This site lets you play a giant collaborative game in trying to imagine the impact of hypothetical scenarios. This site is sort of similar, but different. This is the presentation that pointed me toward these interesting things. This one allows you to help imagine what a world in the early throes of an oil shortage [...]
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So I was hacking around and I found the source code to myself. As it turns out I’m written in Lisp, which is good in most ways but bad because I can’t interface with other libraries and because most people can’t understand me. Still, I figured I’d share a few things I’ve learned. This function, [...]
I am lame for reblogging, but these kottke items are too salient not to share. This one is a question I’ve been wondering about forever, but never thought to ask in a context where anybody might try to really answer it. This reminds me of something Eric Taipale said to me about fifteen years ago: [...]
Great Gladwell article up over at The New Yorker about David vs. Goliath. Gladwell articles follow a particular pattern that goes like this: Example A: (The pressing basketball team as David) Thesis: (David can’t fight Goliath by his own rules) Example B: (Lawrence of Arabia as David) Thesis elaboration Example A cont: (History of basketball [...]
You would be hard-pressed to find a more inflammatory topic than intelligence, one more mixed up with ethics, morality, public policy, and strong opinion. Like most stuff that involves politics and strong opinion, the loudest voices are often the ones who know the least about the topic. The ‘discussion’ surrounding evolution is another fine example [...]
I just read this post on laughing linked on BoingBoing. And I was gonna let it go, with nothing more than a “Huh. Interesting, but sort of obvious.” But then I got to thinking how this idea is actually way more important than it seems. Way more important to my own life, especially now, but [...]
Goddamnit. Electric cars have been getting a lot of buzz lately, but a more immediately viable transportation fuel of the future could be liquid derived from coal. Scientists have devised a new way to transform coal into gas for your car using far less energy than the current process. The advance makes scaling up [...]
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
This blog post, from internet-social-research person danah boyd, probably won’t interest you, in and of itself. She’s talking about a study she co-authored on the ‘dangers of the internet’ to children: For the our Task Force Report, I helped create a Research Advisory Board Literature Review where, along with the tremendous help of Andrew Schrock, [...]
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Some famous literary editor once said that he was only interested in buying (as in, greenlighting for publication) books about (I’m paraphrasing, despite the quotes) “people being alone and depressed in cities.” Presumably this is because publishers generally live in New York and generally publish what they think people want, and what people want is [...]
Thursday, October 23, 2008
I’m back from NYC and you know what I saw a lot of? People who had merged with machines. Yes, a few of these were freaky cyborgs, like cars with human heads, or cats with little computers embedded in their brains and controlled remotely by their human owners. Vastly outnumbering these folks, though, were more-or-less [...]