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9 Eyes

22 Nov 2010 -

Fascinating stills from Google Street View collected by Jon Rafman. In 2009 he told Art Fag City:

With its supposedly neutral gaze, the Street View photography had a spontaneous quality unspoiled by the sensitivities or agendas of a human photographer. It was tempting to see the images as a neutral and privileged representation of reality—as though the Street Views, wrenched from any social context other than geospatial contiguity, were able to perform true docu-photography, capturing fragments of reality stripped of all cultural intentions.

Warren Buffett on the Bailout

18 Nov 2010 -

Warren Buffett:

When the crisis struck, I felt you would understand the role you had to play. But you’ve never been known for speed, and in a meltdown minutes matter. I worried whether the barrage of shattering surprises would disorient you. You would have to improvise solutions on the run, stretch legal boundaries and avoid slowdowns, like Congressional hearings and studies. You would also need to get turf-conscious departments to work together in mounting your counterattack. The challenge was huge, and many people thought you were not up to it.

Well, Uncle Sam, you delivered. People will second-guess your specific decisions; you can always count on that. But just as there is a fog of war, there is a fog of panic — and, overall, your actions were remarkably effective.

Animated Movie GIFs

14 Nov 2010 -

The vast majority of animated GIFs are not worth the bytes they take up. These, however, are a different breed

(via Jason Kottke)

1.0 Is the Loneliest Number

10 Nov 2010 -

Matt Mullenweg on shipping and shipping early:

Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world. It’s even worse because development doesn’t happen in a vacuum — if you have a halfway decent idea, you can be sure that there are two or three teams somewhere in the world that independently came up with it and are working on the same thing, or something you haven’t even imagined that disrupts the market you’re working in.

Saying “enough” can be very difficult

Banana Republic of America

8 Nov 2010 -

Nicholas Kristoff for New York Times:

The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.

C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.

Outrageous

Creative Internet

15 Oct 2010 -

The internet is a funny thing. The endless stream of pointless status updates and silly youtube videos makes us look rather stupid as a race. On the other hand, the enormity of it also reveals how the extraordinary happens all the time. It’s a matter of where you look.

It’s wonderful being reminded of the creativity we’re capable of. There are some truly remarkable things in this technology-focused collection.

Rouge Computer Traders

6 Oct 2010 -

The automated computer systems that trade stocks at high speed is a disaster waiting to happen. New York Times now has an article about how a 600 point drop of Dow Jones in minutes back in May was the result of these programs.

The mutual fund started a program at about 2:32 p.m. on May 6 to sell $4.1 billion of futures contracts, using a computer sell algorithm that over the next 20 minutes dumped 75,000 contracts onto the market, even automatically accelerating its selling as prices plunged.

I still don’t get how this is legal.

There is a Horse in the Apple Store

7 Sep 2010 -

Lovely piece by Frank Chimero on not noticing the wonders around us

Can horses type? Probably not. But, you know, that clip-clop sound that their hooves make sounds an awful lot like the clip-clop sound my fingers make when I’m writing. I like that sound: it denotes progress. I wish we would still ride horses, because then we could have a sound we associate with progress and getting closer to somewhere we want to be. I didn’t know where I wanted to be, but I was glad I was here. Because there is a horse in the Apple Store.

Color cycling online

2 Aug 2010 -

Color cycling is an effect used widely in games of the 90s to create the illusion of animating backgrounds by changing only the colors used in a single image. The backgrounds for the classic LucasArts games are masterly done using color cycling.

Joe Huckaby has created an HTML5 implementation of color cycling using a few of Mark Ferrari’s fabulous images. Ah, the memories…

Architecture’s Modern Marvels

1 Jul 2010 -

Vanity Fair:

When V.F. asked 52 experts to choose the five most important works of architecture created since 1980, they named a staggering 132 different structures. Here are the top 21, in order of popularity.

Many of these are remarkable from an engineering view as well.

Incredible Technology

1 Jul 2010 -

iFixit has a teardown of the gyroscope inside the new iPhone 4. The images are stunning examples of the remarkable expertise and precision required to build the devices we have come to think of as everyday things. To think it started only 50 years ago with the invention of the transistor…

The Secret Powers of Time

1 Jul 2010 -

Talking at RSA, Philip Zimbardo explains some absolutely amazing correlations between how we perceive time and how we interact with others and the world. Discoveries like this ought to have profound implications on how we structure our society.

