April 2012
Sold a bookshelf for the cost of my Kindle.
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Chen Guangcheng’s Journey →
Evan Osnos is not only the best single source for understanding news out of China, he also has a superhuman knack for the 2nd paragraph recap:
Sometime in the last few days, Chen slipped out of the stone farmhouse on the rural plains of Shandong province where he has been held under house arrest, with his family, off and on since 2005. If Chen’s captors had been readers of history, they might...
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“The dishes on his entertaining, deceptively sophisticated, 22-course menu ($150)...”
– New York Magazine.
You get one guess at where this chef is from.
And this: “Like lots of artsy, cutting-edge cooks, however, Lightner isn’t necessarily concerned with making his food delicious in the standard, accessible ways.”
Mother Jones: Silicon Valley’s Brogrammer Problem →
“The two court of appeals most comfortable with Wikipedia were the Seventh...”
– The WSJ Law Blog, via Nick Kam
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“Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind about...”
– My newly created TextExpander snippet for replying to potential Craigslist robots.
It’s triggered with “vk;”
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“The 48fps footage I saw looked terrible. It looked completely non-cinematic. The...”
– Early screenings of the Hobbit are getting burned by the soap opera effect
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Chinese Censors Crack Down on Influential... →
The Chinese Government is tries to put their thumb over the faucet, deleting the accounts of several influential microbloggers:
On March 24, Chinese journalist Yang Haipeng drew a connection on his Sina Weibo account between a British national and the Bo family, including Mr. Bo’s son, Guagua. “Deceased: Guagua’s nanny. Nationality: British. Place: Chongqing. Handled by: Wang...
NYTimes: Playground Slides Post Threat →
The New York Times, our paper of record and national treasure, is now teaching us how to use slides:
To prevent the injury, the best solution is to allow a child to slide by himself, with supervision and instructions on how to play safely. Young children can be placed on the slide at the halfway point with a parent standing next to the slide. At the very least, parents should remove a child’s...
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Felix Salmon: Should the NYT Sell Early Access to... →
In light of the NYT’s Wal-Mart bribery story, Felix Salmon poses a question:
The market was taken by surprise, with $12 billion of market capitalization evaporating from Walmart and Walmex in one day.
Which raises the obvious question: shouldn’t the NYT, which can always use a bit of extra revenue, take advantage of the fact that its stories can move markets so much? Not directly:...
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Taking Down Bo Xilai Threatens Exposing to Rich... →
Bloomberg issued a fantastic report two days ago detailing the financial connections of Bo Xilai’s family. The piece nicely succinctly articulated why the Chinese government is so spooked:
“The danger for them, the Chinese, is that the whole of the Politburo and their Central Committee colleagues will be exposed as a new property-owning class,” said Roderick MacFarquhar, a Harvard...
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News.me: Leave the house, download news →
This is my favorite use of iOS’s background geofencing yet:
newsme:
I’ll think we’ve all been there: you get into a subway car, and just as the doors are closing, you realize that you’ve forgotten to take your phone out, pull to refresh, and wait 10 seconds to download the latest news articles to read offline. You curse under your breath and switch back to Angry Birds.
Today we’re...
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“If you look at what we’re rooted in, it’s kind of obvious what...”
– David Lawee, Google VP of corporate development and M&A chief, interviewed by Business Insider.
One large problem the web has yet to crack is the sorting, valuation, and distribution of culture –– point to point. Parts and pieces have been taken on, but none have done it on a dependable scale....
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“Most people don’t care about politics. They’re not running around with these...”
– UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck, as quoted by Ezra Klein, who makes convincing case that Etch-a-Sketches, Hilary Rosen tweets, and other news cycle blow ups don’t matter.
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Chinese Blog Rumors: Titanic Nude Scene Edition →
When an official statement is lacking (as it often is), Chinese microbloggers concoct up their own explanations for government intent.
Titantic 3D launched in China with Kate Winslet’s nude scene censored, despite it being uncut from the 2D version (which was the Chinese box office champ from 1998-2009). The censors remained silent and the blogs had a field day. One fake explanation by...
