January 2010
40 posts
The Menace of Something-or-other
JP Sousa, 1906:
I foresee a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue — or rather by vice — of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines.
Alex Payne, 2010:
The thing that bothers me most about the iPad...
“If HP or Lenovo or Asus release a machine and it doesn’t match a specific...”
– Stilgherrian, commenting on his piece “It’s called iPad, and the Kindle is rooted at Crikey.
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On bestsellers →
Keep this in mind when Apple release the Jesus Tablet tomorrow.
Under pressure from both their parent companies and booksellers, publishers became less and less willing to gamble on undiscovered talent and more inclined to hoard their resources for their most bankable authors. The effect was self-fulfilling. The few books that publishers invested heavily in sold; most of the rest didn’t. And...
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US School District Bans Dictionary →
In a move which has angered editors at The Onion, a US school district has banned the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
A spokesperson for The Onion said, “How are we supposed to have any credibility as the nation’s premier parody news source when real news defies parody? This has to stop.”
Menifee Union school district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus said, “It’s hard to sit...
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I don’t pay a great deal of attention to the tech blogs, so I don’t know if this has been put out there, but I’m going to guess that in addition to the Tablet, Apple will discontinue iTunes in favour of something else. Maybe “The Apple Store”. There won’t be separate iTunes and other content stores. It’ll all be available from the one place.
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Since when did dumb-arsed nationalism become... →
rocketpilot quoted John Birmingham:
I don’t mind getting ruinously drunk. I don’t mind the odd cockroach race. And I love a barbecue, especially if there’s ruinously drunken cockroach racing involved. But one of the things I really like about Australia, or I used to anyway, was our quiet reluctance to wave the flag in everyone’s face; a reluctance which has gradually given way to an uglier,...
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Teachings and Learnings
Have you noticed that people use the word learnings these days? They use it to mean lessons, or things that I/we learned. This annoys me. Pointing it out to others annoys them.
I’m happy for language to move on. I google; I tweet; two things that I couldn’t do when I was in high-school. But why do people say learnings when there are other words for the same thing? I’m no...
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“It’s interesting to note how corporations get to pick and choose the good parts...”
– Max Barry riffs on the recent US Supreme Court decision. (Max Barry | The Lawnmower People)
“Let’s say that you are captivated by the story of the watch. So you read the...”
– Jack Baruth: What we talk about when we talk about soul. (via Instapaper)
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“This is, without doubt, the stupidest thing I have ever seen happen on a...”
– Seth Stevenson in Slate, on why the US remake of the great UK show Life on Mars failed.
dbreunig:
I still think the biggest hint to the function of the tablet is hidden in plain sight: iTunes LP.
Clean HTML interfaces with access to local and networked media. It can make books, magazines, and newspapers sing. It can take entire back catalogues from very medium and contextualize them for touch computing.
You heard it there ⇧ first kids.
Not so sure about Ambient Awareness
Pattie Maes, last year, from MIT’s Media Lab:
Today’s hardware devices, the iPhone as well, they all assume that you completely shift your attention to the device if you want to access some information. You have to basically completely drop what you are in the middle of and redirect your attention to the screen and use a pointing device, whether it’s the mouse or your own fingers, and...
“Reading through these wealthy, powerful people’s glib statements on...”
– Nicholas Carr, Other people’s privacy.
(via ReadWriteWeb, via Colvinius)
Watchputthison:
Michael Alden demonstrates how a hat should be worn.
Damn straight.
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It's a thing (iii)
State: Winding down after the weekend. Weekends are, in many ways, busier than weekdays.
See: Derek Kreindler’s great blog about cars, Rich Corinthian Leather.
Hear: Everyone needs some James Brown in their lives. You know where YouTube is; I’m sure you can figure it out.
Idea: Back in the day, Lotus Cars would sell you your new Seven in kit form for you to assemble yourself. In...
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It's a thing (ii)
State: Productive. Is reading research papers productive? It looks like procrastinating but it’s directly related to work. Who decides these things?
