Skip to main contentTag: Media
- An Attribution Failure Theory – “Credit is easy. Well, mostly easy. It might have been hard to get the format of citations right at first in school when we were writing papers, but the act of citing is easy. You just do it. Yet, people all over the Internet don’t.”
- You Are Not Ruthless Enough – “Here’s the thing: you are not ruthless enough. You are certainly not ruthless enough to your objects, and you probably need to be more ruthless to yourself.” Programming Is Hard, Part 381.
- You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You – “The seven step, ten minute download process (which will be about ten seconds when US internet speeds catch up with the rest of the world) is the real enemy the studios should be trying to tackle.”
- News Corp to Offer Plaid Stamps! – “Giving Murdoch the benefit of the doubt, then, I’m guessing he simply doesn’t mean what he said. Perhaps he just wanted to sow a little confusion, get some publicity and maybe a concession or two from Google.”
- The night the Berlin Wall fell – “For me it was that rare occasion when a story was unqualified good news. After years watching the way communism was practised, I felt no need to mourn its collapse. Whatever came next had to be better.” Twenty years since the fall of the Berlin wall.
- OMG Ponies!!! (Aka Humanity: Epic Fail) – “The real world has failed us. It has concentrated on local simplicity, leading to global complexity. It’s easy to organise a meeting if everyone is in the same time zone – but once you get different continents involved, invariably people get confused. It’s easy to get writing to work uniformly left to right or uniformly right to left – but if you’ve got a mixture, it becomes really hard to keep track of. The diversity which makes humanity such an interesting species is the curse of computing.”
- Clive Thompson on the New Literacy – Maybe the Internet isn’t the end of literacy after all…
- Galileo’s telescope reaches 400th anniversary – “Exactly 400 years ago today, on 25 August 1609, the Italian astronomer and philosopher Galilei Galileo showed Venetian merchants his new creation, a telescope – the instrument that was to bring him both scientific immortality and, more immediately, a whole lot of trouble.”
- Creationists, now they’re coming for your children – “The Greatest Show on Earth is a book about the positive evidence that evolution is a fact. It is not intended as an antireligious book. I’ve done that, it’s another T-shirt, this is not the place to wear it again. Bishops and theologians who have attended to the evidence for evolution have given up the struggle against it.”
- Objectified – New documentary from the people that gave you Helvetica. Looks interesting.
- Georgia recalls Soviet crackdown – I visited ten years after this. It’s a really beautiful country and such a shame that it keeps descending into civil war or getting into a scuffle with its northern neighbour.
- Odds of Dying in a Terrorist Attack – “You are eight times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist.” Maybe the government should start protecting us from the police instead? (via Kottke.org)
- NetNewsWire and iPhone-Sized Data – “Lesson learned: It’s not enough for an iPhone app to sport an iPhone-optimized user interface. It needs iPhone-sized data, too.” I agree with this in principle but I’ve been thinking how I’d apply it to my iPhone application, Yummy, and coming up with a blank. How can you decide in advance which bookmarks you’ll want to see? Most recent? Those with a particular tag? I can’t think of an option other than ‘all.’
- The Inauguration of President Barack Obama – In case you’re not sick of the inauguration already, here are some great images of the day.
- Gordon Brown withdraws plan to keep details of MPs’ expenses secret – “The PM said proposals for reforms of MPs’ expenses would provide ‘more transparency’ than in most other parliaments around the world.” I’m not convinced that this is a standard we should aspire to. Let’s face it, our parliament is more open that North Korea and less tyrannical than Iran’s but really that’s not much of an achievement.