There was, it turned out, at least one advantage to being without Internet. On Thursday I had to leave work early, as my Internet provider was finally going to send a technician out between 4:00 and 8:00 P.M. In my mailbox when I got home was a package from Amazon; I tore into it eagerly and spent the next two hours buried in one of my new books.

The book in question is Carolyn McCulley’s Did I Kiss Marriage Goodbye? Noel had mentioned it in church this weekend – had actually asked single people to go out and read it and let him know if it was worth recommending.

The short answer is that it absolutely is. I expect this book to be a treasured resource for me in the years to come, and one that I pass along to all my single female friends.

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religion, reviews books, christianity, personal stories, religion

So… apparently they’re making a print volume of Wikipedia now?

I’m actually kind of torn on how I should feel about this. On the one hand, this almost completely contradicts everything that makes Wikipedia what it is: a triumph of collective intelligence–a living, very searchable document. You can’t put something like that into a book. You can’t put hypertext into print, nor can the general population collaboratively edit the printed word (unless they’re publishing it on Kindle). It is a useful document precisely because it isn’t printed.

On the other hand, a printed version would be great for archival purposes. I’ve wondered what a hypothetical alien archaeologist would say about our generation; we’re leaving increasingly fewer traces of individualism. Even my own hypothetical grandchildren may or may not get to see photographs from years of my life; it simply depends on the state of technology. Maybe .jpgs will no longer be valid file extensions in fifty years. Guess what: there went the last three years of my life, if I never got them printed. So an archive strikes me as an incredibly useful tool for future historians.

Regardless, though, who do they actually expect to *use* this?

rhetoric books, wikipedia