- The idea of cubicle farms kept awake pharmacologically for 20-hour work days is absolutely terrifying. But this article raises some very interesting questions about the value, consequences, and even future necessity of cognitive-enhancing drugs. [via]
- Speaking of all things pharmacological, I’m just going to come right out and say it: Grant Morrison is pretty fucked up.
- “…if the future is about to be rewritten, the big question becomes: How?” Steven Johnson in the WSJ on How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write. [via]
- Apparently, 3-D animation is the only way to stay true to Charles Dickens’ original intent. So says Robert Zemeckis, anyway:
“The way he describes the ghosts, the way he describes the environment that these characters move in, has always been unbelievably visual and very descriptive. We’ve actually been saddled with technology that never really allowed us to present the ghosts, if you will, in a way that is put on the page by Mr. Dickens. So that was the main inspiration as to why we wanted to re-envision the movie in a way that I think is really more true to the novel.”
Having recently read Dickens’ original novel — a pleasant holiday read, no doubt occasionally thrilling when he recited it on-stage, but not necessarily one of his best — and having seen plenty of adaptations of it over the years, I’d say Zemeckis is pretty much full of it. Usually, “true to the novel” is a euphemism. In this case, I think plenty of people have been plenty true to Dickens’ novel. I have serious doubts that Carrey in motion-capture 3-D animation is going to be any improvement.
- And finally, this almost sounds like a present-day Canticle for Liebowitz [via]:
A Benedictine monk from Minnesota is scouring libraries in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Georgia for rare, ancient Christian manuscripts that are threatened by wars and black-market looters; so far, more than 16,500 of his finds have been digitized.