Joakim Nygård Archive Linked About

We're All Bastards

7 May 2010 -

New Scientist on palaeogeneticist Svante Pääbo’s discovery:

Any human whose ancestral group developed outside Africa has a little Neanderthal in them – between 1 and 4 per cent of their genome, Pääbo’s team estimates. In other words, humans and Neanderthals had sex and had hybrid offspring. A small amount of that genetic mingling survives in “non-Africans” today: Neanderthals didn’t live in Africa, which is why sub-Saharan African populations have no trace of Neanderthal DNA.

Remarkable!

The Oldest Living Life

16 Apr 2010 -

Photographer Rachel Sussman has been taking photographs of some of the oldest life on earth and the results are some remarkable images. Wired has more images

Designing for iPad

14 Apr 2010 -

A great rundown of some of the challenges designing iPad apps by informationarchitects.jp

Water covered insects

31 Mar 2010 -

Fantastic photographs of insects covered in dew.

International Space Station Expansion

23 Mar 2010 -

Flash animation by USA Today showing how much has been added to the ISS since 1998

Cloudhead

19 Mar 2010 -

David Pell, internet addict and early adopter by his own admission, on how the realtime, social web is effecting us:

And the stream [of updates] creates information equality where it shouldn’t exist. I post happy birthday messages to people I hardly know and then forget Norman’s altogether. When my brain was in charge, it used to make these kinds of value judgments. The stream doesn’t. It just runs and runs.

It must be valuable

1 Mar 2010 -

Mindblowing talk by Jesse Schell from Carnegie Mellon University on the future of games and how they will be everywhere. Immensely packed with insights, it is a must watch.

The Google Algorithm

1 Mar 2010 -

Wired’s Steven Levy on Google search:

Every time engineers want to test a tweak, they run the new algorithm on a tiny percentage of random users, letting the rest of the site’s searchers serve as a massive control group. There are so many changes to measure that Google has discarded the traditional scientific nostrum that only one experiment should be conducted at a time. “On most Google queries, you’re actually in multiple control or experimental groups simultaneously,” says search quality engineer Patrick Riley. Then he corrects himself. “Essentially,” he says, “all the queries are involved in some test.” In other words, just about every time you search on Google, you’re a lab rat.

Homo empathicus

20 Feb 2010 -

New Scientist interview with Jeremy Rifkin on a new model for society based the fact that the human species is social to the core.

A lot of business people would say that you can’t be empathic in the market. But the market is a secondary institution–it’s an extension of culture. The real invisible hand of the market is trust, which is the result of empathic engagement. The only way you can have a market is if you have a shared narrative. The market is not a utilitarian frame of reference, it only exists by the social trust that allows people to engage in anonymous settings and believe that their engagements will be honored. When that trust fails, markets collapse and that’s what is happening now.

Shock full of thought provoking remarks, it’s well worth a read

Brute force

17 Feb 2010 -

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves. – Alan Kay

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