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POPSNational Writing Day Now there's the computer and the internet. In the digital age, anyone with a laptop, a wi-fi card, and a place to sit at Starbucks can put material into cyberspace. The digital revolution means everyone's an author, every day is National Writing Day. And this sudden democratizing of the writing process generates its own set of complaints: * it's wrong to give so many people access to authorship -- after all, most people won't be very good at, and some people are going to write things that we don't agree with * computers make writing too easy -- something so important should only come with effort -- no pain, no gain -- maybe we should increase the entrance fees? * we need to control, license, censor what's on the 'net: after all, the web is full of lies, misinformation, nonsense, pornography, fraud, Nigerian money scams, and hate, not to mention all those pictures of little cats But despite the complaints, writers everywhere are grabbing their keyboards...
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POPS1001 Free Fonts Although it sounds like they named themselves a bit prematurely, and these days it's more like 10,001 free fonts.
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POPSIs the Internet melting our brains? I start with Plato's critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They're not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down -- the ultimate irony. We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won't have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there's no way to preserve or record a phone conversation.
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POPSWho needs cursive writing skills? My handwriting is horrible. I will admit it and if I can use the keyboard and a word processing program for any writing activity, I would willingly do that over writing by hand. Unfortunately, the technology isn't quite up to the task that would allow me NOT to write by hand. Do you feel this is an dying "art form" as the article below suggests? Will it every really go away and why is it important at all? Share your thoughts and tweets with us on this topic!
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POPSHow Chuck Darwin made it from reception to the corner office Thought this was a very colorful piece and worth the quick read at the source. It was written by a long time publishing exec who provides a personal view into the evolution of an industry caught smack in the middle of a technology and media revolution. Having read a number of insightful posts recently (here on Amplify) regarding magazine industry's struggle to bridge traditional and new media, this particular story resonated with me. I wonder if any old school mag publishing execs are still the decision makers. If so, do they realize Mr. Darwin is still sitting in their corner office...
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POPSDem Potpourri: Obamacare, Kennedy and Bush-Era Torture
August 25, 2009 Shifting The Conversation To Thicker Ice Obama rallies his base by trying to shift the national conversation to Bush-era torture. Glenn Greenwald, a sometime consultant to the ACLU, reminds us of the depth of his commitment to civil liberties as he discusses the newly-released CIA Inspector General report on enhanced interrogation: What every American should be made to learn about the IG Torture Report ...Before saying anything about the implications of this Report, I want to post some excerpts of what CIA interrogators did. Every American should be forced to read and learn this in order to know what was done in their names . . . "Forced" to learn this stuff? I will defend to the death the right of every American to grill hotdogs and watch a ball game while tuning this news out. In another incident a guard racked a handgun and spun up a power drill near a hooded detainee. Geez, are we holding hardened terrorists or . .
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POPSBarack Obama's half-brother George The man behind this is idea Martin Feldstein. Months ago Feldstein read about the plight of George Obama. "I wondered if it was a hoax, but it wasn't! Barack's got to be helping him out, right? But he's not. Not even a penny!" says Feldstein. The idea is to raise money to buy Obama's brother a nice apartment or house, a decent car, healthy food, and maybe an education since George never finished first-grade. 'And if he wants to, he can come to America, we'll help get him a visa too! We're sure there's plenty of spare rooms at the White House...Maybe the Lincoln bedroom!' George is an avid fan of America and once here has plans to write a book. The book, 'The Greatest Fighter Pilots of the Merican Civil War' will include a forward by President Obama's Grandmother Ethel.
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POPSWho Wrote Dreams and Why It Matters There should be NO QUESTION why its so imperative for Obama to require a teleprompter to deliver his speeches. The question SHOULD be, Is Ayers also behind the text that appears on it
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POPS Turing Bombe, the WWII Nazi Code-Breaking Machine [PICS] War veterans Ruth Bourne, left, and Jean Valentine, who served in Women's Royal Navy Service during World War II, stand in front of the machine, that played a crucial part in cracking the Nazi, Enigma code, Teams of highly skilled mathematicians, cryptologists, inventive thinkers and crossword enthusiasts would receive hundreds of Nazi codes and ‘guess’ the approximate real message or plain text. This ‘crib’ would be given to the Wrens who would set it on the Bombe’s alphabet wheels. By checking all the permutations, the crib would help locate the true message within the code. "There were 210 such bookcase-like Bombes that gave Britain advance warning of Hitler’s plans and shortened the conflict by two years. " This replica is called Phoenix.
