November 2008
Pong with Windows →
Not on Windows, with windows. Horrible and awesome. Make sure to turn off any pop-up blockers before trying.
Jimmy Wales on the Failure of Nupedia →
I knew there was a precursor to Wikipedia, but until I read this blog post, I didn’t know how bad the state of affairs really was:
Before Wikipedia there was Nupedia, where the articles had to be written by experts and peer-reviewed. After three years, Nupedia had produced a grand total of 24 articles. Then a tiny, experimental adjunct to Nupedia—a wiki-based peanut gallery where anyone...
Your First Website
Jason Santa Maria shares his first website and encourages others to do the same (via.) This sounds like a great idea. Let’s laugh about our first attempts — or, if you’re making your first attempt yourself, have a look at how horrible the first designs of great designers were, or how petty and uninteresting great bloggers have been — and consider how far we’ve come.
...
Confirming Suspicions
The MacArthur Foundation has funded a large study on how youth engage, live and learn with digital media, and the results are here. I’ve read the summary (it’s only two pages) and read/skimmed the white paper (it’s longer), and the findings seem to confirm a bunch of suspicions many of us have had for some time:
The majority of young people primarily use new media to extend...
Slate In Brief →
95 percent less verbiage. Whoever is doing this: good idea.
Why Not Eat an Eclair? →
Why vote when the result would likely be the same if you did not? Because the threshold is there, even if no single vote will reach over it, just like no single eclair will make you fat, but that doesn’t mean it’s rational to eat one every day, thinking that this one won’t be the one that makes you fat, so why not? At least, that’s what David Runciman thinks, reviewing Free...
Windhammer by Rob Weychert →
Rob Weychert describes his experience in the Philadelphia Air Guitar Championship — apparently there is such a thing — in Fray’s Geek issue:
My body was stolidly walked onto the stage by its new occupant. To say he was confident would falsely suggest that failure was even a possibility. His stare pierced every eyeball in the house, and those who managed to avoid it directly were...
angrigami →
Ze Frank made art out of hate mail. Fold up some anger. Brilliant. (via.)
How To (really) Trust A Mathematical Proof →
Science News on proof assistants (one is called Coq).
LIFE photo archive hosted by Google →
YES. I was waiting for life.com to update, but no more. Google Blog:
Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos.
This is an absolute goldmine. (via.)
Blogging Like a Hacker →
Jekyll and Trivium are two new, simple blogging engines that bake content. In many ways very attractive, especially for a tumblelog that is essentially a (frequently updated) static site. Everything is stored in flat files, you edit posts in your favorite text editor, and then you bake and mirror them to your web server. But could you combine that with the convenience of a bookmarklet?
Can Crowdfunding Help Save the Journalism... →
(Thanks for the link, Simon — though I don’t agree with this ad hominem.)
Update: N. Ortalo: “I think everyone should give it a read with crowdsurfing in mind.” Absolutely.
“When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they...”
– Robert Frank.
Give Up and Use Tables →
Love the use of <sarcasm> in the code. (via azspot.)
Disappearing Shanghai →
Some contrast to this.
The New York Times — Saturday, July 4th, 2009 →
Similar to utopian Google News, this is the online version of an elaborate prank version of the NY Times, dated July 4, 2009, which announces that the Iraq war ends, the Patriot act is repealed, a “maximum wage law” has passed, and more. Ap writes that “about 1.2 million copies of a 14-page Times parody were handed out by 1,000 volunteers on behalf of prankster activists who say...
ShareSomeCandy →
A collection of eye candy. (via.)
They will be filming the pilot episode of A Game... →
Whoa. I’d rather see A Dance with Dragons finished, but this sounds pretty awesome, too. (via.)
HIPSTER OR GAY →
Hipster? Gay? Is there a difference? Does it matter?
There, there, Ron →
Jeff Jarvis thinks the decline of old media and traditional journalism is the fault of old media and traditional journalists, for not embracing new technology and being out of touch with their market. Ron Rosenbaum is angry that Jarvis won’t let journalists have their precious victim role. Jarvis responds:
Whether we save all the journalists today is entirely another matter and not my goal....
Tab Bankruptcy
I just closed a window with 20+ open tabs, some of which I opened and started reading several days ago.
I didn’t experience a zen moment. I didn’t plunge into a deep flow. In fact, I just opened a new tab to find “flow” on wikipedia. I want my window back.
Stanislav Petrov →
Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov (born c. 1939) is a retired Russian Soviet Air Defence Forces lieutenant colonel who, according to several sources, averted a nuclear war on September 26, 1983, when he deviated from standard Soviet doctrine by positively identifying a missile attack warning as a false alarm. This decision, according to several sources, was a major factor in preventing an accidental...
Hiroshima: The Lost Photographs
→
An excellent article tracing a collection of rare, clinical photos documenting Hiroshima. (via.)
It’s tempting to see the fate of these photographs as something close to metaphor. Twice abandoned, twice rescued; the photographs, like Hiroshima itself, is a subject we would prefer to discard but can’t. As one of the concluding acts of the last “good war” the atomic bombing of Hiroshima initiated a...
389 years ago… →
Inspired by the genuine progress of this country, I created this typographic mashup of the history of slavery, racism, and the progress of African Americans.
Wonderful. In more ways than one. (via.)
“I want to give my kids just enough so that they would feel that they could do...”
– Warren Buffet. (via.)
Natural Law and Moral Fallacies
I have an interest in ethics and metaethics, so it pains me to see fallacious ethical reasoning, especially so when it is employed to defend hateful laws and customs. Via Tal Atlas I found this, and far from a “fabulously eloquent statement on human rights”, it’s a wrong-headed and bigoted statement. Sds quotes and concurs with Adrian:
The American Revolution was different from...