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...
Category: technology
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...
The new co-viewing. Same as the old.
Television sets often determine the layout of the furniture in communal rooms. Their position in the typical American home is a clear testament to their social ...
Scrapbooks made for sharing
From the Wikipedia entry on the origins of the scrapbook in the 15th century and their ongoing function as self-portraits: From the standpoint of the psychology...
what if car dealerships were run more like Apple stores?
Nissan Leaf, Apple iPhone recently, i went to check out one of the most expensive high tech gadgets you can buy: a new car. perhaps, our experience was atypica...
Why do taco trucks promote their Facebook pages?
What RSS promised, Facebook delivered: easy to use, personalized news. There’s tremendous canny in shortening “subscribe” to “like”...
mobil gas pump interface suggestion
original revised
living in the age of digital singles, what of digital shorts?
Computers have transformed music production and consumption by enabling the cheap and easy manipulation of sound. Digitization took apart music culture (industr...
extending play: from lp’s to mp3’s and beyond
One of the benefits that record companies enjoyed when albums were the prevalent packaging for pop music was the upward pressure this scheme placed on song pric...
Creepy TV-watching robot buddies synched with pre-programmed emotion tracks.
[I wrote the below last August but never posted it. Now, seeing the depiction of movie color palettes at moviebarcode, I’ve relented.] The Speech Analysis...
art/business/design/ideas/journalism/language/latin america/mental illness/movies & television/music/nature/people/play/power/technology/work
About a year of tweets, archived here for posterity.
I began this current journal, XSML, with the intent of reducing my own notes to extra small, XML-friendly updates. Increasingly, I have been drawn by the allure...
re: Egypt. Enough with the prattle about new media. It’s the economy, stupid. (And satellite TV.)
Here’s a headline you don’t want to miss, from January 18, 2007: MIDDLE EAST: Population growth poses huge challenge for Middle East and North Afric...
“becomes more informed and demanding (thanks to the internet forums)”
While reading up on a ridiculously high-performance kitchen appliance, I found this quote from a manufacturer: Between the year 2000 – 2001 the market con...
The great American standup tournament that can be the Twitter trending topic.
The original snap was: #thingsfatpeoplehatedoing. Here are some snaps back – one-liner’s, survey results – that caught my eye: Jasmine Lewis: going to the...
Facebook + smart grids + cash prizes = It’s on! (and off!)
I know my fellow consumers. We are a conspicuous competitive lot. Look at what I got. Also, free shit. Everyone loves free shit. I was just trying to remember w...
Never mind the iOS “home” button. The whole screen should offer physical feedback.
The “home” button Apple has designed the iOS devices (iPhone, iPad and Touch) with a single physical button for navigation: the round “home...
Bruce Sterling sheds light on the cultures that led to cablegate, obscures what comes next.
Bruce Sterling knows his nerds, outsiders in real life who are insiders online, alternately diffident and insolent. In his interesting assessment of the Wikilea...
magic wands: new AR app allows for “enchanting translations”. casting better spells getting easier with every roll.
This year’s worthiest sequel to the Harry Potter series may be an app. Word Lens debuted on potentially millions of screens just in time for the final hol...