Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Wednesday, January 29, 2003

Cloned Opinions -- Comment()
Today appeared my net column titled Cloned Opinions (in Finnish, Kloonattuja mielipiteitä). When writing the text, especially helpful was the document Fight Back Against Killer Astroturf, which lists quite a few cases of 'Letters to the Editor expressing support for the Bush agenda'.

-- Comment()
t e c h n o c u l t u r e writes: "John Naughton has some great links to both his recent Observer column on the scourge of Powerpoint in the corporate world and to related links, one of which is to this wonderful version of the Gettysburg Address -- if Abe Lincoln had used Powerpoint."

Earlier in Learning by PowerPoint I wrote: "I believe that Learning by PowerPoint will be increasingly common, and generate increasingly worse results. Those students who have personal access to more experienced colleagues will probably do all right...". There is also a great PowerPoint Anthology of Literature.

Lessig vs. Lessing -- Comment()
I found out that I had missprinted the name Lessig in the title of my book review of The Future of Ideas (the missprint was Lessing). I'm too embarrassed to say who noticed the error. Fortunately the name was correct in the book review which was printed in the magazine. Perhaps the missprint was due to a mistyped Control-N command in Emacs while editing the review.

I must say that I have run into the same phenomenon. In fact, I wrote earlier:

When I first started to get my texts published, I was eager for feedback. But typically nothing happened. Nobody commented, and nobody gave any indication of reading the text. Later on, I might get indirect feedback, of the following kind: "I heard X saying that she wants to keep subscribing to the magazine because that Haatainen [sic!] writes there."

But I must emphasise that I didn't make the missprint (Lessig vs. Lessing) on purpose, as a Finn might be thought to do:

By the way, it may be a singularly Finnish trait that when giving positive feedback we tend to insult the recipient a bit. This way the recipient feels that you didn't offer you encouragement only because you wanted to be polite.

Note: Several readers noticed that the word misprint was misspelled as missprint in the above text. To remind myself that I'm fallible (and not a good speller), I'm leaving the text as it is.

Issues of drug discovery -- Comment()
I was yesterday in a seminar on drug discovery. The presentations were fine and provoking. However, the discussion tended to get stuck in the same topics again and again: financing, expertise, and intellectual property rights. These are important issues, especially for a small country like Finland. We don't afford to make many mistakes. And because drug discovery is a relatively new field in Finland, we have to overcome some obstacles which have already been tackled in other countries.