“recommendations”
89 posts under this tag.
Yesterday’s postELZR on a recent essay by Thomas L. Friedman made me remember just how good the man is and how much I enjoyed his latest book, The World is Flat. Today I chanced upon this MIT lecture1 in which he discusses the book at length and it may be even even better than the book itself. Friedman’s a master storyteller and shines in front of a live audience. The video quality is pixel-art at best but no matter, I promise you this hour and a half will be one of your day’s highlights (and when you watch it, don’t miss the answer to the final question posed to him: “How can an open society be secure?”).
Friedman himself’s a very interesting man—Mediterranean studies BrandeisWP B.A., married to one of the hundred richest families in America, won every journalistic accolade there is—don’t forget to check out his pedia and this U.S. News & World Report writeup on him (listing Friedman as one of America’s best leaders).
1 While you’re at it, give the MIT Video Index a good browse, there’s good stuff aplenty.
I’m ambiguous towards Seed. On one hand, it has excellent webdesign; features like a daily zeitgeist and cribsheets; articles like the unnerving Culture-shaping parasite, the funny Big in Japan, and the unexpected The Value of Small Things; and intriguing syndicated posts like Einstein in Lust and Getting Physical. Its SnowishWP slogan—”Science is Culture”—is pure genius.
On the other hand, it lacks good editing at times and can be glib, informal, superficial, and, well, too pop. I’ve been reading quite a lot of scientific articles lately and am thrilled by how rewarding it’s been. Yes, they can be dense, intricate, and dry, and the genre sure has its very own idiosyncrasies (ticks), but they are also clear, painstakingly crafted, in-depth, documented, and supremely interesting: distilled thought of the highest import. So I’m not sure if a popular science magazine is right for me now—perhaps, (gulp), I’ve outgrown them (and after the absolute fiasco that became my former childhood choice, Conozca Mas, I’m wary).
Simile is a simple, snappy AJAX timeline from MIT. To keep with the space-time musings of late, it’s a Google Maps for time.
Techcrunch—which I discovered a few days ago and am liking more and more everyday—had a recent good introduction to PornoTube, a new YouTubeWP porn clone (that as you’d expect, contains explicit sexual material).
The streaming-video website is quite something—intuitive, well-designed, web-2.0-buzz-compliant, massive, and free—and Techcrunch makes several good points throughout its review, chief among which is this one: “For more technically saavy users, bittorent has long been a source of free
pornography. But PornoTube, which is usable by anyone with a computer, could be disruptive.”
And disruptive it will be. Owing to support from its porn behemoth owner, the website appears to be staying atop of the expensive bandwith deluge it must be under. If it keeps doing so and survives prosecution and finds a way to be profitable, it would be yet another beacon of our media saturated future: a whole nother level of free, easy, abundant, instant gratification.
I was running out of space this morning—these days, not even half a tera is enough—so I decided to finally download one of those famous programs to visualize your folder structure. They had intrigued me before, to be sure, but they were a somewhat expensive technology back then, and so I resisted. I figured there would be something free by now. I wasn’t disappointed: SequoiaView does everything I wanted it to do, its free, its simple, and its way cool. (And I wasn’t disappointed at all on the utility of such a visualization, I freed up 100 GB half an hour later after installing it!)
Here’s my favela drive a couple of hours ago:
Some weeks ago I was very interested in folksonomies because I was trying to build yet another one (though a political one at that). During my journeys I found out that Del.icio.us has a special kind of tag for filetypes—system:filetype:FILETYPE_HERE. Mixing it with the popular tag, I found many truly wonderful media shards for the filetypes that came to mind—mp3, jpg, jpeg, pdf, gif, png, mov.
Here they are, lest time forgets:
A week ago I learned two friends are coming from the US this July 21: that means empty cases. Two happy days later and hundreds of dollars less: 38 books on shipping parcels from Amazon. Book shopping is a pleasure in and of itself (I’m rarely this happy!), and hereforward’s my list (which is quite an intimate thing to share—it’s the perfect psychological text, if you know how to read it).
I’ve been fiction-starved long enough now.
Erasmo wants to kill the man, I want to do him (I fell in love the moment I read his “The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for achieving participatory democracy.”).
Wondrous book. Truly. I’m buying these 3 extra copies just to pester friends (and family) with.
The only Ender book I’m missing.
I’d read Mencken’s quotes before, of course. But I just became aware of him a couple of weeks ago through, of all places, a Gilmore Girls episode. I couldn’t be more ashamed of my tardiness. I’m diving into economics these next couple of months.
