Squandering bits since 2003

“During rush hour, men have long been barred from a third of the carriages of metro trains. Some see that as offering a blessed sanctuary from wandering macho hands; for others it is a backward step on the march to equality.”

– Gender politics in Mexico City: Pink cabs rev up | The Economist

“I know some people think that blogs are conversations, but I don’t. I think they’re publications. And I think the role of comments is to add value to the posts. If you want to rebut a post, then you can create your own blog and post your rebuttal there”

– Scripting News: Proposal: A new kind of blog comment system

“There is a lot of diversity there, different from its beginning in 2004, where there was a pretty homogenic group of people there (almost like Facebook today). This certainly bother hipsters, fashion kinds and other high-income groups. There is even a neologism: “orkutificação”. In English it would be something as “orkutization”. It’s used as a negative term to refer to this “here comes everybody” feel, in which orkut has become full of “strange” people. Nowadays, there is even people saying that Twitter is becoming “orkutized”, because it is gaining popularity in Brazil and is becoming more diverse as well.”

– danah boyd | apophenia » social divisions between Orkut & Facebook in Brazil

“Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people—you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else.”

– Solitude and Leadership: an article by William Deresiewicz | The American Scholar

The 53rd Annual Punctuation Posse Round-up | PassiveAggressiveNotes.com — funny (if not necessarily “passive-aggressive”) notes from pissed-off people

An In-Depth Look at How People Are Using the iPad

“Once again I’m caught in the radical middle, between the techno-apologists and the paleobibliophiles, where no major-magazine story proposals dare to tread.”

– The Shallow Surplus | HiLobrow

“Please at your earliest convenience produce an SDK that is not reliant upon
JAVA. C, C#, or possibly python pyc would be the most advantageous options.”

– Issue 8420 – android – SDK that does not rely on a jvm – Project Hosting on Google Code

TAKEOURJOBS.ORG

[...] the hideous threat of the Filler of Stockings, who oozes through chimneys and ventilation ducts every Dead God’s Birthday-eve to perform unspeakable acts against items of hosiery.

Architecture’s Modern Marvels | Culture | Vanity Fair

slaughterhouse90210:

“I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly.”
— Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“To encourage this creative process, Dr. Schooler says, it may help if you go jogging, take a walk, do some knitting or just sit around doodling, because relatively undemanding tasks seem to free your mind to wander productively. But you also want to be able to catch yourself at the Eureka moment.”

– Findings – Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind – NYTimes.com

slaughterhouse90210:

“When we don’t know who to hate, we hate ourselves.”
— Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“But an intriguing piece of research published in Psychological Science by Francesca Gino of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, suggests the opposite: wearing fake goods makes you feel a fake yourself, and causes you to be more dishonest in other matters than you would otherwise be.”

– Morality: Rose-coloured spectacles? | The Economist

“In the end, growing a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem is more a cultural than a bureaucratic question: European venture capitalists and entrepreneurs must take more risks; incumbents must realise that buying a start-up is often better than trying to develop new technology in-house; politicians must stop protecting vested interests; and – last but far from least – consumers need to be more adventurous in trying new products and services. Failing all that, innovation – and jobs – will increasingly emerge elsewhere.”

– Innovation in Europe: Ultimately, it’s cultural | The Economist

“Now traffic to two of the most popular blog-hosting sites, Blogger and WordPress, is stagnating, according to Nielsen, a media-research firm. By contrast, Facebook’s traffic grew by 66% last year and Twitter’s by 47%. Growth in advertisements is slowing, too. Blogads, which sells them, says media buyers’ inquiries increased nearly tenfold between 2004 and 2008, but have grown by only 17% since then. Search engines show declining interest, too.”

– The evolving blogosphere: An empire gives way | The Economist

“It’s worth noting that Guido Koch is employed today, despite his youthful experimentation with the forbidden allure of the weekend.”

– “I have noticed that you failed to come into the lab on several weekends” – Boing Boing

“Regular crises perform two functions: They keep people too busy to think, and they provide intermittent reinforcement. After all, sometimes you win—and when you’ve mostly lost, a taste of success is addictive.”

– Issendai’s Superhero Training Journal – How to keep someone with you forever

“Humans are turning the entire planet into an exobrain. Our brains can’t hold all of the data we produce, so we look for ways to offload to books, websites, music, and architecture, to name a few storage devices. And we manipulate the environment to reprogram our brains as needed.”

– Scott Adams Blog: Exobrain 06/23/2010

“California’s legislature is exploring the feasibility of electronic license plates with digital ads, a move that its leading proponent says could add jobs and help in combating the state’s budget crisis. Sen. Curren Price, a Democrat from the Los Angeles area, said the technology will resemble traditional license plates, with plate numbers visible at all times. However, digital ads and public service announcements would flash on the plate’s screen when the vehicle is stopped for more than a few seconds.”

– Electronic license plates to plug budget gaps? – Jun. 21, 2010

“A gift costs the giver something real. It might be cash (enough that we feel the pinch) but more likely it involves a sacrifice or a risk or an emotional exposure. A true gift is a heartfelt connection, something that changes both the giver and the recipient.”

– Seth’s Blog: Gifts, misunderstood

“if we let thinking about one decision crowd out everything else, and think about it long enough without reaching an answer, then eventually we will settle on Solitaire as the best choice”

– Less Wrong: Cached Procrastination

“It is a problem with me. I can’t not use it if it’s there. And, unfortunately, it’s always there. So I returned it. Problem solved.”

– Why I Returned My iPad – Peter Bregman – Harvard Business Review

“Wikileaks wraps encrypted submissions in layers of junk data to obscure their size and origin, then routes them through servers in Sweden (where it is a crime to disclose a source) and Belgium (where a wiretapped conversation with a journalist is inadmissible in court).”

– Wikileaks: Wiki Gaga | The Economist