May 2012
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“— You’ll obviously be remembered as the person who put the @ symbol in email....”
– Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of email: ‘I see email being used, by and large, exactly the way I envisioned’ (on The Verge)
April 2012
7 posts
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“At police headquarters, he admitted that he was Frédéric Bourdin, and that in...”
– This story of Frédéric Bourdin leaves me incredulous. He seems to be able to be everything but himself.
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“I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and...”
– Barack Obama
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March 2012
10 posts
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“When guards pulled away the box, she jerked about desperately. As he watched his...”
– The Guardian’s extract of a book about one man’s escape from the horrible living conditions in a North Korean prison camp is a somber read. It goes to show how far we as humans are ready to go to get that little bit of extra food under such harsh circumstances – and how far guards and a...
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“What happened when one of the world’s most unusual, and beloved, computer...”
– Annie Lowrey’s Slate article about the fabled programmer-artist _why is worth a read, even just for a good look at the quirky world that is the Ruby community – and for those who don’t know, what programming languages actually are. Via @waxpancake.
Matt Langer: Stop Calling it Curation →
langer:
If people want to be celebrated for being smart or for having exceptional taste that’s all fine and good, everyone can go right on congratulating one another in their little mutual admiration societies. But please spare the rest of us all this moralizing on why we should be giving people who share links anywhere near the same amount of credit we afford that singularly special act of...
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“It’s not where you take things from, it’s where you take them to.”
– Jean-Luc Godard, via Kai Bernau
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“Six months before this thing got going, every Republican I know was saying,...”
– Great article about the 2012 GOP primaries and the party’s unsure future in the New York Magazine.
Via @halbluchs
February 2012
12 posts
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“I realise that in pointing out that advertising is fundamentally shit, I’m not...”
– Adactio: Journal—Getting ahead in advertising (via soxiam)
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“The Whitney is proud to be able to redistribute resources from major corporate...”
– The Whitney Biennial releases a frank statement denouncing two of their past sponsors, announcing their break with Sotheby’s and Deutsche Bank.
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Can Monkeys Understand Money?
Keith Chen, a Yale economist, and Laurie Santos, a psychologist, are studying the effects of introducing capuchin monkeys to money. A nice article from the Freakonomics series by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt. I’m always very apprehensive about animal testing, but this seems like one of the more useful things you could do.
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Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital...
John Naughton’s article The true fathers of computing contains a short summary of the alternative history of computer as put forth by George Dyson in his new book, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. Following that there’s an interview with George Dyson about many details. Anyone who’s interested in this will probably also like George Dyson’s TED...
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“Personally, I’m a minimalist: I value content more highly than aesthetics.”
– By thoughtyoushouldseethis:
In Graphic Designers Are Ruining The Web, Observer writer John Naughton outlines his dismay that so many webpages have turned into so much bloat (over the last decade, the size of web pages has more than septupled.) He has a point, and designers and developers certainly...
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“Our firm’s reputation for providing quality service reflects the high...”
– This exact sentence in a Google search leads to 2,270 results. And all of them are accountants—so much for being different and high standards. They’re all using websites created using cpasitesolutions dot com (I really don’t want to link to them and give them more Google juice).
This is...
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An Insanely Comprehensive Primer on China's...
I warned you: it takes a while to read through. But it teaches you everything you ever needed to know about China’s political system and the upcoming 2012 leadership transition.
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January 2012
19 posts
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WatchUrbanized is the new documentary by Gary Hustwit of Helvetica and Objectified fame and the last part of his Design Trilogy. Urbanized takes a closer look at how cities and urban communities work; how they become stale, decay, make people miserable; how they grow, excite, make people’s life amazing.
Watch the trailer above. You can also directly buy the streamed version above for $6.99 – the...
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How Hollywood Fucked Up SOPA
The Hollywood Reporter offers an interesting inside view into the industry’s fight for new anti-piracy legislation that was ultimately doomed because it went way too far, posed unacceptable risks for the internet, and was pushed through committee by people with absolutely no idea about how the internet works – technically or socially.
Talking of the White House’s repudiation of...
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Gadgets And Global Supply Chains
Good New York Times article about a squeezed American middle-class and the realities of a global manufacturing landscape, using Apple’s iPhone as the prime example.
Foxconn Technology assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics. “They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined...
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Do you like the taste of beer?
Or: Will you have sex with me on the first date?
The dating site OkCupid has long been known for great data-driven blog posts about dating-related topics, and The Best Questions For A First Date from a year ago is no exception – and worth a revisit. It goes to show that perceived correlation is very often wrong. It’s not the common importance of God, sex, and a shared disgust about smokers...
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“SIR – Thanks for the story nine years ago on the benefits of office clutter (“In...”
– A letter from Australia. (via theeconomist)
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“The waitress comes by, hands me the bill, and glances with contempt at Layla....”
– Shalom Auslander has written an interesting introspective read for GQ, My Hard-Core Obsession, about how everybody has their own private porn fantasies, but looks down on those with fantasies that one deems disgusting.
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LOLCODE
The internet – and the amount of time put into asinine, useless, amazing ideas – never ceases to amaze me. This time: LOLCODE, a programming language inspired by the LOLCATS meme language.
HAI CAN HAS STDIO? VISIBLE “HAI WORLD!” KTHXBYE
or
HAI CAN HAS STDIO? PLZ OPEN FILE “LOLCATS.TXT”? AWSUM THX VISIBLE FILE O NOES INVISIBLE...
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