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Facebook Blocks Stories About an Extradition Fight →
…due to a programming error.
Facebook’s link filters block not only URLs, but stories about URLs which have been blocked:
However, as James Losey discovered, Facebook won’t let you post about it — calling the article “spammy or unsafe.” Specifically, it appears that (as with TPB) Facebook is blocking any and all mention of TVShack.net. However,...
Just One Thing.
Jason Zengerle: Are there structural reforms that you think need to take place?
Barney Frank: To get rid of the filibuster in the Senate.
Jason Zengerle: Is that the only one?
Barney Frank: That’s the only one.
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Tupac 'Hologram' May Go on Tour →
“It’s great to be here in CITY NOT FOUND.” (Via WSJ)
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“The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of...”
– Twitter introduces the Innovator’s Patent Agreement, sets an amazing example.
Use pull-to-refresh without fear.
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If I Were Huffington Post I'd Buy or Clone Read It...
Then train my readers how to use a bookmarklet, let them save articles from all over the web to the HuffPo mobile apps, and piggy back off their patterns so they’d do all the aggregating for me.
(I’d have to be completely evil to pull the trigger, though.)
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“Over the next hour or so, Weiner and his team took me through their brand new...”
– The Next Web.
Read It Later rebrands to Pocket and expands to cover more of the web only one day after Readability.
The Economist Argues for Open Research →
Highway robbery:
An annual subscription to Tetrahedron, a chemistry journal, will cost your university library $20,269; a year of the Journal of Mathematical Sciences will set you back $20,100. In 2011 Elsevier, the biggest academic-journal publisher, made a profit of £768m ($1.2 billion) on revenues of £2.1 billion. Such margins (37%, up from 36% in 2010) are possible because the journals’...
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“Can you find love in six minutes? That’s how long bachelors or bachelorettes are...”
– The New York Times. Later in the article talk about dating services using Klout scores as a datapoint: ‘“I will use whatever tool I can use to help my instincts and my gut,” said Ms. Carroll, who reasons that people with high Klout scores are excellent communicators.”
Why not just file...
“Spain’s effort at deficit reduction is not just bad economics, it is physically...”
– Wolfgang Münchau continues to be a pessimistic counter for official Euro statements.
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On Readability: Attempts to Fork the Web and Tame...
Readability just announced a new web processing engine, Iris, which evaluates web content and then chooses from several different presentation filters. For example, a Wikipedia entry, with its predictable sidebar of figures, will be presented differently from a New York Times article or a Vimeo video. Readability’s last engine applied the same general reading filter to every page.
By...
“[I]f individuals live three years longer than expected—in line with...”
– The IMF (Via CONVERSABLE ECONOMIST)
Nerds brag about how long they haven’t used Word the same way foodies brag about how it’s been since they ate at McDonalds.
“What is Gawker? Is that that pornographic website? I don’t care if they...”
– Roger Ailes, ‘merican
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The Bo Xilai Story Makes Rumors Seem Rational →
Evan Osnos continues to deliver amazing China coverage as the Bo case evolves:
The real-life murder mystery unfolding at the highest ranks of the Chinese government—featuring, so far, homicide, MI6, poison, Party infighting, and a police chief whose hobby involves organ transplantation—is not only a political opera that makes Berlusconi’s antics look like community theatre. It’s also the...
“The draft story was not intended to be published until we confirmed that...”
– Washington Post spokeswoman Kris Coratti, explaining how WaPo inadvertently tipped off Bloomberg, which eventually ran the story with no source at all piece.
In the future, information will travel so quickly ‘scoops’ will only result through software errors. (Via Buzzfeed)
Product Demos to Retire
If you demo data products or online services, please consider retiring the following example topics:
The Haiti Earthquake
A major election
Starbucks
American Idol
Lady Gaga
Cat or other adorable animal videos
Finding the closest Starbucks is like finding Michael Jackson songs in 1984. All of these examples are far too mass-market and general for practical use.
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“In case you’re upset about our decision to stop making pennies,...”
– The Canadian Mint (Via Vancouver Sun)
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“Police in China have arrested a woman for performing ultrasound tests in the...”
– Associated Press 