Davos Newbies

The Language Log goes into books, against type: “Naturally, Mark and I see ourselves as being basically of the post-print era. Cyber-aware, web-initiated, silicon-sinewed, HTML-savvy guys. Books, for us, are those old, musty things bound in calf skin that line the walls of the studies of older scholars. Books are for geezers. We do most of our research through web browsers, like everybody else now. We belong to the 21st century, not the 14th. We are much too modern for books. Oh, sure, we do keep a few books around, but just a few that we care about. Roughly four or five thousand each, I estimate, looking at the bookshelves in his Philadelphia apartment, and recalling the shelves in the Santa Cruz house and office that I will be returning to this July. The Cambridge Grammar; Syntactic Structures; a first edition of Dracula; that sort of thing. But mostly we are postbiblic.”

Buy Far From the Madding Gerund now to help them fight the good fight and soar ahead of Dan Brown in the Amazon.com charts.

Living in the Bay Area, it’s been impossible to avoid the many commemorations of the great San Francisco earthquake, which struck 100 years ago this morning. Fortunately, today the earth didn’t move. At least, not so that I could feel it: there are hundreds of imperceptible quakes each week in California and I’m sure today was no exception.

My wife can’t understand why I don’t go to bed fearful of the Big One striking while we sleep. We live, after all, a very short walk from the Hayward fault, which is seismologists’ best bet for the next major quake in California. I may just be oblivious, but I am also aware of how shaky statistics such as “there’s a 30% chance of the Big One hitting the Bay Area in the next 30 years” are. Maybe yes, maybe no.

Chris Anderson: “So much for AI overlords.”