December 2009
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2010 Predictions: NYT Trend Piece
There will be a NYT trend piece about people meeting and starting relationships during the last hour of international flights, when all gadgets are off and the passengers must remain seated. The article will run after there have been two resulting marriages and will center on a third engaged couple.
Could a Conjoined Twin Get Away with Murder? →
Nick Kam, a friend of mine since my Santa Cruz days, just received a great write up on io9 for his law school paper. Amazingly awesome. Go read the whole thing.
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“Read voraciously, many books at a time. Only then will you hear the conversation...”
– Ways of reading / from a working library
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“Someone teleported through time from the early 1950s to 2009 would find a music...”
– Variety, December 2009. (Via Marginal Revolution)
“This is my Zeen. It is the key to my Airlife.”
– From a new trademark filed by HP. (Via Gizmodo)
2010 is looking up!
getoutmybiz:
Comedy Central has ‘no plans’ to renew Jeff Dunham Show in 2010
I can’t not put into words how excited I am for 2010. It’s going to be a good year.
via.
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I would pay $20 a month for Instapaper if it let me select specific articles and output them wirelessly to a Kindle, complete with a TOC and sections.
But in the meantime: my project for the first quarter of 2010 will be an application that pulls your starred articles from Google Reader, let’s you check off the ones you want, and outputs a formatted ebook file complete with TOC. I’ve...
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Amazon Sold More Kindle Books Than Physical Books... →
Inside the $1 Billion Christmas Tree Business →
Via Gizmodo
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“Is Google going to become the computing platform for the enterprise? Is a bank...”
– IBM CEO On Google’s World Domination
Douglas Adams’ “rules that describe our reactions...
humancomputer:
lickystickypickyme:
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that’s invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.
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“Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack...”
– Annaless Newitz.
After a few days thinking on Avatar, I’ve arrived at the belief that the film will be largely forgotten. Kind of like Titanic.
When the key feature of your film is its technology, the product is waiting to become obsolete. The story of Avatar is nothing new. In fact, it...
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The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan →
Instapaper material for the holidays.
Israeli programmer hacks Kindle, breaks DRM... →
The hacker, known only as Labba, posed a challenge on a hacker forum and was quickly aided by other programmers to discover the hack for the Kindle. They were essentially able to break the DRM protection and find a way to get the eBooks converted to an open format and into PDF files.
Cracked DRM isn’t an if, but a when.
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“But let’s not dwell on the sentimentality of Cameron’s notion of aboriginal...”
– David Denby perfectly describes my feelings about Avatar: it’s a pretty bad movie. Pun intended.
(Via The New Yorker)
“I do not suggest that nothing happened in the past ten years. Things happened;...”
– Rob Walker
4chan Founder “moot” to Speak at TED →
He’s presenting at TED during a session on the topic of “provocation,” in between a Harvard government professor famous for lectures about justice and an anti-slavery activist.
We now know no one at TED has actually been to 4chan.
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How to Host Brunch (and Still Sleep In) →
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Unreal Engine 3 Running on the iPhone 3GS →
For now, it’s just a demo of the tech that Epic’s put together, which relies on theOpenGL ES 2.0 graphics powah in the 3GS and latest iPod touch. But, the killer point is that Epic is planning “to make this available to licensees at some point in the near future,” meaning we could one day see games running Unreal 3 on the iPhone.
Remember when the DS was unveiled and...
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“In the ’80s, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon dominated...”
– The A.V. Club
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How Facebook Made $1 Billion:
Facebook’s scale makes a Facebook Page the best landing page for brands advertising on the Internet.
Facebook ads are the best at driving traffic to Facebook Pages.
There is no step three. More or less. (Via Business Insider)
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Yelp Balks at Google Cash →
I give them one year of relevance, two years of life.
“If I did Titanic today, I’d do it very differently. There wouldn’t...”
– James Cameron
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I can’t wait to read the responses from the anthropology community regarding the “going native” and “human terrain” themes in Avatar.
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“But I guess where I was originally going is that nobody wants to write endings...”
– David Simon. Vice has an absolutely huge interview with Simon online. If you’re done with The Wire, go read it now.
A few months back I was talking trends with a colleague and we started talking about death. The question we asked, and I’m not even sure it can be answered, is whether a...
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A Multitrack Analysis of Come Together, from the...
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Apparently half the Jersey Shore cast showed up at my New York office’s holiday party. I’m waiting for pictures.
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Note to Yelp: Sell.
The rumor du jour is that Google is in talks to buy Yelp for ~$500 million. Yelp should take any money offered and run.
Yelp has a damned if you do, damned if you don’t problem, one that I believe is present because of a horribly broken rating system. A city either has too little data and the handful of reviews vary so wildly as to undermine the cumulative stars, or too much data and the...
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