Jan 29 2012
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Jan 28 2012
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An interview with William Gibson
It requires quite a bit of imaginative effort on my part to get a sense of what that must be like. But today’s strangeness, while only a few mouse-clicks away from anyone, becomes difficult to find because it has to occur to you to Google it. You may be able to Google everything, but the trick is figuring what you need to Google. Given the near-infinite amount of stuff out there, there’s a huge mass of the overall content that none of us will ever see. You could spend your entire lifetime trying to look through all that stuff. It isn’t as though there’s no less-trod path. It’s simply a matter of figuring out where it is. There are an infinite number of universes of stuff that you can access, but most of us will never see that much of it. So I think people can still find genuinely strange things that no one else they know has ever considered.
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How Much Do Music and Movie Piracy Really Hurt the U.S. Economy?
Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman of Freakonomics discuss the claims that piracy leads to $250 billion a year in loses and 750,000 American jobs lost:
The good news is that the numbers are wrong — as this post by the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez explains. In 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology,” which is polite government-speak for “these figures were made up out of thin air.”
And:
So what’s the real number? At this point, we simply don’t know. And this leads us to a second problem: one which is not so much about data, as about actual economic effects. There are certainly a lot of people who download music and movies without paying. It’s clear that, at least in some cases, piracy substitutes for a legitimate transaction — for example, a person who would have bought the DVD of the new Kate Beckinsale vampire film (who is that, actually?) but instead downloads it for free on Bit Torrent. In other cases, the person pirating the movie or song would never have bought it. This is especially true if the consumer lives in a relatively poor country, like China, and is simply unable to afford to pay for the films and music he downloads.
Do we count this latter category of downloads as “lost sales”? Not if we’re honest.
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Who Needs A Menu Button Anymore?
5 Ways That Android Is Trying To Break The Mobile UI Paradigm
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Real Time Farms tells you exactly where your food came from | Grist
Real Time Farms is a “crowd-sourced online food guide” that tells you exactly where the meal on your plate came from.
As crazy as it sounds, our vision is to collectively document the whole food system.
That does sound crazy, but so does the notion that a bunch of volunteers would build the most comprehensive and frequently updated encyclopedia in human history. And that one seems to have worked out okay.
Real Time Farms is in its early days, so only a tiny fraction of restaurants, farmers markets, and their fans have imported data on where ingredients are sourced. It feels like the kind of thing that will require a really big technological solution at some point in the future, like DNA barcoding of food or super cheap RFID tracking of crops from field to fork. Or maybe just more of us moving to Portland.
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“ Fuck them is what I say. I hate those e-books. They cannot be the future. They may well be. I will be dead. I won’t give a shit.
— Renowned children’s book author MAURICE SENDAK, telling us how he really feels, on The Colbert Report. (via inothernews)
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When Poland signed the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement yesterday, lawmakers from the left-wing Palikot’s Movement showed their dissatisfaction in an unusual way: by donning the Guy Fawkes masks popularized by the group Anonymous.
via The Verge
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In Charleston, I spent a lot of late nights playing on the many fantastic playgrounds that small town has to offer. It was an idyllic college environment: riding our bikes to different playgrounds, sitting on top of the dugouts sharing secrets, getting motion-sick at the physics playground at 3am, looking out over the water from the top of the dragon at Brittlebank. Those playground adventures are some of the memories I cherish most about that town, particularly now that I live in a big city where it is both unsafe to be on a playground at night and also illegal to be on a playground without a child. So today, when one of my fellow Charleston playgrounders sent me this page of vintage playgrounds, I was flooded with nostalgia and happy memories.
Thanks, Jess.
Also, there’s a ROBOT PLAYGROUND.
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At first glance, this recipe for Bacon, Ranch & Chicken Mac&Cheese looks like a heart attack in a bowl. But wait! Look closer! It’s made by @Cooking_Light, so you know it’s yummy AND good for you! YAY!
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