The British Library vs DRM: The BBC reported February 3 that Dr Clive Field, the British Library's director of scholarships and collections, called the increasing restrictions of fair use by digital rights management (DRM) cause for concern.
Editor's Note: A reader recently complained that we publish too many obituaries and remembrances on this website. "I don't need to be reminded of my own mortality and depressed at the same time by reading all these death notices," he wrote. "I'm a baby boomer and I don't want to read about baby boomers—not their work, [not] their deaths."
A good read from The New Yorker. I saw a special on the Enigma Project once and they interviewed a woman who had worked with Turing at Bletchley Park. She basically said that everybody at BP was phenomenally bright, but that Turing was a genius and that the difference between being intelligent and being a genius was the difference between going from A to G and from A to Zed. Genius didn't need the intermediate steps that even the very brightest of us require.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis posits that the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks affects how he or she perceives the world. It has been a lightning rod of controversy ever since it was proposed. A new paper suggests that it's half true—sort of.
I'm not sure what makes it so special; I'm not sure if it really is as special as Mark Levinson says it is. "This is about life. This is going to bring digital music life."