Category Archives: Micropostings

Twitterstorm redux

Twitter redux

Twitter redux

  • “The reliance on correlations has entered an age of diminishing returns.” Excellent in Wired: bit.ly/tddrtU by Jonah Lehrer
    All the easy causal relations have been found – and we now have to pay attention to the second and third interactions. New methods are needed – though Lehrer does not propose anything to do in this otherwise excellent essay.
  • From 2010, but current and extremely well-written: The end of men.bit.ly/u5ZM0Q
    I have three daughters and should welcome this development, but it feels a bit weird. Made me think about an experience a few years back: With a few other parents, I helped the teacher of a 10-grade class arrange a half-day at a climbing center in downtown Oslo. I was the only male adult there. The girls in the class all participated in climbing the walls, with different levels of skill and stamina. The boys, however, all huddled in a corner, not willing to do any climbing. I tried to challenge them, literally speaking, by asking them if they were afraid – a challenge no boy that age would have refused in my time. Instead, they just ignored it and continued to sulk…
  • Nick Carr on ebooks: on.wsj.com/rtubGe Likes the speed but afraid the marketers will retroactively alter content.
  • Anti-theft car seat that recognizes your butt… bit.ly/w3eYj3
    Should be a good reason to keep the slim line – eat too much and your car won’t recognize you.
  • Hugh MacLeod nails it: “Facebook is the new suburbia” bit.ly/uoP6Vn
  • Proposed new calendar would mean stable date/weekdays, no annual scheduling dance… bit.ly/vesPAX I would just love to have my courses and other things the same day every year.
  • HP Photon looks like just the thing for your living room bit.ly/ryGrPDOr banquet hall.

Twitter redux

  • Cory Doctorow on the coming battle against general computation:youtu.be/HUEvRyemKSg
    (eminently lucid, as always. Compare to Brad Feld below, same argument, with additions)
  • Epicure on the finance industry – a necessary service, like garbagemen bit.ly/vlLgxI
    (“The nature of investment banking—and, dare I say it, management consulting, too—is not one that demands deep thinkers, brilliantly inventive innovators, or even virtuoso synthesizers of disparate intellectual strands. We want smart, fun, dedicated, aggressive youngsters who can work like animals, day-in, day-out, for as long as it takes. As you can tell, this is not a particularly nuanced or diverse set of criteria”)
  • Great: How Maskelyne hacked Marconi’s radio – in 1903bit.ly/smUHM6 (via schneier.com)
  • Brad Feld puts #SOPA in context: ideas.4brad.com/content-indust… 
    (compare to Cory Doctorow above – Brad uses airlines as example, Cory wheels. Both metaphors work.)
  • Eric Raymond on flavors of anti-intellectualism: esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4001
  • O’Reilly on changes in publishing. Excellent summary.oreil.ly/uvTght Wish Norwegian publishers would read and act.
  • Good product: Logitech wireless earphones wp.me/p1Ug4Q-hq
    (an example of how excellent customer service can make up for a weakness in an otherwise excellent product.)
  • Excellent article by James Fallows: Hacked! bit.ly/qErjlP What to do not to lose years of email.
    (Backup, backup, backup. Unless you know Eric Schmidt.)

Twitter redux

  • Good list of business articles: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/this-year-in-small-business-the-best-reads/
    (I especially liked the article about how the next bubble is going to be in higher education – when parents see their offspring moving back home after four years at $50K each, they will start to wonder if not something else – community college first, for instance – will make more sense.)
  • Keep getting questions about a paper I wrote about “Organizations as brains” in 1992. Should have published it. bit.ly/sHCfvK
  • Woman freed from kidnapper through Facebook update:mashable.com/2011/12/27/fac… FB with panic button?
  • Digitalt Personvern har passert 500,000 innsamlet! Hva med et romjulsbidrag? digitaltpersonvern.no/bidra/
  • Excellent article about the insane security theatre:vanityfair.com/culture/featur…
    (This article in Vanity Fair nicely summarizes the many paradoxes of security. A few simple acts, such as locking the door to the cockpit, actively tracking luggage, and the mental change that has taken place in airline passengers (that is, that they now will attack a hijacker rather than accede to his demands) as led to a situation where we are now much more secure against hijacking them before. The many high-cost initiatives, such as full body scanners, explosive residue detection, and no-fly lists have not resulted in any appreciable improvement in security.)
  • Bloomberg with Economic History Blog:bloomberg.com/view/echoes/

Twitter 24-hour redux

  • A coming disruption in supercomputers? bit.ly/sSTxPd Amazon takes on really big iron.
    (this one has all the hallmarks: Cheap alternative, incumbents showing their best stuff and pointing out all the things the newcomer can’t do. But 30,000 processors at $1250/hour is hard to beat. And the virtual supercomputer is on a falling price curve.)
  • New Teslas might make electric cars competitive with normal onesbit.ly/w1cxGW
    (300 miles’ range, 30 minute to 50% charge, 4 passengers. This is beginning to look like a car.)
  • The Atlantic has a good outlook for tech in 2012 – not too pie-in-the-sky: bit.ly/up95ri
    (maybe a trifle boring, but the future tends to be more of the same.)
  • The more data you produce, the happier organized crime is to consume it youtu.be/6ueKilyThQg #digitaltpersonvern
    (Information stored is information vulnerable. Or as a @forsberg said: The only way to make sure nobody has access to a list is not to make the list.)
  • A lament for nickfromfulham wp.me/p1Ug4Q-he
    (Why doesn’t BBC put their stuff on Youtube? Here is my heartfelt opinion)
  • Dual SIM phones may be next step in BYOD mobile strategiesbit.ly/tlcCgO
    (or maybe just a stopgap fix, since connection prices are falling)
  • IT department can become hostage to cloud services bit.ly/s1dfaa
    (Hard to fiddle with someone else’s cloud.)

The morning browse

  • Time to switch back to Firefox? bit.ly/vICWB6 I have gotten used to a few of the Chrome apps, myself
  • Wolfram Alpha and Siri secures Christmas entertainment bit.ly/uXCpCy
  • Martin Freeman seems a good choice as Bilbo youtu.be/G0k3kHtyoqc
  • Scott Adams’ take on “Race against the machine”: bit.ly/uBCxxv
  • Bionic eyes where you can zoom in. bit.ly/ufN7Tq Singularity, here we come…
  • The Name of the Rose “was the first and last of [Umberto Eco's] good books” bit.ly/tPD4UE Agreed.