May 2012
1 post
The cult of personality around Steve Jobs has mislead many. Articles looking to reminisce about his time at Apple in the mid-’80s tell big stories of his “mercurial asshole” tendencies. They overemphasize his insistence to simplify, and misstate it as “simplify until there’s nothing left”. It’s easy to forget that his early days at Apple could be...
April 2012
9 posts
Paintballing with Hezbollah →
nullarysources:
Mitchell Prothero, writing in Vice Magazine:
We figured they’d cheat; they were Hezbollah, after all. But none of us—a team of four Western journalists—thought we’d be dodging military-grade flash bangs when we initiated this “friendly” paintball match.
This is one of the most fascinating pieces about the Middle East I’ve read, well, possibly ever — certainly this year....
CEOs and the Candle Problem →
A monetary reward will help your employees focus. That’s the point. When you’re focused you are less able to think laterally. You become dumber.
(via handbecomesclaw)
Face Hallucination →
Machines simulating the human process of “up-rezzing” a face. Spooky, mostly. The Seinfeld example is particularly almost-right.
Machine Pareidolia: Hello Little Fella Meets... →
“The future we were promised, of living in space, of jetpacks and pellet foods,...”
– http://booktwo.org/notebook/hauntological-futures/
“Hauntology is a coming to terms with the permanence of our (dis)possession, the...”
– Hauntological Futures | booktwo.org
I’m in the midst of an adventure through the New Aesthetic. Pardon the pull quotes and half-structured thoughts and mumblings, I’ll make sense of it all soon enough.
“His explanation for why his novels have snapped to the now is that there’s...”
– russell davies: something something something
Why New UI
iOS has been a playground for new and novel user interfaces for the last four years. Many experimental ideas for navigation and actions have been invented, and while not all of them have been intuitive enough to ship or stayed popular over time, many now-obvious and common interface elements started when one developer deciding to try something “a little different”. I’m not...
March 2012
5 posts
WatchOn my iPad 3, I’m seeing “bent lines” when scrolling text or tableviews in portrait. You can see this for yourself: scroll any view with lines of text at a constant speed, and watch how they “bend” or “tilt” with your direction of motion: they’ll run downhill left-to-right when scrolling your finger from bottom-to-top, and uphill left-to-right when...
iPhoto for iOS
I tried to install iPhoto on my iPad this morning.
“This app requires a front facing camera.”
Marketing language is hard.
I think I understand what they’re trying to do: iPhone 4/4S and the iPad 2 all include 512 MB of RAM and an A4 or better processor. The original iPad has 256 MB of RAM and a less-beefy GPU (both are big contributing factors to its slowness running iOS 5)....
Things To Read
How did we get to a state where corporations seem to have more legal (and financial) access to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness than the average citizen?
Douglass Rushkoff discusses the rise of the corporation.
The prison-industrial complex is large, lucrative, far-reaching, and totally out of control. Americans in particular should read this: almost 1% of your fellow citizens...
“It seemed that only the machines were still alive, possessed of some perverse...”
– Feet In Smoke: A Story About Electrified Near-Death
February 2012
4 posts
“Sustainability can be about money or quality or love. But however you aim to...”
– apenwarr - What is the definition of success?
A script for Xcode to make your life suck a little... →
Patrick and I co-wrote (he wrote, and I re-wrote and documented) a nice little script for Xcode. It lets you keep API keys in a file outside of your project’s version control system (great for open source work or for multiple developers with different keys). It’s nice. I hope it makes your day a tiny bit better.
Football is destroying itself
(via Kottke) Grantland has two articles, one by Jonah Lehrer and one by Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier, about how concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) may end the sport of football in the near future.
Remember “punch-drunk” boxers? It turns out they were literally pummeling their brains into an Alzheimer’s-like state of neuron death. Chronic exposure to concussions and...
January 2012
7 posts
Why Science is Failing Us →
Science is all about telling a story that fits a set of data points. These stories cut corners and ignore small pieces that don’t fit, because the complexity of explaining every bit puts you in a bind to figure out the whole gig, down to every last detail. The problem is, sometimes those small details matter a whole lot, and it’s why medicine (and, in my opinion, economics) is having a...
Vladimir Nabokov’s Transparent Things is a lovely read. The Kindle sample caught me right at the start, and it’s delightfully short and can be read in one sitting. Despite its brevity, it’s a well-written novel with the same flowing prose and long paragraphs, both interspersed with asides and ambiguous changes in subject, that make me miss David Foster Wallace. It’s only...
The really tough problem of innovation is waste... →
via timoni:
“The way to have good ideas is to have lots of ideas.” That’s one of my favorite axioms and, in my experience, it is universally true. I have many ideas, every day, and some of them are very good. Mostly, though, they are bad.
— The Cooper Journal: Innovation is a waste disposal problem
Give Me Something To Read's 2011 Highlights
givemesomethingtoread:
Here are Give Me Something To Read’s highlights of the year. This list is comprised of my favourites and reader favourites, selected from articles posted here in 2011 (limited to those originally published in 2011). Open this post in your browser to make use of the Read Later button accompanying each link.
