- Saying Goodbye to Now
- If you are taking a picture of your children, which is to say if you are holding a camera (in the form of a phone) and snapping a picture, then are you, in that moment, looking at them? Or are you anticipating a moment in the future—it is sometimes ten seconds in the future but it could well be ten years—when you will be looking at this very moment?
Interesting Links 2012-12-06
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– December 6, 2012
Interesting Links 2012-12-05
- Why First Round Capital funded a lawsuit
- We needed to send a message to Best Buy – and every other large company – that they can’t blatantly violate agreements and steal ideas from startups. And if big companies believe they can violate agreements with immunity because a startup can’t afford to sue them, it is bad news for every startup in the ecosystem.
- What Disturbs Us Most About the N.Y. Post Subway Death Cover
- Our dumping of a whole mess of anxieties on this photographer and this picture shows that in an increasingly visual culture, while we desperately want to see, we really can’t bear to look.
- This Airplane’s Been Repurposed Into a Classroom
- Gary Chapidze, the headmaster at a school Rustavi, Georgia, found a more creative use for an old Yak-42 airplane. He’s had it repurposed into a “kindergarten where the children would not want to go home.”
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– December 5, 2012
Interesting Links 2012-12-04
- Let’s All Shed Tears For The Crappy Startups That Can’t Raise Any More Money
- The great lie of these last few years is that anyone can be a tech entrepreneur. We have a shortage of students in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math. Every big company in Silicon Valley is starved for talent. And there is an entire generation of young people who, instead of studying those hard subjects, would rather slap together the fourteenth version of a peer-to-peer car sharing service or alternative taxi service. Because it’s easy and you might get rich quick.
- Bath Salts, Orgies, Murder, and Anti-Virus Software
- For 20 years now, we’ve been fed a steady stream of swashbuckling startup wizards who conjured the first quillion on the back of an envelope. When these people flake away from the companies they founded and find themselves cast adrift with infinite checkbooks, expect weird things to happen.
- Shell Gamification
- I want feedback every time I should use an alias. But why do something reasonable when you have the opportunity to do something ridiculous?
- How Mergermania Is Destroying Book Publishing
- The mergers are occurring because book publishing has proved to be less profitable than the conglomerates had hoped. For most of the past two centuries, Western houses averaged a mere 3 percent annual profit. The new owners had hoped to raise the rate closer to 25 percent, to match those of their other holdings: newspapers, magazines and TV stations (even though these depend on advertising). But try as it might, publishing failed to churn out enough bestsellers.
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– December 4, 2012
Interesting Links 2012-12-02
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The future will not be cool
- When asked to imagine the future, we have the tendency to take the present as a baseline, then produce speculative destiny by adding new technologies and products to it.We also represent society according to our utopia of the moment, largely driven by our wishes. But to understand the future, you do not need techno-autistic jargon, and obsession with “killer apps”. You just need some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of “heuristics,” these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival.
- The case for governing by lottery
- It might seem unlikely that a random collection of Americans would be capable of hashing out the minutia of tax policy or figuring out how to reform Medicare. But then again, that may be selling our own judgment short. There is already a place in American life where we count on randomly selected groups of ordinary citizens to decide crucial questions, often highly technical and morally momentous. It’s called the jury system, and so far it has worked out pretty well.
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– December 2, 2012
Interesting Links 2012-12-01
- Why email is and must remain private
- The expectation that private communication will be monitored will damage trust between individuals, making it harder to form relationships and exchange ideas. Email, the most intimate form of online communication, should be considered private by default and legal rights to privacy must be strengthened. The self-censored life is not worth living.
- 6 Ideas Every City Should Steal From Barcelona
- Spain may be facing significant economic and political challenges these days, but Barcelona’s city-building remains one of the best models in the world.
- The Bookstore Strikes Back
- Changing the course of the corporate world is possible. Amazon doesn’t get to make all the decisions; the people can make them, by choosing how and where they spend their money. If what a bookstore offers matters to you, then shop at a bookstore. If you feel that the experience of reading a book is valuable, then read a book. This is how we change the world: We grab hold of it. We change ourselves.
- To eat or be eaten?
- When I look at the software world, I get bored fairly quickly.In the past 20 years, haven’t we gained more than the ability to use sophisticated JavaScript to display ads based on a real-time prediction of the user’s next purchase? When I look at what excites me, I see a much bigger world than just software.
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– December 1, 2012
Interesting Links 2012-11-30
- Charter 12: Estonia’s stab at direct democracy
- Charter 12 has by now set in motion a consultative process which could shortly see the country adopt at least two important pieces of crowdsourced legislation. [Don’t skip the comments!]
- Steve Coogan: We’ve been betrayed by David Cameron
- Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre is the embodiment of Fleet Street bullying, using his newspaper to peddle his Little-England, curtain-twitching Alan Partridgesque view of the world, which manages to combine sanctimonious, pompous moralising and prurient, voyeuristic, judgmental obsession, like a Victorian father masturbating secretly in his bedroom. This is the side of the press Cameron has sided with.
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– November 30, 2012
Interesting Links 2012-11-27
- Former OED editor covertly deleted thousands of words
- An eminent former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary covertly deleted thousands of words because of their foreign origins and bizarrely blamed previous editors
- Can You Save Diplomacy From Itself?
- Carne Ross, more than anyone, appreciated that with his ruse he had not only destroyed a taboo, but established a new way of doing diplomacy: Independent Diplomat was born. Forget the old-style diplomacy. In its place he would establish a transparent, inclusive, unpretentious service that would help the marginalized to the decision-making table.
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– November 27, 2012
Interesting Links 2012-11-16
- When the Nerds Go Marching In
- How a dream team of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google built the software that drove Barack Obama’s reelection.
- You Can’t Say That on the Internet
- A bastion of openness and counterculture, Silicon Valley imagines itself as the un-Chick-fil-A. But its hyper-tolerant facade often masks deeply conservative, outdated norms that digital culture discreetly imposes on billions of technology users worldwide.
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– November 16, 2012
Interesting Links 2012-11-13
- The Aha! Moments That Made Paul Graham’s Y Combinator Possible
- What really makes successful entrepreneurs is not the nature of their idea, or the university they went to, but their actual character — their willingness to adapt their idea and take advantage of possibilities they had not first imagined. This is precisely the trait — fluidity of mind — that Graham had identified in himself and in other inventors. The other essential character trait was supreme tenacity.
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– November 13, 2012
Interesting Links 2012-11-12
- Arrested for poppy burning? Beware the tyranny of decency
- It should go without saying that throughout history, there has rarely been an opinion of value that didn’t cause outrage and offence to many. The truth it is not really the message, not the image, not the words that are being punished in any of these cases, but rather a refusal to conform to a tabloid-esque, lowest common denominator of decency. The new tyranny has less in common with Stalin or Mussolini than with the grassroots fundamentalism, puritanism and vigilantism of the Taliban, transposed to a hi-tech, secular, networked, postmodern society.
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– November 12, 2012
