Prompted by Eric’s question about the nature of modern romance I offer the following links: Knight Ridder report on a study that finds more Americans feel isolated
It found that men and women of every race, age and education level reported fewer intimate friends than the same survey turned up in 1985. Their remaining confidants were more likely to be members of their nuclear family than in 1985, according to the study, but intimacy within families was down, too.
My quest for more information on defense technology continues to move through odd paths and unexpected troves of information. Today I followed a single link from Wikipedia to the Federation of American Scientists and discovered a whole set of pages on current military technology, some we know is true and other we can only speculate about There’s stuff on space, smart weapons, ballistic missile defense, etc.
I’ve been a subscriber to Stephen Aftergood’s Secrecy News email for some time and it appears he’s now publishing similar information at the Secrecy News Weblog.
I’ve also worked in tech support so I could relate to this story in Salon, “We don’t support that.” Working on internal support meant that I never had to learn the Mantra, but the overall process could be just as disappointing.
David Weinberger has a nice essay at Salon about the “echo chamber” meme that seems to be pervading analysis of Howard Dean’s fall and the supposed insularity of the internet.
Behind the echo chamber controversy lies the question of whether the Internet causes people to solidify their beliefs or to diversify them. Does it open people up or shut them down?
This is a really tough question, and not just because it’s hard to quantify.
Paul Ford of Ftrain has produced 4,500 words (Processing Processing via wood s lot) on a topic that has fascinated me since I argued about whether language or thought came first in Mr. Borgerding’s high school English class. How, in particular, do the languages we use to program computers affect the way we think?
I took a class in Scheme two years ago, when I was toying with the idea of going back to school to get a computer science degree, and was blown away by the elegant recursive structures you could create.
Virginia Postrel links to an article at Tech Central Station entitled “Mapping the Debate Over Technology” by Eugene Miller. I haven’t read the entire thing yet but it interacts with some new books I just got from Amazon: Questioning Technology by Andrew Feenberg and Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World by Bruce Schneier. More thoughts to come.