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POPSFormer Employee Of Fraudster Madoff Gives Inside Scoop THE SECRETIVE 17TH FLOOR The employee says he only saw the 17th floor, where the fraudulent Investment Advisory operation was located, about two times. He noticed the out-of-date computers and the old-fashioned dot-matrix printers that printed out paper with green and white stripes. The computers he saw were about 15 years old, including one system that “is not even around anymore—miles away from modern Windows technology. And the statements I've seen from victims don’t look like my statements from Fidelity. They had primitive typefaces, as though they had been typed on a typewriter. Nobody sends statement like that, so maybe it was done to create the illusion of old-fashioned transparency.” BERNIE, ‘OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE’ “Everything had to be black. The computers, the tables, even the picture frames. If he saw a kid’s picture in a silver frame, for instance, he would order the offender to get a black frame.” H/T suitably flip
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POPSHow to write a modern classic in 20 days Opinions differ as to whether Kerouac really wrote in this way, or whether he did a sneaky bit of rewriting and polishing afterwards. There are also different views on the literary merit of the “spontaneous” approach. Truman Capote, for one, was famously unimpressed. Spontaneous prose was, he declared, “not writing, but typing”. On this subject too, the scroll has a tale to tell. “There are a lot of annotations,” says Kennedy. “He went back over the scroll with pencil, scored things out, and changed names and so forth. You can see these changes before your eyes, which is something that scholars would usually have to go to a library or research institute to do. It’s great that this can be on display, free of charge, to the public.”
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POPSA Writer in a Living Novel 
Ms. Chute, 61, a wry, direct and earthy woman who favors bandannas, peasant skirts and stout hiking boots, works in their home, which is guarded by a sign that reads: “Woa. Visitors Turn Back.” Neither building is heated, except by wood stove, or has hot water. The compound’s sole toilet is a tin-roofed outhouse. The Chute home does have an industrial-size copying machine, however, and nearby she keeps her AK-47 rifle, which she likes because it has a gas piston that dampens recoil. “It’s very gentle, very soft,” she said. Ms. Chute, whose fourth novel, “The School on Heart’s Content Road,” comes out on Friday, had a surprise hit in the mid-’80s with her first book, “The Beans of Egypt, Maine,” about a hard-luck, occasionally incestuous clan that some critics compared to Faulkner’s Snopeses. “If it runs, a Bean will shoot it,” she wrote. “If it falls, a Bean will eat it.” The book’s empathy and precise observation derived, it turned out, from personal experience. Ms. Chute, who g
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POPSWe Interrupt This Election To Bring You Something Unserious... Yo' Momma So Fat Jokes Through The Ages. Also from the same site: “Yo’ Momma” Jokes as told by Nerds Your Mother is so slow she uses the ISA Slot and 1000KB of RAM. Your Mother is so overweight that when she steps on the scale it says, “Sorry, we don’t do Millennium Falcons.” Your Mother is so tremendously hirsute she makes Wolverine look like Professor X. Your Mother is so approaching her senior years that she practices her micros on a typewriter. Your Mother is so poverty-stricken that if we all lived in Zelda’s Hyrule, she’d have a hut in Kakariko Village. Your Mother is so lacking in general attractiveness that the Borg refused to assimilate her.
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POPSThe typewriter symbolized the golden age of writing "The golden age of the typewriter has passed, but its memory lives on. That memory exists in the great literature it helped produce, in everyday parlance such as “Carbon Copy” (CC) and “Carriage Return" (CR), as a storyline in detective fiction and films, but most of all it lives on in the “QWERTY” keyboard design, its great legacy to the technology that consigned the typewriter to history."
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POPSInventions - the 19th Century Many of these seem so much part of life, others seem so primitive in comparison to our time, and yet they were invented not so long ago. A full list on source.
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POPSTypewriter Art This is an amazing story of a man born with spastic cerebral palsy. Though disabled in many ways, he taught himself to create detailed pictures using one finger on a typewriter that resembled pencil or charcoal drawings. Another tribute to the indomitable human spirit.
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