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Continuing the saga of the exhibit I’ve had to put together in under a week:

The primary challenge today was setting up the display stands. We don’t exactly have budget or time to buy proper stands for materials, so I got to construct them myself out of used folders. Arts & crafts time!

As silly as that all sounds, it went pretty well. Three of us worked on it and got all 20-some finished in only a couple of hours. The stands are sturdy, and somehow manage to not look like they were made out of used folders in an afternoon. I’m actually quite proud of how it turned out.

If the printers pull through, we might be able to get it up “on time” tomorrow afternoon. The accompanying website still has at least a day’s work left.

I’ll certainly post more once the whole thing is finished.

Big Project of the week is a small exhibit I’m putting together ASAP of the items from the time capsule recently unearthed at City Hall. I’m almost afraid to admit it publicly, but this is my first time doing a physical exhibit. And it keeps getting more and more complicated.

The problem I’ve just encountered is the difficulty of creating useful reproductions that are good enough to be used in the exhibit. We’re worried about light damage, and that the exhibit location isn’t particularly secure, so I’ve been asked to use reproductions wherever possible.

However, an exhibit of crap pictures of cool things is still a crap exhibit.

The photographs are going to turn out pretty decently, I think. But a scan of a printed page, shot out of a colour printer, still looks like a scan of a printed page shot out of a colour printer. And no matter what that’s costing us it looks cheap to me.

Speaking of cheap, I am also building my own display stands out of old file folders, so I guess there you have it.

This is a review I wrote for <u>Anathem</u>, by Neal Stephenson, for the LibraryThing Early Reviewers group.

Fantastic book. Just fantastic. I’m going to try to write a review that’s very low in spoilers, in that I’m not going to give away anything about how it ends; on the other hand I experienced a certain joy in entering this book with absolutely no foreknowledge of its contents. You might enjoy that, too.

The setting is a world called Arbre, similar to Earth in many ways; its people are human, even though its culture has gone in a different direction. In this world, there has been an enforced separation between science and technology, between theory and practice. (This is to keep technology from developing faster than culture can acclimate, though details are scarce there had been disasters far in the past that inspired this separation.)

The theors live in monastic communities, with their own system of governance independent from the outside world. The flow of information is highly restricted: some groups allow communication once a year, others once every thousand years. Little heed is paid to the rise and fall of politics and religions outside the walls.

Things begin to change drastically when an anomaly is spotted in the sky. Brilliant minds from around the world are brought together in protection of the planet. Adventure ensues.

But that’s not the point of the book, really. The plot is filled out by hundreds of dialogues and thought experiments and wonderful big ideas. Everything is pseudonymous, but can be recognized as a treatment of the big ideas of Earth. (After all, truth is truth, no matter which universe you live in … ) At no point does it come across as forced. The characters spend their lives studying their world with no tools but their own minds; the story offers a glimpse into that way of life.

And, astoundingly, there is an ending. Very few loose ends remain, except for of course one thing which is clearly necessary to be left unresolved.

I never once stopped enjoying myself while reading. I forced myself to take breaks, so that it wouldn’t be gone too quickly. I think it’ll take a bit of time and distance to determine if I liked it better than The Baroque Cycle, but it’s certainly up there as possibly the best thing Stephenson’s written.

Thank you, Early Reviews program

Do I really need to comment on how fantastic the Watchmen trailer looks?

No, I probably don’t. But I will anyway.

‘Will it ever be embarrassing not to have a digital past?’

This question added significantly to thoughts I’ve been having lately about online activities, blogging, and the like.

A lot of concern has been about anonymity — how can we ensure that those embarassing photos posted by our friends on Facebook won’t end up being public? It’s a valid worry, but it’s new only in scope. If those photos exist, they could conceivably ‘get out” in any medium you choose.

Now larger and larger segments of the Internet are moving slowly towards a reputation economy. People who have been around for years, and writing smart things, garner regard because of that history, and because of reputation accorded to them by other public figures. It’s possible to make this work anonymously, but you’d have to keep the same false name throughout.

I’ve kept a fairly anonymous blog on with a free service for five years now. About a year ago I started to think seriously about the consequences: it’s publicly available, and despite not using my name I could still be identified by the sorts of things I write about. I’ve always been understandably reluctant to discuss the very private in a public forum, but every day it becoems clearer that true anonymity (if desired) is difficult to sustain.

In addition to that, there’s a lot of work that can go into turning thoughts into words. People are motivated by any number of reasons, but if you’re writing about big issues or things affecting your profession, you may want to turn that into a career benefit. That was my reason for starting this site up. It’s also a reason I’ve been reluctant to use it often — I’m not yet used to attaching my real name to things I haven’t read over six or seven or eight times.

Still. It may be worth it to make a start, a demonstration of effort at least. At some point that will count for more than silence.