World Airmail Links

"Residents of Rio’s favelas are more likely to have computers and microwaves than the city’s middle..."

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:38:52 -0500

“Residents of Rio’s favelas are more likely to have computers and microwaves than the city’s middle classes.”

- Sidebar from How slumns can save the planet, citing Janice Perlman (main article by Stuart Brand)

"Newspapers locking up their content in paywalls and trumpeting loudly against Google might be..."

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:37:54 -0500

“Newspapers locking up their content in paywalls and trumpeting loudly against Google might be effective if Google were merely a predator. But this is the Internet, where copies are free, everyone could be a customer, your competitors are just a click away, and customer loyalty isn’t merely a consequence of geography. To treat the Internet merely as just another competitor is to miss the point that it’s a new medium which favours some business models and hurts others.”

- Nat Torkington, Newspaper Paywalls

"By their very nature, cameras result in underused and misallocated police resources."

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:36:52 -0500

“By their very nature, cameras result in underused and misallocated police resources.”

- Bruce Schneier, Spy cameras won’t make us safer

"SCM choice is a shibboleth."

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:34:51 -0500

“SCM choice is a shibboleth.”

- Jesse Vincent, on choice of source code management system

"Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident in their abilities. But there’s evidence that..."

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:33:53 -0500

“Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident in their abilities. But there’s evidence that those people are actually worse at multitasking than most people.”

- Clifford I. Nass, psychology professor, Stanford University, quoted in Scholars Turn Their Attention to Attention [via James]

"Conventional parking policy counsels providing enough spots to handle car storage on the 30th..."

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:30:52 -0500

“Conventional parking policy counsels providing enough spots to handle car storage on the 30th busiest hour of the entire year, usually the weekend before Christmas. That means intentionally planning for an oversupply of parking the other 8,730 hours of the year.”

- from Streetsblog’s Fun Facts About the Sad State of Parking Policy, culled from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy U.S. Parking Policies report [PDF]

World map with north at the bottom, south at the top [via...

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:48:07 -0500

World map with north at the bottom, south at the top [via Reddit]

"Reporting" via Google Trends

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 09:57:56 -0500

"Reporting" via Google Trends:

Rogers Cadenhead: “There are a lot of online news sites and blogs that use Google Trends as their assignment desk, churning out poorly researched stories quickly to capitalize on a hot news search term.”

"People who aren’t accustomed to having a lot of ideas of their own have a very poor grasp of the..."

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 09:56:53 -0500

“People who aren’t accustomed to having a lot of ideas of their own have a very poor grasp of the odds that others might independently come up with the same ideas.”

- Teresa Neilsen Hayden, Rowling’s being sued for plagiarism again [via Boing Boing]

"We have all benefited from the extraordinary innovation delivered first by the independent software..."

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:55:52 -0500

“We have all benefited from the extraordinary innovation delivered first by the independent software industry and more recently by the web services industry. In both cases, this innovation was a direct result of the ability to innovate without permission.”

- Brad Burnham, Software patents are the problem not the answer [via Stephen Johnson]

"Any use of legislation or technology that tries to control what people can do with digital media..."

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:55:51 -0500

“Any use of legislation or technology that tries to control what people can do with digital media objects, once they’ve been transmitted, is broken. Also any business model that relies on such control.”

- Tim Bray, Let Your Data Go

"Trust me: If you talk to an unemployed, uninsured mother of two in Greenville, she’ll tell you..."

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:54:54 -0500

“Trust me: If you talk to an unemployed, uninsured mother of two in Greenville, she’ll tell you that jobs and reliable medical coverage come a distant second to the crafting of meticulous talking points that deftly omit the facts and reduce what should be honest discourse about our country’s future to a series of contrived, easy-to-digest sound bites designed to sway crucial independent voters.”

- “House Minority Leader John Boehner,” My Constituents Care Way More About Political Gamesmanship Than Jobs, Health Care, And The Economy [via Charlie Todd]

"…fault-tolerant hardware gets sold in tranches (great, ok, bad) and the bad tranche sold off-label."

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:54:54 -0500

“…fault-tolerant hardware gets sold in tranches (great, ok, bad) and the bad tranche sold off-label.”

- Nat Torkington’s summary of an investigation into bad MicroSD cards, Four short links: 18 February 2010

"…And then you’ve got a meeting at another building; it’s a half a mile away. And you..."

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 09:54:52 -0500

“…And then you’ve got a meeting at another building; it’s a half a mile away. And you could take the shuttle over but you decide “I’m going to walk” because the health insurance plan that you’re on gives you bonus points if you walk more than a mile each day. We can sense that easily through your digital shoes. And if you get your heart rate up above a certain amount then you get more bonus points from your health insurance company.”

- Jesse Schell, from a series of examples of what the future might hold for games designed on top of real life (making me think Foursquare is just the beginning) in “Design Outside the Box,” a talk at DICE 2010 [via Milosz]

"Movie-goers are pickier about the believability of movies than pundits are about the believability..."

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 09:54:51 -0500

“Movie-goers are pickier about the believability of movies than pundits are about the believability of politicians’ claims.”

- Doug J, Post-realism [via Duncan Black]

"There is always going to be a lowest common denominator platform. That used to be Windows. Now it’s..."

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 09:53:53 -0500

“There is always going to be a lowest common denominator platform. That used to be Windows. Now it’s the web.”

- John Gruber, Yet More on the Unfolding Future-of-Flash-and-the-Web Saga

"It takes a while to really understand any abstraction in our modern society: how currency works, why..."

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 09:53:52 -0500

“

It takes a while to really understand any abstraction in our modern society: how currency works, why we try to separate church and state, how a bicameral legislature acts on the will of the people, how interest compounds.

…[U]nlike laymen, programmers are regularly challenged with new ways of abstracting information (be it entire programming paradigms, new frameworks, or just a new way of factoring their own code) and eventually become adept at this meta-skill.

But regular people don’t have to learn new abstractions on a day-to-day basis. Anything presented to them in a new symbolic or abstracted way is bound to cause confusion for a long time. Especially second or third order abstractions.

”

- Dan Grover, Toward a Grand Unified Theory of n00bs

NYC subway map showing Olympic venues (gymnastics at the...

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:52:53 -0500

NYC subway map showing Olympic venues (gymnastics at the Atlantic Center, equestrian events in Staten Island), part of New York City’s failed campaign for the 2012 summer games. [seen at How the Olympics ruined the 7 line extension]

Sushi-preparing robot, from “Just Like Mombot Used to...

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 09:52:51 -0500

Sushi-preparing robot, from “Just Like Mombot Used to Make” [via Diner’s Journal]

"For the most part, our big news orgs simply don’t explain things. In all candor, they rarely seem to..."

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 09:51:53 -0500

“For the most part, our big news orgs simply don’t explain things. In all candor, they rarely seem to know what sorts of claims are being made in the wider discourse.”

- Bob Somerby, Why is it easy to beat our side? Wisely, Dionne asked [via Kevin Drum]