Well some may be laughing, but Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab people really do seem to be moving this project forward. More power to their elbow!
Taiwan’s Quanta, the world’s largest maker of notebook computers, will manufacture an ultra-low-cost laptop developed by Nicholas Negroponte, the chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab.
Negroponte, [...]

Sun Microsystems really do seem to have an important point here. If there aren’t some common underlying standards then reading todays documents fifty years from now could become just like trying to read Linear B today:
Speaking to a group of reporters, Sun’s top open-source executive said that a format like OpenDocument (ODF) is needed [...]

Well, pretty damn reliable apparently. Or at least that is the view expressed by the scientific journal Nature who have just carried out the first peer based comparative review of Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica in terms of their science coverage. Clearly cases like the Seigenthaler one are the exception rather than the rule, and Britannica [...]

The Head Heeb: Call for papers
I’m pleased to formally announce a project that Sharon Howard and I have been discussing for some time: the first online symposium on the Old Bailey Session Paper database. The Old Bailey database is, quite simply, the largest primary source collection currently available online, with reports (and often complete transcripts) [...]

Clay Risen’s article for TNR is probably an implicilyt responding to the Caldwell article I linked to earlier.

Wanting to fix our anti-spam hack, I noticed Strang’s blog, including the relevant post, has disappeared. As a public service, I reproduce the entry here.
[Removed. Read my own tutorial instead..]

Revolting High Rises
Le Corbusier called houses “machines for living.” France’s housing projects, as we now know, became machines for alienation. In theory, the cause of this alienation is some mix of the buildings themselves and the way they’re joined to the city. But in practice, the most effective urban renewal has tended to focus on [...]

The New Yorker: The Critics: Books
Still, “Postwar” can fairly be called an interpretation of European history since 1945, and its thesis can be put in a sentence. It is that Europe was able to rebuild itself politically and economically only by forgetting the past, but it was able to define itself morally and culturally only [...]

Or should that be children of the world connect (to each other) using your new - Nicholas Negroponte facilitated - 125 dollar laptop. This initiative to bring cheap and abundant computing and connectivity to the world’s children seems absolutely terrific. Obviously, and at one foul swoop, the global playing field is going to become a [...]

Review-essay in Haaretz on Raymond Aron and the war in Algeria. Very interesting. Via the Heab Heeb