See: Amazing photos at The Big Picture from the Dakar rally.
Hear: Future Reference, by Rhombus. E.g. Together.
Idea: One of the ideas, I hesitate to call it a meme, though that is also appropriate, that keeps cropping up in my work is...
Dream come true
Dr. Pryor: Here's your scientifically selected career.
Janey: Architect.
Kid: Insurance salesman,
Ralph: Salmon gutter?
Milhouse: Military strongman.
Martin (whispers, chanting, fingers crossed): Systems analyst! Systems analyst!
Dr. Pryor: Systems analyst.
Martin: All right!
“when Zuckerberg says social norm he means business value, and when he says...”
– Davey Winder in iTWire, A primer on privacy for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Let’s try that with the text of Zuckerberg’s interview where he spoke every-so-briefly about the privacy changes with Michael Arrington:
(some formatting here is not visible in the dashboard)
...
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It's a thingg
State: Procrastinating over my DRS2010 paper on stethoscopes, sort of. That is, the paper is sort of about stethoscopes, not that I’m sort of procrastinating. I’m well and truly procrastinating.
See: An Affordable Wardrobe.
Hear: Everybody Digs Bill Evans. Except, well, you know who.
Idea: Privacy and openness aren’t opposites or even a continuum. There’s something...
Translation from PR Speak to English of Head of GM...
“The exact G8 car coming back – I don’t know that we’d do that because we would get crucified for not having some of the uniqueness for another brand designed into that car that we did for Pontiac and we designed a lot into that car for Pontiac”
We won’t bring the G8 back because we were embarrassed about bringing in a car from Australia so we buried it in an unfocussed brand and we...
“They’re not writing songs about cars anymore.”
– J Mays, chief designer at Ford. (via Drew Smith, via Esquire)
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I'm going to bear witness
Word comes from my friend Simon that there’s going to be a Save Saab Convoy next Sunday. It comes with the offer to cruise around in Simon’s quite lovely 1978 Saab 99 Turbo, so naturally I’m in.
Unlike some cities around the world, there’s no GM headquarters to drive to, in a show of numbers, or even a Saab office to visit in solidarity. Instead, we’re meeting at...
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“Of course, at this point, nothing is going to stop the General from doing what...”
– This is the best article on Saab’s imminent demise I’ve read. Equal parts angry at GM and accepting of the inevitability of the end of the company. And it’s by The Mountain Goat’s guitarist no less. (Firebird Man: Report from Detroit: We Bear Witness)
Educating the Blob →
Then we went on the tube in London and I had to tie the blob to my suitcase. I felt a bit like it was a guest I had to take care of and explain where we were going. I guess it hasn’t been to London before.
Lucy Kimbell was given a blob by Dutch artist Yvonne Droge Wendel. She had to look after it. Educating the Blob is a diary blog of that experience.
“A gentleman of higher rank and more far-reaching responsibilities would probably...”
– Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age.
Hackworth doesn’t get a proper newspaper, but he does get some of his news from a feed shared with others in the phyle.
(via Blog all kindle-clipped… umm… LOCATIONS!: The Diamond Age. « Magical Nihilism)
I dislike airports ...
squashed:
… for the same reasons I dislike police states. No liquids. No powders. No acting weird. No objection to random searches. No putting blankets on your lap. What’s the obsession with security? Once you’ve strengthened cockpit doors so planes can no longer be used as missiles, what separates them from any other potentially crowded area? Why the excess screening? The reason there are few...
“Cars that drive themselves were invented ages ago, they’re called Taxis”
– James May (via micofeliciano) (via tractioninc)
Mobile-phone culture: The Apparatgeist calls →
I can’t decide if this article from the Economist is annoying or terrible. It’s certainly terribly annoying. Perhaps it’s annoyingly terrible.
On the other hand, new word: Apparatgeist “spirit of the machine”.
December 2009
41 posts
1 tag
Resolution
I resolve, as I do every year, not to make any resolutions.