remarkable: April 2010

Efficiency implies rapid progress toward a known goal. For many
self-trackers, the goal is unknown.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.xml

--
Sent from my mobile device

Another person I'm friendly with, Mark Carranza - he also makes his
living with computers - has been keeping a detailed, searchable
archive of all the ideas he has had since he was 21. That was in 1984.
I realize that this seems impossible. But I have seen his archive,
with its million plus entries, and observed him using it. He navigates
smoothly between an interaction with somebody in the present moment
and his digital record, bringing in associations to conversations that
took place years earlier. Most thoughts are tagged with date, time and
location. What for other people is an inchoate flow of mental life is
broken up into elements and cross-referenced.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.xml

--
Sent from my mobile device

"When I went to work for Random House, ten editors ran it," he said.
"We had a sales manager and sales reps. We had a bookkeeper and a
publicist and a president. It was hugely successful. We didn't need
eighteen layers of executives. Digitization makes that possible again,
and inevitable."

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/26/100426fa_fact_auletta?currentPage=4

--
Sent from my mobile device

Publishing exists in a continual state of forecasting its own demise;
at one major house, there is a running joke that the second book
published on the Gutenberg press was about the death of the publishing
business.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/26/100426fa_fact_auletta?currentPage=2

--
Sent from my mobile device

Fantasy User Interfaces

An Italian singer wrote this song with gibberish to sound like English. If you've ever wondered what other people think Americans sound like, this is it.

In other words, before we decide whether or not to make a big
purchase, or take out a mortgage, or make a donation to a 401(k), or
contemplate a policy devoted to climate change, we should spend a few
minutes thinking about what we're doing tomorrow.

http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/04/thinking_about_tomorrow.php

--
Sent from my mobile device

"There is no problem with the climate," except that Greenpeace is
"about to impose a communist world government on the world" and "you
have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of
view." Warming is an excuse invented so that Obama can "sign your
freedom, your democracy and your prosperity away forever," and give it
all to "third world countries."

That's the intellectual caliber of the most celebrated denialist.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100503/hari

--
Sent from my mobile device

Passive Aggressive Library Signs

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/passive-aggressive-library-signs

--
Sent from my mobile device

Indeed, soon enough the polarity would be reversed, and the creation
of a new class of drugs would lead to the creation of a new
psychiatric "disease" to match, just one of the factors that prompted
successive editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders to proliferate pages and disorders, like the Yellow Pages on
steroids.

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673610605326/fulltext?rss=yes

--
Sent from my mobile device