Web Monitor
16:20 UK time, Tuesday, 16 February 2010
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Today in Web Monitor: one way to celebrate Darwin's anniversary and the extinction of the written word.
• What would be the most inappropriate celebration of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species? The answer, as both Vanity Fair and More Intelligent Life have independently concluded, is to go to the Creation Museum in Kentucky. taken aback at how packed the museum is:
"What is truly awe-inspiring about the museum is the task it sets itself: to rationalize a story, written 3,000 years ago, without allowing for any metaphoric or symbolic wiggle room. There's no poetic license. This is a no-parable zone. It starts with the definitive answer, and all the questions have to be made to fit under it. That's tough. Science has it a whole lot easier: It can change things. It can expand and hypothesize and tinker. Scientists have all this cool equipment and stuff. They've got all these 'lenses' and things."
about the museum's inclusion of dinosaurs:
"Visitors emerge from a tour of Biblical history into a vast gift shop stocked with T-shirts, toy dinosaurs and an extensive array of creationist literature, much of which was penned by Ken Ham himself. Suddenly, those strenuous efforts to reconcile scripture and the dinosaurs seem commercially justified: kids do adore ancient reptiles, particularly when they get to own a model of their very own."
• The end of the written word is nigh :
"If written language is merely a technology for transferring information, then it can and should be replaced by a newer technology that performs the same function more fully and effectively... As originally proposed by futurist William Crossman, the written word will likely be rendered a functionally obsolete technology by 2050."
In the in his ode to the e-book:
"The only thing I'd do to improve them is to include an emergency button that automatically sums the entire book up in a sentence if you couldn't be arsed to finish it, or if your plane starts crashing and you want to know whodunit before exploding over the sea. Ideally it'd shriek the summary aloud, bellowing something like 'THE BUTLER DID IT' for potboilers, or maybe 'THE SCULPTRESS COMES TO TERMS WITH THE DEATH OF HER FATHER' for highbrow fiction. Which means you could effectively skip the reading process entirely and audibly digest the entire contents of the British Library in less than a month. That's ink-and-paper dead, right there."
Links in full
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