, here's my
favorite recipe, "Cud'n Walker's Uncle Will's Favorite Mint Julep Receipt."You need excellent Bourbon whiskey; rye or Scotch will not do. Put half
an inch of sugar in the bottom of the glass and merely dampen it with water.
Next, very quickly--and here is the trick in the procedure -- crush your
ice, actually powder it, preferably with a wooden mallet, so quickly that
it remains dry, and, slipping two sprigs of fresh mint against the inside
of the glass, cram the ice in right to the brim, packing it with your hand.
Finally, fill the glass, which apparently has no room left for anything
else, with Bourbon, the older the better, and grate a bit of nutmeg on the
top. The glass will frost immediately. Then settle back in your chair
for half an hour of cumulative bliss.
--Walker Pearcy, "Bourbon", from Signposts in a Strange Land, 1975
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February 05, 2006
News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (****!)
Preliminary Rating: ***
Final Rating: ****
News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translated by Edith Grossman.
[Updated: The book is flawless. Four asterisks!]
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January 06, 2006
Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz, Translated by Danuta Borchardt (***)
This was a Xmas present from wife, recommended as "Slav-o-liciousness: Extreme".
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December 14, 2005
Geek Fiction: My Top 16
When I started dating Elissa, I put her on a crash course of Important Novels to Noel. Slashdot just finished debating the top twenty geek novels since 1932. Combining stuff from these two sources, I present my essentials. This is a great Christmas list of gifts for the geek in your life.
- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
- The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol
- That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- Foundation by Isaac Asimov
- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
- Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
- Flatland by E. A. Abott, ed. Ian Stewart
- Zeitgeist by Bruce Sterling
- Idoru by William Gibson
- Ender's Game by O. S. Card
- The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
- 1984 by George Orwell
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
-
Didn't find your favorite? That's why there's only sixteen. Comment below.
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November 03, 2005
A Modest Proposal to the Librarian of Congress
Proposed class or classes of copyrighted work(s) to be exempted:
Motion Pictures, Software, Audio Recordings, and Digital Text.
Brief summary of the argument(s) in support of the exemption proposed above:
These classes of works (Motion Pictures, Software, Audio Recordings, and Digital Text) have traditionally been granted copyrights for the purpose of encouraging the public dissemination of the works for the benefit and use of the public by providing a property incentive to the originator for a short period of time. The DMCA ignores this traditional cause of granting a copyright, and moreover establishes crippling restrictions on the aforementioned "benefit and use of the public". As such, the DMCA's use should be restricted to the text of the DMCA itself, with the consequence being that any private party which attempts to discern the workings of the DCMA with the intent to apply it in any broader fashion outside of the text of the Act itself would be committing a punishable, criminal action under the DMCA.
Just an idea ;)
I am awaiting a response from the LoC.
Found via Slashdot.Thank you!
The following information was submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office at 17:35 on 11/3/05. Please print this page for your records.
[I have read the notice of inquiry and acknowledge that my attached submission will be posted on the Copyright Office website.]: Acknowledged
[Name]: Noel Weichbrodt
[Title]: Application Developer
[Organization]:
[Street Address]: The Volunteer Building
[Address Line 2]:
[City]: Chattanooga
[State]: TN
[ZIP]: 37402
[Phone]: 4237858262
[Fax]:
[Submitter's email]: nweichbrodt millermartin com
[Proposed class or classes of copyrighted work(s) to be exempted]: Motion Pictures, Software, Audio Recordings, and Digital Text.
[Brief summary of the argument(s) in support of the exemption proposed above]: These classes of works (Motion Pictures, Software, Audio Recordings, and Digital Text) have traditionally been granted copyrights for the purpose of encouraging the public dissemination of the works for the benefit and use of the public by providing a property incentive to the originator for a short period of time. The DMCA ignores this traditional cause of granting a copyright, and moreover establishes crippling restrictions on the aforementioned "benefit and use of the public". As such, the DMCA's use should be restricted to the text of the DMCA itself, with the consequence being that any private party which attempts to discern the workings of the DCMA with the intent to apply it in any broader fashion outside of the text of the Act itself would be committing a punishable, criminal action under the DMCA.
[Attached file]: ExceptionProposal.doc
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October 27, 2005
The Code Book by Simon Singh (***.*)
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October 10, 2005
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (****)
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July 23, 2005
For the Last Time, Harry Potter != Satanic: A Response to Doug Phillips [Updated]
Subject: Re: Harry Potter and the Lavender Brigade On Jul 23, 2005, at 11:28 AM, Mom wrote: Noel, would you please read this treatise and let me know what thoughts you have after reading it. I would really like to hear your opinions on what Doug Phillips has to say. Thanks. Love, Mom
...And poof, there went my Saturday morning. My Mom forwarded me an email-only essay by Doug Phillips of the Vision Forum organization titled "Harry Potter and the Lavender Brigade". From appearances, they're not posting the essay on their site because, one would surmise, of its rather poorly argued nature, I mean, its rather inflammatory nature. What with all the false analogies and such. Anyways, I won't reproduce it here out of respect for their copyright, but if you want to read it,
just leave a comment below and I'll forward it on to youa poster at freerepublic.com has put up an unformatted copy. Below is my heated response to the argument that J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series should not be read by Christians because it is an imagined world that is rooted in magic as practiced by humans, which for Phillips equates to, well, I'm not quite sure, but reading about that world is like worshipping other gods, which we may all agree is bad.Follow the jump for my savage six-paragraph retort that I wrote for my lovely Mom...
