a bunch of stuff

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Fri Jan 15

BEYOND AWESOME. They are announcing a recall of the Plush Uterus “due to a potential choking hazard for children”. To apply for it, “Please send an email to the address below with the subject line, ‘UTERUS OPT OUT’”.

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Thu Jan 14

“To order, please TYPE “YES” IN CHECKBOX BELOW TO AGREE YOU UNDERSTAND THIS PLUSH MUST BE KEPT AWAY FROM KIDS (it is a sex organ, after all). If it is not checked, WE WILL NOT SEND THE UTERUS.” (via @ibogost)

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Mon Jan 11

I watched Space: 1999 back in the day, but I swear to god I do not remember this scene.

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“We can hear you having sex.” A nifty, passive-aggressive way to warn your neighbors about their annoying behavior: Rename your wifi node to send a message. (via @Suw)

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Thu Jan 7

What?? According to the AnalyzeWords analysis of my recent Tweets, I am a “depressed”, “plugged in” guy who thinks “in the moment”.

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The ascendacy of the “non-private person”

A fascinating short essay on Boing Boing:

Tiger Woods, described frequently as a “very private” person, was unable to keep his private life private. Why? Because he interacted with non-private people. The reason Kim Kardashian and the Jersey Shore denizens have risen to positions of prominence in popular culture is because they each epitomize the non-private person. They have nothing to hide, so nothing that becomes public knowledge can hurt them. Ms. Kardashian can be urinated on in a sex tape and actually be helped in terms of being a public figure. My own ability to be effective as a transgender rights activist is because there’s nothing anyone could expose about me that would deter me from my activism. That gives me enormous power over anonymous haters who vent their impotent fury at me to no avail. Their own fear of exposure (loss of privacy) is their greatest weakness.

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“ You are my son and you came from my balls and you should have known better. You have totally crushed me beyond repair. The mobster Frank Campione writes a letter to his son Michael for “ratting him out” to the FBI.

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Thu Sep 24

“ here’s a toast to Alan Turing
born in harsher, darker times
who thought outside the container
and loved outside the lines
and so the code-breaker was broken
and we’re sorry
yes now the s-word has been spoken
the official conscience woken
– very carefully scripted but at least it’s not encrypted –
and the story does suggest
a part 2 to the Turing Test:
1. can machines behave like humans?
2. can we? A poem by Matt Harvey, in response to the British government’s formal apology for hounding Alan Turing to death. It’s only a so-so poem, by my tastes — very Philip Larkin — but I love that last couplet a lot! I’ve actually been sort of writing around that question in my journalism for a loooong time … though sometimes the proposition is inverted: In what situations would we humans behave more morally if be behaved more like machines?

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Thu Sep 17

“ There’s no such thing as information overload but filter failure,” said Mr. Crowley. Great comment by Dennis Crowley of foursquare, in a story about location-based tech.

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Wed Sep 16

“ the Kindle lets readers down with respect to one subtle but powerful element of the traditional book’s appeal: its role as an identity marker. Pulling out a particular book on an airline flight or in a doctor’s office can mean staking a claim to being a particular kind of person. Likewise, the books lining your living room or office can tell others about your interests and background. But on the Kindle, no matter what you’re reading, all anyone else will see is an unchanging plastic device. Nice point about the Kindle …

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Tue Sep 8

Is your handwriting going to hell in the age of the keyboard? Mine sure is. I’d always figured my horrible handwriting was the result of some deep moral flaw, but these authors argue — in this superbly graphically-crafted and thought-provoking New York Times op-ed piece — that the problem stems from the inherent limitations of “Palmer” cursive writing, which was intended to be beautiful but also slow and clumsy … a rough ergonomic analogue of the QWERTY keyboard.

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Tue Aug 4

“ In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes claims he does not know that the Earth revolves around the sun, as such information is irrelevant to his work solving crimes. Directly after having heard that fact from Watson, he says he will immediately try to forget it. He says he believes that the mind has a finite capacity for information storage, and so learning useless things would merely reduce his ability to learn useful things. Sherlock Holmes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Mon Aug 3

From the Get Your War On blogger: “What can I say? If you’ve ever wanted to watch a gelfling-starchild perform “Kids” on her mini-keyboard from the future while hiding out in a record-store basement(?), then you’re pretty psyched right now. I am counting the days until we hear this young woman in an iPod commercial.”

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Wed Jul 29

“ iTunes sells a lot of music that you can get for free on the internet, so they’re not really selling the music, they’re selling the service of getting the music without having to muck about with P2P software and unsure quality. This precisely describes why I’ve subscribed to Rhapsody — $15 a month — nonstop for five years now. (From a great piece by Cory Doctorow about Chris Anderson’s new book Freei>.)

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Tue Jul 21

A clever idea, recently patented by Samsung, for packing a full QWERTY keyboard into ever-smaller modern mobile phones.