Category: publishing

Monkey Shakespeare With Lots Of S’s

Could monkeys typing actually produce Shakespeare given enough monkeys and enough time? “Now someone has attempted to put the theory to the test. Admittedly the British academics involved in this unusual project did not have an infinite number of typewriters, nor monkeys, nor time, but they did have six Sulawesi crested macaque monkeys, and one computer, and four weeks for them to get creative. The results of this trial at Paignton zoo in Devon were more Mothercare than Macbeth. The macaques – Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan – produced just five pages of text between them, primarily filled with the letter S. There were greater signs of creativity towards the end, with the letters A, J, L and M making fleeting appearances, but they wrote nothing even close to a word of human language.”

Congressman Proposes Rollback Of Patriot Act Snooping On Library Patrons

US Congressman Bernie Sanders introduces a bill to roll back some of the government snooping into libraries allowed under the Patriot Act. “We need law enforcement to track terrorists down before they do their evil deeds. But if we give up some of our most cherished freedoms — the right to read what we want without surveillance; the need for ‘probable cause’ before searches are made — the terrorists win, for their attacks will have struck at the very heart of our constitutional rights. To remedy the excesses of the Patriot Act that threaten our right to read, I have introduced the Freedom to Read Protection Act. The bill, which has the support of Democrats and Republicans, progressives and conservatives, will establish once again that libraries and bookstores are no place for fishing expeditions.”

New Electronic “Paper”

Ond of the complaints about electronic publishing is that it doesn’t have the “feel” of a book. Now, “in a paper published in the British science journal Nature, E Ink executives said they have successfully developed a prototype display just three-tenths of a millimeter thick, using stainless steel and a plastic covering, that can display words and pictures at up to 96 pixels per inch. Besides being lightweight, the display can be rolled into a half-inch-wide scroll without damage, E Ink said.”

You Couldn’t Wait One More Month?

The Harry Potter craze is apparently causing a rise in one of the more traditional ‘black arts’: stealing. Author J.K. Rowling has been fighting court battles worldwide to stop unauthorized installments in the series from being published, and now it appears that someone is attempting to get their hands on the latest ‘legit’ Potter adventure a bit early. “Two copies of the forthcoming novel by JK Rowling were found in a field earlier this week – a quarter of a mile from where they were being printed. Two 16-year-old boys, an 18-year-old man, and a 44-year-old man, were arrested in connection with the theft of the books from a printworks, and on suspicion of obtaining property by deception.”

Young Conservatives Fight Campus Liberalism

America’s colleges and universities have long been thought of as bastions of liberalism in an increasingly right-wing nation, and students with conservative leanings claim that their views are often repressed in campus settings. A new seminar at the Jesse Helms Center in North Carolina is teaching students “how to start their own conservative newspapers and opinion journals. And how to pick fights with lefty bogeymen on the faculty and in student government.”

A Best-Of List To Cut Through The Hype

Why make a list annointing the “best” writers in a country? Granta editor Ian Jack thinks “it’s useful for readers to have a list that cuts through the marketing hype that declares every new book to be a masterpiece and tells book buyers that these writers are genuinely worth reading.” The Granta lists, of course, have been widely debated…

The Next New Thing – Distributed Journalism?

Distributed research offers out projects over the internet – Information is freely available and researchers take little pieces of a problem and work on them. Many people work on many parts of a problem, sharing their results until a solution emerges. “Distributed journalism works similarly. Different lines of inquiry will occur to different people, who bring different kinds of knowledge to bear on the same topic. The ability to concatenate that information online – particularly via those motley commentary sites and open diaries called blogs – makes the information discovered by each available to all.”