» Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson

Set phasers to dreadful Shakespearian pun! Down and out in the Magic Kingdom has hit both the bookshelves and The Commons in the USA [it’s not out in the UK till February, apparently], and it’s a corker.

With Cory’s approach to publishing, he might show other authors of content how it’s possible to stack up both the dollars and the Whuffie.

Warren Ellis reviews one of the most beautiful considerations of human creativity I’ve come across: Snakes & Ladders by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell.

It’s a wonderfully sensitive illustrated adaptation of a talk Moore gave at the Conway Hall, Red Lion Square (which I walk through on the way to work every morning) – using the square’s history, it’s inhabitants and their encounters with the muse as a basis for the investigation of dna, magic and the creative urge.

There’s a PDF preview [c. 500k] to give a flavour.

» artbomb.net: Snakes & Ladders

Skimming the surface of social-software research and thinking, there is a lot made of the the things that we are ‘hard-wired’ to do – for instance the notion of the “law of 150”, and other anthropological rules of thumb. Steven PInker’s new book ‘The Blank Slate” delves into this area, with mixed results according to the Guardian review:

“The notion of the tabula rasa, ‘the blank slate’, is utterly wrong, he insists. Human nature is not ‘unbelievably malleable’, as anthropologist Margaret Mead once claimed, but contains a set of inherited neurological instructions that direct us to seek status, to fight and to make peace, to make weapons and tools, to acquire a spoken language, to gossip, to use common facial expressions, to admire generosity, to adorn our bodies and to worry about the weather.”

» Guardian Unlimited Books | Hoist by his own polemic