January 2011
5 posts
"Alone Together": An MIT Professor's New Book... →
if you don’t learn how to be alone, you’ll always be lonely, that loneliness is failed solitude. We’re raising a generation that has grown up with constant connection, and only knows how to be lonely when not connected. This capacity for generative solitude is very important for the creative process, but if you grow up thinking it’s your right and due to be tweeted and retweeted, to have thumbs...
The Case of the Vanishing Blonde | Culture |... →
The “system” is the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS). The F.B.I.-administered database now has well over eight million DNA offender profiles. Local, state, and federal law-enforcement officials routinely enter DNA samples recovered from convicts and from the scenes and victims of unsolved crimes, and over the years the system has electronically matched more than 100,000 of them, often reaching...
In Defense of The Memory Theater | Open Letters... →
As I look over my own shelf, I see my life pass before my eyes. The memories grafted onto each volume become stirred and awakened by a glance at the spine, which presents itself to be touched, opened, and explored. Without the bookshelf’s landscape to turn to, that manifest remainder from a lifetime of reading, how would one think?
Streamonomics →
Much is made of Apple’s controlled platform versus Google’s Android openomics. But In actuality Google’s model requires them to keep HTML 5 and H264 open across both platforms in order to preserve the ubiquity of search data and YouTube. Google preserving Flash on its platform buys them allegiance to a desktop model that is being replaced at the very moment as we’re switching to the streaming...
Andrew Womack, Co-Founder of the Morning News,... →
The future of online publishing is currently on hold, interminably delayed by iPad apps. In fact, this should be a very exciting time for anyone who’s not pouring their resources into making an iPad clone of their publication—the playing field is leveling out. The Gourmet Live team got it right, but their goal wasn’t to create a version of a magazine to sell through the iPad—it was to create a...