“magazines”
30 posts under this tag.
Three good, non-obvious answers:
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That we participate in it.
Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I’m going to mash up 50 Cent’s vocals with Queen’s instrumentals? I’m going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
You can use words like ‘platform’ and ‘web application’ and ‘Ajax’ and ‘desktop functionality’ but really in essence the most amazing thing about the web today is the concept of sharing is becoming increasingly OK. We are slowly coming out of our cocoons, testing the waters and sharing out things that we know, and things that we love or hate.
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That we can make (some) sense of it at all.
People understand a graph composed of tree-like documents (HTML) related by links (URLs). In some ways I find this the most surprising of all. For years we assumed people had trouble with trees, never mind graphs. And suddenly hyperlinks come along, and as long as there is a Back button, they work.
I would argue that the “back” button is one of the two or three defining constraints of interaction design. I’d even go so far to say that it’s more significant than the hyperlink.
“Back” doesn’t just mean “go backwards”: it stands for the entire paradigm of user-controlled navigation, arbitrary hyperlinking, and back-as-undo that everyone has come to expect from the behavior of software.. The back button is a contract web design has with our users.
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That it is a universal namespace.
The most important thing about the Web is that it is a universal namespace, something that has not been available before, not at this level of precision.
Benny Gustavsson, On the Semantic Web languagePDF
But a finding in 2005 appears to have swung the argument decisively in favour of an ageing programme. A study at the Russian Academy of Sciences found that salmon can live much longer and continue reproducing when infected by pearl mussel larvae. In some cases, infection by this parasite extends life fourfold, to 13 years. It seems that the parasite has evolved a mechanism to avert the salmon’s abrupt death so it can continue providing shelter and food for the parasite’s development and reproduction. For a parasite dependent on the survival of its host, this is a sensible strategy. While the mechanism for this effect is not yet fully understood, it seems that the larvae produce a small protein that helps to mop up free radicals.
 There was recently (November 2006) an article in Nature about the famous Antikythera MechanismWP, a strange Greek contraption from the second century B.C.E. that with its gears and dials is considered by some the first (astrological) computer. Nothing like it is known in human history until a thousand years later (which prompted Professor Mike Edmunds, one of the article’s authors, to regard it as “more valuable than the Mona Lisa.”). Using new advanced imaging techniques the researchers were able to discover much previously hidden complexity in the device and established it was used to model the position of the moon and probably that of other planets. The article was all over the news (in 2002, another famous analysis was released and it was also broadly covered).
Then there’s Richard Feynman and his letters, gathered by her daughter and published in an also fairly recent (April 5, 2005) book titled Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten TrackAM. And there’s one from Athens that mentions Feynman’s encounter with a funny little Greek mechanism. It’s a gem of a letter, full of wisdom about science, history, and modernity.
This was originally appended to the original lonelygirl article some weeks ago. I’m moving it to the blog stripELZR itself because I doubt anyone noticed it.
It’s frighteningly fast how the avant-garde becomes the status quo. Not long ago Google was an underdog. It is now unarguably a behemoth. (“Google is the weather.”EEM) Two months ago it payed 1.65 billion for YouTube, the new media underdog. Now lonelygirl15, YouTube’s first star, has made the cover of this month’s Wired. And her article, The Secret World of Lonelygirl, is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how it all started. From Jessica Rose’s misgivings about the shady project, to her browseresque beauty, to lonelygirl’s origin as the alter ego of a commune-raised, bullied boy.
Jessica Rose was suspicious and frankly a little pissed off. She had come to this organic-tea shop to discuss what she thought was a feature film called Children of Anchor Cove. Now Beckett and Flinders had made her sign a nondisclosure agreement and, clearly pleased with themselves, told her that they wanted her to play the lead in what they billed as the future of entertainment. For free. It was an Internet-something-or-other –- she wasn’t listening. They were also going to “hire” another actor to play a character named Daniel. It sounded a lot like porn.
It was exactly what her acting coaches at Universal Studios’ film program had warned her against: unkempt producer-types hawking shady deals.
When he got to college, Flinders [cocreator of lonelygirl] dreamed up an alter ego—an awkward, geeky homeschooled girl. As a camp counselor, he told fireside tales about her experiences. He wrote short stories about her, and when he tried to make it as a writer in Hollywood, he put her in his screenplays.
There’s something about Jessica Rose that the webcam loves. Her distractingly large eyebrows and small round face are bent and stretched by the fish-eye lens into a morsel of beauty that fits perfectly in a pop-up window. That’s not to say she isn’t pretty off camera—she is—but every step she takes closer to the cam multiplies and enhances her looks. It’s a face made for the browser screen.