There’s a 10 minute animated extract for those with short attention spans :)

Retrofuturism

30 Jun 2010 -

Supercomputer

What would you do if you could travel back in time? Assassinate Marilyn Monroe? Go on a date with Hitler? Obviously. But here’s what I’d do after that: grab all the modern technology I could find, take it to the late 70’s, superficially redesign it all to blend in, start a consumer electronics company to unleash it upon the world, then sit back as I rake in billions, trillions, or even millions of dollars.

Seriously cool!

Sexual Hijacking

30 Jun 2010 -

Interview with Gail Dines about her new book Pornland:

Pornography, like all images, tells stories about the world. It tells stories about women, men, sexuality, and intimacy. In pornography, intimacy is something to be avoided, and—as I say in the book—“In pornography nobody makes love. They all make hate.” The man makes hate to the woman’s body. It’s about the destruction of intimacy.

Tuna's End

30 Jun 2010 -

Paul Greenberg writes for The New York Times about the declining population of Tuna:

But appetites continued to outstrip supply. Global seafood consumption has increased consistently to the point where we now remove more wild fish and shellfish from the oceans every year than the weight of the human population of China.

Tuna then are both a real thing and a metaphor. Literally they are one of the last big public supplies of wild fish left in the world. Metaphorically they are the terminus of an idea: that the ocean is an endless resource where new fish can always be found. In the years to come we can treat tuna as a mile marker to zoom past on our way toward annihilating the wild ocean or as a stop sign that compels us to turn back and radically reconsider.

We seriously need to reconsider what we eat or there will be none.

Why Farmville

30 Jun 2010 -

Astute analysis by A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz of the psychology in Farmville (yet another social game I’ll never play) and why we need time to think:

The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness.[11] We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.

On Sick Systems

29 Jun 2010 -

Everyone should read this. There’s a real risk of finding oneself in a sick relationship or employment at some point in life – or knowing someone who is:

Make sure there’s never quite enough money, or time, or goods, or status, or anything else people might want. Insufficiency makes sick systems self-perpetuating, because if there’s never enough ______ to fix the system, and never enough time to think of a better solution, everyone has to work on all six cylinders just to keep the system from collapsing.

Deepwater Economics

24 Jun 2010 -

On May 2 the investment advisory firm Cumberland commented on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

Three scenarios lie ahead. They rank as bad, worse, and ugliest (the latter being catastrophic and unprecedented). There is no “good” here.

One and a half month later, the oil is still spewing into the ocean and at a much higher rate than previously thought. Up from 600.000 liters to 7-10 million liters every day. That’s 1/3 of Denmark’s daily oil consumption! and Exxon-Valdez every four days

There’s more on popularlogistics.

UPDATE: 60 Minutes recently did a report on a trial in Ecuador against Chevron, claiming they dumped 68 billion liters of toxic oil waste in the Ecuador rainforest. In Nigeria, it’s not news either. I still shocks me to see the extent to which we have no respect for human life and the environment. Our way of life turns us all into horrible parasites.

Electronic Wasteland

24 Jun 2010 -

It’s a two-year old article, but It’s surely as relevant today. In 2008 Engadget linked to two videos by 60 Minutes and CurrentTV about how electronic waste is shipped to China to end up in massive dumps.

IBM is building HAL

17 Jun 2010 -

IBM has spent the last three years building a fantastic question-answering machine called Watson. Much like Deep Blue beat the grandmasters of chess, Watson will attempt at beating the best players of Jeopardy!, a much harder task as it involves complex language parsing and spans enormous knowledge areas. New York Times has a fascinating article on how they approached the challenge and just how far they’ve come:

Ferrucci showed me how Watson handled this sample “Jeopardy!” clue: “He was presidentially pardoned on Sept. 8, 1974.” In the first pass, the algorithms came up with “Nixon.” To evaluate whether “Nixon” was the best response, Watson performed a clever trick: it inserted the answer into the original phrase — “Nixon was presidentially pardoned on Sept. 8, 1974” — and then ran it as a new search, to see if it also produced results that supported “Nixon” as the right answer. (It did. The new search returned the result “Ford pardoned Nixon on Sept. 8, 1974,” a phrasing so similar to the original clue that it helped make “Nixon” the top-ranked solution.)

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