I have a tendency to over-commit myself, which usually takes the form making a claim that I’ll finish something by a particular date, when there was really no realistic way to make that deadline. I just noticed that way, way back on July 9, I introduced the Featured Books category on this site with Jane Bath’s The Landscape Design Answer Book: More Than 300 Specific Design Solutions for Your Landscape and said that I’d publish a review of the book in a couple of days. Well, I’m not finished yet, and I only know that I’ll be finished sometime soon. Bath’s book is no ordinary garden design book, and I’ve ended out taking a very close look at it, reading it from cover-to-cover — which I suspect (or believe, from my own experience) is not what usually gets done with a book of that kind. Why I’ve ended out approaching Bath that way should be clear from my review, once it’s completed; for now, I’ll just say that Bath’s entire approach is so different that I’m determined to give the book the attention I feel it deserves, even if the review seems to suffer from a long delay.

On a lighter note, I guess, the good thing about setting your own deadlines is that it’s really pretty easy and painless to break them. To a point, anyway….

Go here and here, watch the videos, listen to the words and the music, and think about what these new technologies mean. There is some additional coverage of the Microsoft Surface technology here, by Popular Mechanics.

Let’s take a closer look at this article by Timothy Garton Ash later:

What is the elephant in all our rooms? It is the global triumph of capitalism. Democracy is fiercely disputed. Freedom is under threat even in old-established democracies such as Britain. Western supremacy is on the skids. But everyone does capitalism. Americans and Europeans do it. Indians do it. Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes do it. Even Chinese communists do it. And now the members of Israel’s oldest kibbutz, that last best hope of egalitarian socialism, have voted to introduce variable salaries based on individual performance….

Above all, though, there is the inescapable dilemma that this planet cannot sustain six-and-a-half billion people living like today’s middle-class consumers in its rich north….

However ingenious modern capitalists are at finding alternative technologies - and they will be very ingenious - somewhere down the line this is going to mean richer consumers settling for less rather than more….

Marx thought capitalism would have a problem finding consumers for the goods that improving techniques of production enabled it to churn out. Instead, it has become expert in a new branch of manufacturing: the manufacture of desires. The genius of contemporary capitalism is not simply that it gives consumers what they want but that it makes them want what it has to give. It’s that core logic of ever-expanding desires that is unsustainable on a global scale. But are we prepared to abandon it? We may be happy to insulate our lofts, recycle our newspapers and cycle to work, but are we ready to settle for less so others can have more? Am I? Are you?

Ash has an odd mix of good and bad points throughout the article; but in general he seems to have little interest in an actual definition of capitalism. There’s a lot of weakness in intellectual discourse along the lines where history and economics meet; Ash’s article is more accurately about corporatism and consumerism than it is about capitalism.

And, well, I’d like someone to show me one generation in history that hasn’t at least partly embraced the myth that it was a step or two away from doomsday. Funny thing about doomsday … the deadline keeps slipping.