Sunday Posts

I have resisted Kindle, again. Despite the state of my room, and the fact that I plan to relocate to another country sometime soon. It is slightly ironic that I am studying the relationship between technology and knowledge, and yet I am reluctant to surrender my book-reading habits to Amazon, however much I may love it.  The reason is, for me, serendipity trumps convenience. In Too Big To Know, David Weinberger talks about our two kinds of attempts to organise the world: Algorithmic and Social. The first one is to let the machine organise, based on a secret sauce of behavioral prediction. The other is to let our friends recommend what we may like, leveraging the possibility that we may now have a network of 'weak connections', who might be able to provide us with insights beyond our immediate environment. The holy grail of this organised world is indeed to optimally combine the two, because we can easily point to the limitations of each approach on its own: This is ...

I have just finished reading Simon Winchester's magnificent The Man Who Loved China, a biography of Joseph Needham and the story of his magnum opus, The Science and Civilisation in China. I came across this book originally through the recommendation of Fareed Zakaria on his Fareed Zakaria GPS, several years ago, and it was only now I managed to read the book from cover to cover. This is a fascinating tale which presents three entwined narratives: One of a Cambridge Academic, who lived and died in Gonville and Caius College, surrounded by an environ befitting such a person; but parallel to this runs a very unorthodox narrative of a man, his love and his interests, of Dorothy his wife and of Lu his muse, and of Socialism, Internationalism and of innumerable friendships and collaborations that made this project possible; and finally, one of international politics, intrigue and power, of imperial trickery and pretension, of the horrors of the modern war and the glory of the anc...

I believe bookshops have fallen victim of books. Why else, as more people read books and talk about books, bookshops keep disappearing? Recently, another grim report pointed out more high street bookshops went bust, and appealed, in a very British fashion, for more government support. It is as if subsidies will save bookshops, while books desert them. I love books and bookshops. I spend entire afternoons, when I can, browsing through bookshelves. I buy a lot of books online, but that has no pleasure. It is not like feeling the book in my hands and knowing whether I can read the book, whether I want to read the book, before buying it. Amazon has done a lot - allowing me to peek inside the books - but still bookshops retain their charm. Amazon does not, even with its considerable resources and best efforts, give me the conversation I can have with a fellow book-lover at the counters of my favourite bookshops. I think the worst enemy of bookshops have been the bookshop chains. They ...