Society: September 2003 Archives

I've written some thoughts (in the comments section) on monopoly ethics and on IP law critics on Randy Halloway's entry over the recent @stake/microsoft security flap.

Scott Rosenberg comments on the latest meme, that psychology email floating around about how we can all raed eiamls taht hvae tiehr ltetres sbrmlaecd (but it gets harder as the words get bigger).

There's one part of his entry that caught my attention, it seems related to some of Dick Gabriel's writings.

Reading slowly is a dying art. As our world pushes us inevitably towards more speedy skimming of information blasting at us through a dozen different protocols, we scan more than we read. That makes it easy for us to parse near-gibberish, and that capability is a wonderful thing. But reading slowly is a wonderful thing, too. It is an art we still need in a number of areas. Reading poetry requires the ability to read slowly. If you read a poem the way you read your e-mail, you might as well not bother. Oddly enough, working on computer code requires a similar ability: Both because the computer is far more unforgiving of typos, bad punctuation and garbled verbiage than the human eye, and also becaause in good code, like good poetry, every word counts, and you need to be able to notice the patterns the words establish.