Little Booklets

Printing and assembling the mini-comic version of Cory Doctorow's story "Printcrime" (from his new collection Overclocked) was so much fun that I had to make my own origami booklet. So here it is: eight poems by W. B. Yeats, including my personal favorite "The Song of Wandering Aengus," in a pocket-sized booklet produced with PagePacker. Open the .pp document in PagePacker, print it, and follow the directions on the PagePacker page to fold and cut the sheet into booklet form. Then put it in your pocket and read it on the subway, bus, in the cafe, etc. (Note: PagePacker is a Mac application. Windows users might try converting the original PDF into a booklet using the PDF-to-PocketMod converter from PocketMod I haven't tested this, however.)

Here's how I made it: First I copied the text of the poems from www.bartleby.com and formatted it into an eight-page document in my word processor (NeoOfficeJ). Then I exported the document as a pdf. Finally, I dropped the pdf into the PagePacker document window. PagePacker handled the rest.

A note on "Printcrime" itself: as usual, Doctorow wraps a healthy dose of geek ideology in an imagined world that's concrete enough to help the pointedness go down. In this case the point is one that's often missed by post-scarcity extropian futures. Intellectual property clearly shows that the absence of scarcity is no guarantee against a world of haves and have-nots. So even if we can conquer matter, how do we get from where we are now to the bitchun/star trek world of universally shared abundance?

YANAS: Mathematical Fantasy

Yet another new Astore section: Mathematical Fantasy. Lewis Carroll was not the last word.