sep 29 2020
On growing older wiser
Category: technology
a thousand authors
While writing about the 1979 movie Alien and what it can teach us about extractive capitalism, I noted that movies can be more nuanced, profound and comprehensi...
desperately seeking sounds
After nearly two years of working on an audio drama, I’ve come to wonder if I should have spent more time thinking about the audio part and less on the dr...
playhouse
Nearly two years ago, for the birthday of our oldest, I made a playhouse. I designed it using Sketchup, which allowed me to adjust the sizing and layout, while ...
A Long View on YouTube
A long view on YouTube is that it’s a platform for artists – outsider mostly, many of whom make art about their own lives – and educators. The “how&...
War Games, Fail-Safe, Dr. Strangelove
In 1998, there were two movies about a natural catastrophe: Armageddon & Deep Impact. In 2006, there were two movies about magicians living outside the real...
a big lie
most car commercials are really public road commercials
Facebook is made out of…
very good critics point out that Facebook is engineered to be addictive. but they seldom recognize that the pleasure being meted out is OTHER PEOPLE. for exampl...
Wheels of fortune
Smart people become irrational around technology. We want absolutes, purity and simple answers; whether it’s being anti-GMO or bullish on AI, the impulse ...
Facebook users deserve all their feels.
Facebook is software for managing your feelings. It promises to be a tool for strengthening relationships – primarily, as a replacement for email – but it is en...
tired of winning
David Segal reviewing Norman Ohler’s Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany: By 1944, the doctor had trouble finding veins to shoot. Then, as the Allies bombed th...
China 2016, USA 2020
Christina Xu: Contrary to popular sentiment in the US, Chinese readers don’t blindly trust the state-run media. Rather, they distrust it so much that they don’t...
the hyperreality TV star who became president
From a masterful polemic by Brian Phillips: Authoritarianism wants to convince its supporters that nothing is true, that the whole machinery of truth is an into...
keeping the hamsters alive: clickbait and the information market
google just served me up the following “news” without knowing my full identity: this appears to be their default offering for an English speaker in ...
“what’s going on”
Virginia Heffernan: Just get back to that time where you were just tripping out in college and wondering what else is out there, before you buttoned up. Because...
You say Rachel, I say Really?
New software, same old problem:
Certainty is a contact sport
Nicola Twilley: The LIGO team includes a small group of people whose job is to create blind injections—bogus evidence of a gravitational wave—as a way of keepin...
robots and secrets
From an overview of consensus by John Cassidy: Why, then, are the markets so disturbed? One possible explanation has to do with trading algorithms, which encour...
competition
An intrepid researcher has mapped some of the microwave towers being used to conduct high-frequency-trading around the world. HFT requires competitors to use cu...
Who let the bots out
Today I had occasion to contact roughly two dozen friends via the message or chat tool on Facebook. When first contacted, two of them replied by asking if I was...