A long, thoughtful RRE message on everything from the sociology of information technology to the economics of innovation concludes thus:
The 2000’s are not a decade of breaking news. What is happening now
that you need the Internet to understand? The most important story
of the 2000’s, in my opinion, is the war over language in the United
States that I have discussed here earlier. And this is a story
that happens on numerous time-scales from milliseconds to millennia.
Important things are happening literally to the interfaces between
the subjects and verbs in English sentences, yet these things are
continuous with the arguments between conservatives and democrats
in ancient Greece. That, for example, is why Ekaterina Haskins’
“Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle”, in addition to being
scholarship of the highest order, could scarcely be more relevant.Ten More Things That Piss Me Off
1. skits
2. people who claim that tomatoes are a fruit
3. PBS (i.e., American public television)
4. the brightly inane writing in most tourist guidebooks
5. those Citibank ads
6. the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
7. the verb “to morph”
8. anything pertaining to the “American Songbook”
9. mayonnaise, or as scientists call it, “death slime”
10. the phrase “thanks in advance”