A Spectre of Forgery

Arts & Letters Daily is one of my favorite ways to get cultured.  Today they link to a New Yorker article about Han van Meegeren, forger extraordinaire.  The author criticizes forgery:

“The spectre of forgery chills the receptiveness—the will to believe—without which the experience of art cannot occur.”

This struck home with me.  I’m no connoisseur of fine art, but I’ve experienced this effect first-hand in other media.  For instance, comedy is so much funnier when it’s happening in front of you instead of on a TV set; fighting is similarly much more brutal.  I think in part it’s due to the possibility of video editing, TV’s very own spectre of forgery.

Samizdat

Ninjalicious’s Access All Areas is a surprisingly well-written bundle of guidelines, warnings, and stories having to do with Urban Exploration.  Urban Explorers pursue hidden and off-limits areas with the goal of appreciating the spaces (habitable or otherwise) that humans have created.  Destinations include drains, abandoned/construction sites, hotels, and—this was the coolest one by far—ghost ships.  I was saddened to hear that Ninjalicious (Jeff Chapman) died recently due to lung cancer, but his contributions are everywhere (q.v. the Infiltration and Yip e-zines).  8/10 on the enjoy-o-meter.

Stealing the Network is a collection of short stories by various authors involving present-day hardware and software.  On the whole, they aren’t very well-written (clearly the authors’ strengths lie elsewhere) but til I discovered this gem I was finding it hard to stomach books on computer crime that had no basis in reality.  These stories feature real software, real hardware, and believable trickery that made me a little nervous about how we exchange data in the real-world.  That, and the overall theme of the collection is that bad guys always win.  6/10.

Scifi Safari

I went on a little sci-fi safari recently and thought I’d write to my immense readership about it. The three books I read were Orson Scott Card’s Lost Boys, Robert J Sawyer’s Rollback, and Orson Scott Card’s Children of the Mind. I keep returning to Card because, in my opinion, he’s one of the few sci-fi authors who can actually write…

Machine Learning Book

Here is a webpage hosting a downloadable version of the book Machine Learning, Neural and Statistical Classification. It’s old (1994) but on first glance seems to be well-organized and written. What’s more, it’s free…

[Edit: Donald Michie (editor) recently passed away.]

Ketchup

Hello, devoted readers! My absence is mostly due to the fact that, for the past few weeks, every day & all day has been spent writing my thesis. It really doesn’t leave me with much of a desire to write here (I don’t know how some people do it!). But today I’m taking it easy, so I thought I’d play some catch up.