Lifehacker. Nick Denton must be stopped.
The man is a genius, though.
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Ph.D.
I study people, technology, and the worlds they make
Month: January 2005 (page 1 of 6)
A great concept, from Eric Nehrlich: Launch Chicken.
Say you’re in a project with a tight schedule with several different areas contributing to its success, say a product launch. Let’s say that you know that the area you are responsible for is not going to make the launch. You’re supposed to hit the abort button, and let the project manager know immediately. But, you know that another area is even further behind than you. So you hold out, hoping that they’ll abort first, taking the blame for delaying the launch, and giving you the time you need to finish your area. Now it becomes a matter of will, like the original game of Chicken, where two kids are driving cars at each other. Who will chicken out first? Of course, what happens if nobody chickens out? Bad things, like the collision that happens in the original game.
Surprising that there’s no Chinese restaurant around here that’s created a dish with this name.
[via AkuAkuSF]
[To the tune of Sting, “We Work The Black Seam,” from the album “The Dream of the Blue Turtles”.]
One of those data points that, as a futurist, I can only look at and think: oh man, is this dumb.
Bartender, Pour Me Another Cup
Perhaps Inevitably: Caffeinated BeerAmerica’s largest brewing company, Anheuser-Busch, released its latest product last week — a beer that contains caffeine.
Obviously, this is a monumental cultural milestone and it raises important questions that we as a society must answer. For instance: Is adding America’s favorite stimulant to America’s favorite alcoholic beverage the greatest scientific breakthrough of the 21st century? Or the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it? Or what?
[To the tune of Hank Williams, “Move It On Over,” from the album “40 Greatest Hits (Disc 1)”.]
The New York Times has discovered baby blogs. Wow! What trendspotters! And apparently, this is something that women do. Okay, two blogs by dads are mentioned, but overall, it seems to me like the phenomenon is feminized more than it should be.
But given its explanation of the motives behind baby blogging, I think maybe I’m happy enough not being represented by it:
Today’s parents - older, more established and socialized to voicing their emotions - may be uniquely equipped to document their children’s’ lives, but what they seem most likely to complain and marvel about is their own. The baby blog in many cases is an online shrine to parental self-absorption.
[To the tune of The Rolling Stones, “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby,” from the album “Forty Licks (Disc 1)”.]
Finally, a way to pay for all those tax cuts for the rich- extend a tax dating from the Spanish American War to all Internet connections, cell phones, etc.!
Congress proposes tax on all Net, data connections
An influential congressional committee has dropped a political bombshell by suggesting that a tax originally created to pay for the Spanish American War could be extended to all Internet and data connections this year.
This Sunday, the in-laws are going to take the kids for the afternoon, while my wife and I go to the movies. Doesn’t sound like we’re going to see Alone in the Dark, a film “based on the best-selling Atari videogame series”… The reviews are pretty spectacular:
Uwe Boll’s “Alone in the Dark,” opening in theaters across the nation today, is no better than whatever you might pick up while wearing a blindfold at Blockbuster, even if you happen to reach into a trash can…. Tara Reid is a lost cause as an actress. She could fill the old Central Casting call for “Striking Blond,” as long as it wasn’t a speaking part. (New York Daily News)
Slater narrates as if reading a restaurant menu. Reid seems to have learned each long sentence in segments, so she wouldn’t be overtaxed. Having her play a museum curator with a Ph.D. is like asking Bow Wow to play Martin Luther King. (Philadelphia Daily News)
Alone in the Dark… should cause a re-evaluation of the work of legendarily bad filmmaker Ed Wood, whose reputation as the worst of the worst could be imperiled if Alone is emblematic of the work to be expected from director Uwe Boll. Compared to Boll’s handiwork here, Wood’s fabled Plan 9 From Outer Space is Citizen Kane.
Tara Reid… [is] most famous recently for accidentally exposing her breast during a photo shoot at a P. Diddy party. But never fear, the filmmakers make her appear super-smart by having her wear glasses and pulling her hair back in a tight bun. Ingenious!….
Boll and his co-conspirators used an Atari video game as their inspiration. You’d think, after such cinematic failures as Resident Evil and Super Mario Bros., the Hollywood brain trust would come to realize that there’s no such thing as a good movie made from a video game (although a Frogger movie, that I’d like to see). (Baltimore Sun)
As video game adaptations go, even “Pong: The Movie” would have a lot more personality. (Hollywood Reporter)
It’s a film so mind-blowingly horrible that it teeters on the edge of cinematic immortality…. Tara Reid not only plays an archaeologist, but she also utters the phrase, “I need to study these artifacts”…. Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie do not show up to perform brain surgery in “Alone in the Dark,” but you will fully expect to find that deleted scene on the DVD…..