Read More
I’ve read over half of these, and every one was...
This Week's Reading
Jon Stewart and the dichotomy of accidentally becoming a serious news anchor while being a comedian.
There Is No Time in Waterloo: A McSweeney’s short story from their “Life in 2024” issue. Not science fiction, just “futurism-ish”. (I read this online and went to look up which issue it’s in; I recognized the cover from my own copy sitting on my nightstand.)
...
Informal Foursquare Rules
Places you shouldn’t check in:
Where you sleep. It’s no fun being mayor of your own flat: you live there. Let your friend that visits all the time earn it. (Important note: this includes the house of your significant other/fling/one night stand. It’s weird to be at a friend’s house and have their roommate’s friend-with-benefits check in (and even weirder when...
“The governor’s plan slashes $3.1 billion from an estimated $58.8 billion...”
– Ohio’s War on the Middle Class | Mother Jones
December 2011
13 posts
The Single Best Thing You Can Do for Your Health -... →
This went around Twitter a few days ago, and deserves a link. I’ll sum it up simply, though the video is short, cute, and worth watching: “Can you limit your sitting and sleeping to just 23 1/2 hours a day? 30 minutes of walking makes a huge difference in your quality of life.”
I got a Fitbit a few months ago, and simply love it. Having a step count at the end of my day...
Prometheus - Movie Trailers - iTunes →
Firefly? Is that you?
who killed videogames? (a ghost story) | insert... →
This is a four chapter short story about videogames, compulsion, and a bunch of other things. Find the time to read this, ok?
iTunes's iCloud Cache
I had a few hours to kill on the plane on Sunday, so I thought I’d take a look at how iTunes does caching for iCloud songs. This is a new caching mechanism in iTunes 10.5, and only applies to songs you start playing from iCloud in iTunes without hitting the download button. (Downloaded songs are treated like regular store purchases.)
Temporary files from iCloud are stored in...
“I like to urge designers to always ask themselves: “Does this logo look like a...”
– StumbleUpon Stumbles on Hidden Shape - Brand New
Why Spotify can never be profitable: The secret... →
As a music consumer, I love services like Spotify and Rdio: they let me listen to vast amounts of music and seemingly depthless back catalogues. But as someone who enjoys new bands, I love concerts: they seem to be one of the more reliable ways to send non-trivial sums of money to acts you like.
Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction →
You’re reading Bret Victor, right? (You should be.)
Economics focus: House of horrors, part 2 - The... →
… home prices are overvalued by about 25% or more in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, New Zealand, Britain, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden. Indeed, in the first four of those countries housing looks more overvalued than it was in America at the peak of its bubble.
“It doesn’t take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the...”
– Don’t Be A Free User - Pinboard
November 2011
9 posts
The Economist v. The Budget
This week’s Economist has a four-piece discussion of the United States’ budgetary woes:
There’s a detailed piece about the Congressional supercommittee’s utter failure to effect any real reform, even with a procedural layup unlikely to be seen again for years (no amendments and no filibusters allowed, and yet, no deal emerged which took advantage of this).
There’s...
Concurrency Programming Guide: Migrating Away from... →
If you are currently using semaphores to restrict access to a shared resource, you should consider using dispatch semaphores instead. Traditional semaphores always require calling down to the kernel to test the semaphore. In contrast, dispatch semaphores test the semaphore state quickly in user space and trap into the kernel only when the test fails and the calling thread needs to be blocked....
Required Reading
There’s been a plethora of lovely articles I’ve read with Instapaper over the past few weeks. Here’s a few of my most favorite.
Gender and Society
There’s been a lot of noise lately, both in my social circle online and in my head, about gender interactions and socialization patterns in communities. I’m still mulling a lot of it over, but in the meantime, you should...
Voyager I and II →
“Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are each equipped with six sets, or pairs, of thrusters to control their movement. These include three pairs of primary thrusters and three backup, or redundant, pairs. Voyager 2 is currently using the two pairs of backup thrusters that control the pitch and yaw motion of the spacecraft. Switching to the backup thruster pair that controls roll motion will...
The Ticking Euro Bomb (Parts 1–4) – Der Spiegel... →
Der Spiegel’s four-part series on the Euro crisis is another great perspective on, and more backstory for, the impending currency meltdown in Europe.
A euro referendum: Greece’s woes - The Economist →
Let’s talk about austerity measures, bloated spending, and obstinate electorates.
… [A] country’s finances are not defined by markets alone. Rather the limits of solvency are tested by people’s willingness to accept tax rises and spending cuts. A government runs out of political capital long before it runs out of things to tax. In the end, won’t pay matters more than can’t pay.
Greece is,...
Jon Stewart and the Burden of History - Esquire →
This is a great article, and you should definitely watch his interview with Chris Wallace after reading it (it’s also linked in the piece).
“It becomes harder for our friends and ourselves to figure out what really...”
– n+1: The Accidental Bricoleurs
October 2011
4 posts
