Tabloid treasures

A very good piece at the FT by Marek Kohn (site registration required, but if you do not register you will miss the picture of the "merman chimera"...) on the Wellcome Trust's collection of curiosities. It is accompanied by a fantastic slideshow.

I survived my 10K swim this morning; the water was full of chop and the buoys kept shooting all over the place in misleading directions, but it was very enjoyable taken in sum. I can now hardly lift my arms above my shoulders!

Finished the Neal Stephenson book this afternoon. It is enjoyable, but not so much my cup of tea: I think so highly of some of his books that this one has to count as something of a disappointment. I think the fact is that for thrillers, I really prefer either first-person or third-person limited narration, and see no reason for an absolutely enormous cast of characters: there is some serious redundancy here, at least if you consider the book from the point of view of the Lee Child-Dick Francis school of thriller-writing, a school I obviously admire (perhaps partly because my own cast of thought is more clearly Stephensonian than Childish or Franciscan). There are three separate pairs of young man-young woman who basically end up all blending together: it really is true of the men as well as the woman (older-generation protagonist Richard is by far the most fully realized character), but it is particularly problematic for me as a reader in the case of the women. I wanted to press a copy of Taylor Stevens's The Informationist into Stephenson's hands to show him what can be done in this vein. This may, though, really be primarily a function of genre preference: I don't think the Stieg Larsson books are perfect, but they are so very much what I like in terms of light reading that I can forgive them their implausibilities, wish-fulfilling aspects and other excesses. There is some very good writing here, lots of funny and sharp observations very effectively phrased (his prose style is as Gary Lutz might say "tractional, load-bearing" but with interesting word choice and an excellent ear for a phrase), and I feel certain that the book will appeal profoundly to those who have ever played role-playing games, table-top or computer-based!

Swimming and Stephenson were both good for mental health, but though I did a couple hours of work-related stuff today as well, I still have a huge amount to get done tomorrow for Monday - the semester is well and truly underway...

Pushpins, nanobots, unwanted fringes

Files of a fictional architecture.

Real things

More on pervasive gaming (link courtesy of Sherry Wasserman).

At the Independent, John Lichfield on the thirteenth-century castle currently being built by hand in Burgundy (but I hope the workers are not wearing medieval footwear):

The rear defensive wall and two towers are almost complete. So are the great hall and seigneur's chamber and the bedroom for visiting royalty. The roof of the living quarters, or "north range", is almost finished with timber beams hewn from the nearby forest. The roof beams are half-covered with tiles handmade on the site using clay mined a few yards away.

The 50 or so labourers work in medieval clothes. A committee of academic experts advises on what is medievally correct. Most of the materials, and many of the tools, are quarried, gathered or made on site: the stones, the mortar, the ropes, the nails, the saws, the timber, the wooden lifting-engines. There are no cranes or bulldozers or breezeblocks or pneumatic drills or load-bearing steel joists. The chapel tower contains the first rib-vaulted roof to be made with purely medieval techniques for 600 years.

Alternate selves

I like Andrew Miller's "Lives Unled in Realist Fiction" - and we all should have such good websites, with our articles and book chapters available as free PDFs!

Simulation

Future holodecks.

(On an only associatively related note: an interesting obituary at the Times for Star Trek 'superfan' Joan Winston.)