Every casting decision, camera angle, special effect and sound seems created as a dare to leave the theater. The fight choreography appears to have been taken from an episode of “Lost in Space,” the musical score sounds as if it were composed on a 1983 Casio keyboard bought at a garage sale. (SF Gate)
Reid, who plays an archaeologist and telegraphs her character’s intellect by wearing glasses and putting her hair in a bun, gets to say things like, “I started deciphering the pictogram for you.”…
At times, “Alone in the Dark” veers tantalizingly close to being one of those movies that is so bad it’s good, but in the end, it’s so bad it’s just . . . bad. “Some doors are meant to stay shut,” Reid says at one point. Roger that. (Washington Post)
[To the tune of Barbie, “Free,” from the album “Barbie Princess & The Pauper”.]
I get the point of the argument, but still, proofreading isn’t totally useless…
It’s when we do this foolish, time-consuming, romantic, quixotic, childlike thing called play that we are most practical, most useful, and most firmly grounded in reality, because the world itself is the most unlikely of places, and it works in the oddest of ways, and we won’t make any sense of it by doing what everybody else has done before us. It’s when we fool about with the stuff the world is made of that we make the most valuable discoveries, we create the most lasting beauty, we discover the most profound truths. The youngest children can do it, and the greatest artists, the greatest scientists do it all the time. Everything else is proofreading. (Philip Pullman, “Common sense has much to learn from moonshine,” Guardian Unlimited (22 January 2005), online)
[quoted by Foe via Matt Jones]
I’ve been working on this piece on the future of collective intelligence, and almost at random, came across the review I wrote of The Social Life of Information a couple years ago. The last paragraph jumped out at me, as it basically talks about what I’m trying to get a handle on now:
[T]he challenge of producing, storing and managing information is as old as civilization itself; the term “information age” threatens to be as meaningless as “architecture age” or “transportation age.” Most attempts to describe today’s information age have drawn most strongly from either intellectual history or philosophy. “The Social Life of Information’s” emphasis on the importance of organizational learning and tacit knowledge suggests that to a degree that no one has yet appreciated, the history of information is an institutional history, rather than an intellectual one: It needs to be told at the level of libraries and archives, businesses and publishers, universities and corporate research labs. (Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the first book on library management and the last book on classical memory systems, which had been used for millenniums by orators and scholars, were published within a few decades of each other in the 1600s.) It also suggests that the really significant technologies driving large-scale social and economic change today may not be those created to assist individuals but may instead be the tools for organizational learning, creativity and remembering. The information age is represented for most of us by consumer products like the cell phone and Palm Pilot, but perhaps it is corporate databases, project management and collaboration software and data mining tools and search engines that will be the real levers that move the world.
I can’t decide if this kind of thing is good, a proof of consistency and an ability to think for a long time about something, or a warning that I’ve run out of ideas.
Between 1970 and 1994, the number of B.A.s conferred in the United States rose 39 percent. Among all bachelor’s degrees in higher education, three majors increased five- to tenfold: computer and information sciences, protective services, and transportation and material moving. Two majors, already large, tripled: health professions and public administration. Already popular, business management doubled. In 1971, 78 percent more degrees were granted in business than English. By 1994, business enjoyed a fourfold advantage over English and remained the largest major. English, foreign languages, philosophy, and religion all declined. History fell, too. . . On the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, only 9 percent of students now indicate interest in humanities. (James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield, “The Market-Model University, Humanities in the Age of Money,” Harvard Magazine, May-June 1998: 50)
So basically, we’re educating lots of people to program the computers that security guards will use when protecting stuff that’s being moved around.
[via Jack Miles, “Three differences between an academic and an intellectual“]
[To the tune of Projections, “Luminate,” from the album “Between Here And Now”.]
In my effort to live healthier, I’m trying to bike to work these days. My daughter generally also likes bicycling to school, so we attach the trail-a-bike and drop her off on my way.
This morning I saw a break in the clouds, and figured the rain was done for the day.
Stupid move.
Midway between home and school, it started to thunder. As we were pulling into school, the skies opened up. And by that time, my daughter had gotten enough road mud on her to require changing her clothes. For someone who spends most of her days playing in mud, she was surprisingly put off by the experience.
I’ll have to buy her some rain gear if I want to keep doing this. Me, I can just change clothes at the office.
On the bright side, I discovered these great bike lockers that Caltrain and the city operate- they’re like luggage lockers, except big enough for your bike. They require a smart card, and cost 40 cents for ten hours’ rental. On days when it’s raining, or if you’re paranoid about your bike stuff being stolen, it’ll be a great thing.
Add REST: WHY YOU GET MORE DONE WHEN YOU WORK LESS to your Goodreads shelf
My books on Goodreads
The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul
reviews: 78
ratings: 316 (avg rating 3.53)
ratings: 316 (avg rating 3.53)