“This is a book in favor of doing—self-directed, purposeful, meaningful life and work—and against ‘education’—learning cut off from active life and done under pressure of bribe or threat, greed and fear.” I’m fascinated with education these days.
I dig the Austrian School of Economics (or rather, I think I will, when I know more about it).
Frankly, that Edward Tufte’s wife mother wrote this was enough for me, but just think about it: a syntactic critique of 1000 exemplary sentences. This promises to be a jewel.
“Rage, rage against the dying of the light” ( Dylan Thomas). For those late deathnights… “[Oliver Sacks’s writings] has done as much as anyone to make nonspecialists aware of how much diversity gets lumped under the heading of ‘the human mind.’” (Amazon.com review)
I want to be a libertarian.
I’ve been a fan of Andy Grove ever since that Fortune feature on him.
A wildcard.
Just how would a society organized by private property, individual rights, and voluntary co-operation, with little or no government, look?
I guess this is just book gluttony, but I skimmed this book in the New York Public library one rainy afternoon and it’s a happy memory.
Foreign aid debunked. I somewhy feel I need to read this now. I need to know this stuff. I guess a happy byproduct of feverishly reading The Economist is to think of yourself as someone with vast geopolitical and economical impact ;). His Art of Loving became an instant personal classic some months ago. “There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”
George Soros, long known as “the world’s only private citizen with a foreign policy,” is a most interesting man.
Mindfulness. The title alone was almost enough to buy the book. What a beautiful word.
Yup, I know these children education books are a weird choice but I have a hunch they’ll have much to tell me.
I haven’t read much science lately. The science spark needs some help.
“What would happen if children who can’t do math grew up in Mathland, a place that is to math what France is to French?”
I admire Starbucks.
”Buffet has the strangest of powers in that he comes across as a homespun billionaire. Now that’s different from just being homespun, the way Sam Walton was, or just being a billionaire, like Bill Gates. Buffet flaunts his wealth and his professional love of money, all the while expressing essential, eternal truths in simple, earthy phrases. When I saw Buffet speak at business school he tapped on the microphone to test it and said ‘testing, testing, one-million, two-million, three-million.’” (Marc Cenedella, Amazon review)
“The need for endless learning and trying is a way of living, a way of thinking, a way of being awake and ready. Life isn’t a train ride where you choose your destination, pay your fare and settle back for a nap. It’s a cycle ride over uncertain terrain, with you in the driver’s seat, constantly correcting your balance and determining the direction of progress. It’s difficult, sometimes profoundly painful. But it’s better than napping through life.”
“Without a single gesture toward an explanation, this novel recounts the story of a man and a woman mysteriously given the ability to live their lives over. Each dies in 1988 only to awaken as a teenager in 1963 with adult knowledge and wisdom intact and the ability to make a new set of choices. Different spouses, lovers, children, careers, await them in each go-round of the past 25 years, as well as slightly altered versions of world events. Their deep commitment to one another continues through the centuries of their many lifetimes.” (Library Journal review) I haven’t read this book and I love it already.
Believe you me, I’ll be the first to distrust this bluntly titled book, but I’m floored by who and how many people recommend it.
I was only able (or rather, willing) to do the cool, long screen captures on my previous post because of Easy Screen Capture And Annotation—a nice and full-featured software that allows you to capture the entire content of a scrollable window, among many other things.
It’s shareware ($30), but you can use it for free without any limitation other than a welcome-nag and a red-watermark when saving your image (which can of course be easily bypassed by copy-pasting your capture to another graphic-editing program). Very useful if you ever need to do serious scren-capturing.
Oh please, please—I’m begging you here—go do yourself a favor and buy Steven Johnson’s Interface Culture this very moment. Please. Please.
I’ve been rereading my hilites from it, searching for an elusive quote and I’m just shocked again at how good this book is. I have no doubt whatsoever this will be a canon book from the late twentieth century. Don’t be fooled by the 3.5 stars in Amazon, it’s simply a 1997 book that’s still ahead of its time.
Johnson is lucid to (and over) the brink of genius when he talks about interface, technology, media, computers, the web, blogs (which he predicts 10 years ago), hypertext, novels, software, online communities, artificial intelligence, culture, design, agents, TV, life, the universe, and everything.
Being his first book, written in his late twenties, it is full of youthful passion, exhuberance, and raw virtuosity—but, get this, he is right.
This digital age belongs to the graphic interface, and it is time for us to recognize the imaginative work that went into that creation, and prepare ourselves for the imaginative breakthroughs to come. Information-space is the great symbolic accomplishment of our era. We will spend the next few decades coming to terms with it.
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