[Miles] Beckett was at home trying to decompress. He had been working as an urgent care doctor to pay the rent and was exhausted. Between filming and editing the Lonelygirl15 series and dealing with severed fingers and dog bites at the hospital, he wasn’t sleeping much. It didn’t help that Goodfried called at 2 am.
”Miles, it’s time you quit being a doctor,” he said. “We just passed 200,000 views.”
Within 48 hours, the video had half a million views. Goodfried knew that to be considered a success, a cable television show needs to get between 300,000 and 500,000 viewers. “My Parents Suck …” had vaulted into that territory.
Each episode needs to be short, no more than three minutes. ”You wouldn’t show a sitcom at a movie theater, right?” Beckett says. “You make movies for the big screen, sitcoms for TV, and something else entirely for the Internet. That’s the lesson of Lonelygirl15.”
This Web series not only looks different, it’s made differently than other filmed entertainment. As Bree’s universe expands, each new character will have his or her own vlog. Flinders can’t write and film them all, so new writer-directors have been hired and paired with actors playing the new characters. Unlike television, where writers sit in a room and come up with a single script, the Lonelygirl15 team comes up with a general plotline and then sends its writer-directors out to produce independent but interconnected videos. All the characters, in essence, have their own show.
Rose leaps onto the bed and jumps up and down. She makes faces at the camera and waves her hands, knocking askew the picture of the rose hanging on the wall. Beckett got it at a 99-cent store because it was cheap and looked like something a teenage girl would buy. Nobody seems to have noticed the faint pink quotation printed beneath the flower: ”It is by believing in roses that one brings them to bloom.”
Techguru Esther DysonWP, EDGE (who, I just learned, is Freeman DysonWP’s daughter) on freedom under communist Russia (and why it was, bizarrely, like bestiality), online smut, intellectual property (long live intellectual process!), failure, and changing the world in a 1996 interview with Virginia Postrel for Reason mag.
An impressive graph, both in execution and content, to be taken with one big grain of salt (read article for important considerations on the methodology and the difficulty of defining wealth):
Wealth is shared much less equitably than income: more than half of it is held by just 2% of the world’s adults. The distribution is equivalent to a world of ten people, in which one had $1,000 and the other nine had $1 each.
Vaya que es sorprendente. Curiosamente, me entere de esto en The Economist, no se que tanta difusion se le haya dado en periodicos nacionales pero mi familia no estaba enterada.
At first glance it would be easy to dismiss Mr López Obrador’s actions as the inconsequential tantrums of a sore loser who was never able to substantiate his charge of electoral fraud. Certainly most of his fellow countrymen seem to take this view. But a substantial minority do not. A poll commissioned recently by the independent electoral authority found that 37% of respondents believed that fraud took place. Many of those would doubtless prefer a constructive opposition to constant rabble-rousing. Mr López Obrador’s party has plenty of reasonable leaders who have indicated that they will work with Mr Calderón. The “shadow government” is made up of second-tier figures.
El IFE (“the independent electoral authority”) publica aquella encuesta como la Evaluación de la gestión institucional a la luz del Proceso Federal Electoral 2005-2006 (Parametría).
 ” Hay varias otras gemas en esta encuesta a 2,000 personas del 8 al 12 de Septiembre del 2006, como el que 38.6% de los encuestados afirme que no participaria en futuras elecciones (aunque 76.6% esta muy o algo de acuerdo en que “La democracia puede tener problemas, pero es el mejor sistema de gobierno”) o el que la mitad (!) de los encuestados afirmo haber votado por Felipe Calderon, que los partidos politicos son considerados tanto la institucion politica mas corrupta del pais como la menos importante para el desarrollo del pais, que la principal razon (15.9%) por la que se cree que hubo fraude es la tardanza de los resultados, que 47.1% esta muy o algo de acuerdo con la frase “No me importa un gobierno NO democrático en el poder si logra mejorar mi nivel de vida”, que 43.6% cree que es mejor vivir en una “sociedad que respete derechos/libertades aunque haya desorden”, que un 40.8% esta muy en desacuerdo con las acciones de resistencia civil que promueve AMLO mientras que solo un 13% esta muy de acuerdo con ellas…
When I was 8 years old, my family was in a terrible car accident, and my older brother almost died. The next night, as I lay scared and sleepless on my paternal grandmother’s living-room couch, she softly explained to me who was to blame. Not my father’s Aunt Estelle, a dour, aging wild woman and devout Baptist, who, as usual, was driving recklessly fast. No, the reason Estelle’s station wagon flipped over and Joe was thrown out the back window was this: my father had stopped going to church the previous year, and God was very, very angry.
Dear old Grandma June. A compelling lack of evidence for any sort of Higher Power may have steered my mind toward atheism, but she put the heathen in my heart.
<insert wry, sad smile here>
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