For the Last Time, Harry Potter != Satanic!
In my reading, Jerram Barrs' treatment of Potter is more consistent logically, as well as more grounded in Biblical criticism. I wrote something along the same lines a couple of years ago. Phillips goes off the deep end here. I counted four circular arguments in a brief skim, and I have no doubt more could follow a deeper read. But really, the first circular argument sinks his entire ship.
The tip of the iceberg might be found in Phillips inconsistent usage of what to call those who practice magic. He repeatedly refers to those, both male and female, as 'witches'. In fact, he never uses the term 'wizard' to refer to a male practitioner of magic. I see this as the first indication of a systematic failure to grasp the place of magic in fantasy and in reality (both of which by definition of our faith are created, upheld, and brought to an fore-ordained end by God alone). The failure, moreover, is not just definitional, but hermeneutical. For a full exploration of exactly what magic in the world of Harry Potter is and means, please read my earlier-mentioned essay. I shall soldier on and explain the hermeneutical failure that Phillips shows.
Don't be fools and think that we can imagine something outside the law of God, which has been imprinted on every human heart and is reflected in some way in every output of human imagination. The wretched trope of equating magic with homosexuality that Wilson pushes at the beginning lumbers, clumsy and insipid, toward constructing a logical equivalency between a single sinful act (homosexuality) and an entire moral vista as imagined by a profoundly fecund mind (J.K. Rowling's moral, magical world of Harry Potter). Any small amount of brain matter that tries to reconcile this equivalency will spit it out like so much spoiled milk; they are not. Even the most morally wretched world as imagined by man, like the recent movie Sin City, cannot run far enough away that it gets away from Almighty God. To posit that Rowling has accomplished what Jonah failed elicits my laughter at the small, small god in which Phillips evidently believes.
Let me make clear here what Phillips leaves as an exercise to the reader: in his argument, The Lord of the Rings was a sinful exercise in imagining a godless, abominable world. Don't agree with that? Yes, I thought you might not. But if we accept that the sympathetic inclusion of humans practicing magic is sinful, then that's where we're going to find ourselves. Not that I follow Tolkien rather than Jesus, but I trust him a hell of a lot more than Phillips.
Frankly, I'm sick and tired of the lack of hermeneutical imagination displayed by those of Phillips and ilk, and find refuting their every latent legalistic literalist law tedious. Which leads me to my strongest argument. Does Phillips actually think that Rowling created an entire world based on the worship of Satan and the practice of satanic powers by humans intent on destroying the People of God? I don't know what Harry Potter series Phillips is reading, by its not the one that is #1 on the New York Times bestseller list (or, for those who like their lists compiled by a Christian source, World's best selling books list. It's on both, kids).
For the record, I find the most amusing circular argument in the third point of Phillips' argument, where he attempts, after repeated denials that the portrayal of magic of any kind by a human is sinful and, by implication, punishable by death as under Deutronomical law, to carve out a small space for magical creatures (and reading between the lines, is trying desperately to allow C. S. Lewis' Narnia back into his little AV1610 world). It turns out that writing about dragons is okay because the Bible mentions dragons. In the KJV. Based on a mistranslation of the Hebrew in 1610, therefore, dragons are in, but sinful bastard creatures like fauns are out. And heaven help us if we attempt to create an allegorical world that uses magic as a metaphor for society's use of technology and as a device that examines isolation and anxiety as we grow from children to men and women. As it is said, so may it be.
Posted by Noel at 11:04 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
March 09, 2005
More on Walker Percy, Terrorism, and English Languge Data Parsing
In the 1987 novel The Thanatos Syndrome, Walker Percy sketches a couple of scenes that seemed to me quite ludicrous from a software and data angle. In response to the inevitable crisis, the love interest (apparently with l337 h4X0r 5ki11Z) runs to her home in the marsh, boots up her pc, and interfaces with four different government databases to cross-reference and visually display a map that correlates the chemical elements in state water supplies with a map of the state.
Not that the hardware is silly, nor that the data is silly. Both were quite accurately described by the incomparable Mr. Percy. What my mind balked at was to believe that four different government agencies have databases that are so easily mined, and a visualization software that can scale so well (from chemical concentrations in water to maps of the state).
Now, I think, I can finally see where we could get this. Google Maps + XML + Web Services for databases + English language data parsing.
The hard part was never getting the data (though that's interesting). Nor was it matching one thing with another (that's pretty cool too). The hard bit is, how do you come up with a thing in the first place just from raw data? There's no ontology in data, it's just data.
From the article:
"We have guys who can crack hard drives," Mr. Alexander said. "Getting the information out is easy. The hard part is sharing it, and organizing it, so that everybody in an agency, even nonexperts, can use it."
The data has always been there for the terrorists to use, or for companies to, ahem, lose track of (a la ChoicePoint). It's just that there's no easy way to pull it together into something useful.
This post is partly in response to willas comment on my last post about English language data parsing.
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The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (yes, I'm a fanboy.)