Mac OS X Clipboard History
I don’t push my choice of writing tools on others. Well, okay, sometimes I do, but only if I have been using something for ten years and find it indispensable, and it’s open source. That would be Jumpcut.
Richard Dooling
About Richard Dooling
Posts by Richard Dooling:
Plain Text For Authors & Writers
Authors and writers of all stripes can learn a lot about creating and managing words from computer programmers, beginning with an appreciation for the simple, durable efficiencies of plain text.
Rise of the Machines
I wrote this opinion piece for the New York Times in the fall of 2008. Since then I’ve become addicted to financial crisis entertainment and parables of the second gilded age: books, movies, documentaries, Matt Taibi in The Rolling Stone, and the incomparable Gretchen Morgenson in the New York Times business section. The gateway drugs were William D. Cohan’s House of Cards and the Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job by Charles Ferguson, followed by Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail, and Reckless Endangerment by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner. The first serious crisis film that made me feel the fear was HBO’s adaptation of Too Big To Fail. Margin Call beats them all. Shot by J.C. Chandor on a budget but a great cast including Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons. Released in theaters and Video On Demand via Amazon. As far as I can tell, the $65 trillion is still missing. Nobody has been prosecuted. And the Fed and the Treasury are still trying to pretend that the money will show up one day, if they can just keep up appearances until it happens. Rise of the Machines, by Richard Dooling, from the New York Times, […]
Congress Shall Make No Law . . .
Law students spend the better part of three years beetling their brows over the study of constitutional law—a mercurial, opaque, highly theoretical system of textual exegesis, which nobody but the tenured and long-winded professor pretends to understand. And the capsheaf of con-law contwistification is First Amendment law. The First Amendment protects “the freedom of speech” and has spawned an absorbing delusional system of case law, because the harder you work to understand it, the more complex and inscrutable it becomes, until its tracts and tiers and modes of analyses, its time, place, and manner restrictions, its public and private figures and forums, its symbolic expressions and invasions of privacy–all evanesce into vaporous metaphysics. The average citizen knows only that the First Amendment does not mean what it says (i.e., “Congress shall make NO law . . .”), because Congress in fact makes laws abridging the freedom of speech (laws against child pornography, obscenity, fraud, so-called “fighting words,” and so on). To the layperson, the First Amendment must mean whatever nine robed Platonic Guardians say it means: “This political speech is good, we’ll protect it. This obscene speech is bad, we’ll call it ‘unprotected speech’ and let governments ban it.” Voila! […]
Lego Antikythera Mechanism
The Antikythera Mechanism is the oldest known scientific computer, built in Greece at around 100 BCE. Lost for 2000 years, it was recovered from a shipwreck in 1901. But not until a century later was its purpose understood: an astronomical clock that determines the positions of celestial bodies with extraordinary precision. In 2010, a fully-functional replica was built out of Lego. (See YouTube video here). However, as I pointed out in Rapture For The Geeks, the abacus is the oldest “computer,” as far as we know. 500 B.C. – the Abacus Technology and math have had a symbiotic relationship ever since Early Man’s first wife ran out of fingers and toes while counting her husband’s shortcomings and character defects. With twenty or more reasons she’d be better off with some other mug, Early Man’s wife used pebbles, stones, sticks, or other handy objects arranged in columns along lines drawn in the sand. The word “calculus” is Latin for pebble, and these arrangements of pebbles and other objects were the first free-form abaci (the plural of abacus and an important word in early Babylonian Scrabble games). Using abaci, our female ancestors suddenly became proficient at tracking dozens of compound male personality […]