May 2013
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Did We Domesticate Ourselves, Like We Did With...
Carl Zimmer reported recently on some interesting genetic research on dogs that tells us a great deal about their divergence from wolves, but also reflects back on the social mind of people.
Carl Zimmer, From Fearsome Predator to Man’s Best Friend
As they [Ya-Ping Zhang and others] reported on Tuesday [14 May 2013] in the journal Nature Communications, they found that the split started 32,000...
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“Time is the raw material of creation. Wipe away the magic and myth of creating...”
– Kevin Ashton, Creative People Say No
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“Courage grows anywhere, like weeds.”
– David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
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“I think Facebook can be fun, but also it’s drama central. On Facebook, people...”
– Teen, on Facebook.
http://pewrsr.ch/10LRth9
(via pewinternet)
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“Theory is needed to tell you where to look.”
– Marcus du Sautoy Eric Weinstein may have found the answer to physics’ biggest problems
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Cul-de-Sac Poverty - Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan... →
Poverty Is growing in America: 1/3 of us are poor, or nearly so. And the growth of suburban poverty is astonishing:
Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube, Cul-de-Sac Poverty
[…] in the 1990s, poverty in suburbia began to accelerate at a faster rate than poverty in the cities. Sometime after the 2001 recession, more poor people lived in suburbs than in cities for the first time (even though...
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Stanford scientists develop new type of solar... →
Stanford researchers — Professor Shanhui Fan and graduate students Aaswath Raman and Eden Rephaeli — have developed a material suitable to be used as paneling on houses and buildings that reflects light so efficiently, it could passively replace air conditioning, as well as radiating heat in a way that will escape the Earth’s atmosphere.
The trick, from an engineering...
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“Nothing is the future of anything. And so every one of your “No, X is not...”
– Jay Rosen
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WOTD: Bildungsurlaub →
Bildungsurlaub — a word we should hear more often, the German for paid educational leave. If companies abrogate their historical obligation to train their employees, at least they can pay them when workers go off to integrate new skills.
Or you can become a freelancer, and build perma-education into your lifestyle.
President Obama should push for a national law, so that all employers would...
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“ There seems to be a completely false belief that if one struggles then you are...”
– Alastair Arnott
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“Complex derivatives need to be banned because nobody understands them and few...”
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world
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“The new mindset for risk managers requires rituals and approaches that are...”
– Doug Randall and Chris Ertel, Moving Beyond The Official Future
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“There used to be all sorts of criticisms of the old “culture...”
– Mackenzie Wark, Who dares to dodge Google’s information tax?
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“If my films make one more person miserable, I’ll feel like I’ve done my job.”
– Woody Allen
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“The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.”
– William James
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“[…] the problem of nutrient loading into the Mississippi isn’t the methods...”
– Paul Greenberg, A River Runs Through It
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I just want Tumblr to know that I have never, not once, wanted to reblog a text post as a link.
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“The path to success is filled with people helping to clear the way.”
– Susan Dominus
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“Organizational psychology has long concerned itself with how to design work so...”
– Susan Dominus, Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead?
A deep piece on the research and personality traits of Adam Grant, Warton Business School professor and the author of the soon-to-be-released Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, in which he argues that a sense of service to...
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“Trust your practice.”
– Stowe Boyd
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“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic...”
– Anthony Trollope
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WOTD: Gormless
gorm·less adjective \ˈgȯrm-ləs\
Definition of GORMLESS
chiefly British
: lacking intelligence : stupid
— gorm·less·ness noun chiefly British
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“David Brooks has found a congenial story in Google ngrams — or rather, in three...”
– Mark Liberman, Ngram morality
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How Tumblr Can Make Money And Not Piss Us Off
The debate swirling online about how Tumblr (and by extension, Yahoo) can make ad money without alienating a fickle hipster audience is fairly straightforward, if you know how Tumblr works.
Most users would be pissed off if Tumblr put ads a/ on their blogs (extremely pissed off), or b/ in their dashboard stream of Tumblr posts from followed blogs (really pissed off). We consider that our...
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“We won’t let you down.
Fuck yeah,
David”
– David Karp, News!
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“We promise not to screw it up.”
– Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO, announcing the company’s agreement to acquire Tumblr. On Tumblr, of course. Tumblr. + Yahoo! = !!
FJP: We’re wary, but let’s hope so.
(via futurejournalismproject)
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“Try to acquire the weird practice of savouring your mistakes, delighting in...”
– Daniel Dennet, Daniel Dennett’s seven tools for thinking
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“Can Karp put on the big-boy pants, hire a Sheryl Sandberg character, and create...”
– Alexia Tsotsis, David Karp’s Dilemma
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No, We Should Not Protest The Yahoo Tumblr...
Paul Higgins wonders if we should oppose the Tumblr acquisition by Yahoo:
Paul Higgins, The Community, Tumblr and Yahoo - Do we Protest?
There are a couple of services that are really important to my life and my business. One of them is Tumblr and the other is Evernote. In promoting Evernote for example I often tell people that if Microsoft buys it I will retire. That is because it has become...
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Yahoo rumored to be in negotiations to buy Tumblr... →
The AllThingsD team was in attendance at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference and heard the Yahoo CFO, Ken Goldman, admit that Yahoo needs to regain its “cool” image again. (Did it every have that?) And either Goldman or some other credible sources spilled to the AllThingsDers that Marissa Mayer thinks Tumblr could be the answer, or part of it.
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Bill Russell on Playing In The Zone
Playing ‘in the zone’ is what many athletes call their experience of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s flow state, the complete absorption in what you are doing.
Bill Russell, Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man
Every so often a Celtics game would heat up so that it became more than a physical or even mental game, and would be magical. That feeling is difficult to describe,...
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“Gretel Ehrlich said of those yawning Wyoming spaces that she loves, “Its...”
– Christopher Solomon, A Case for Getting Far, Far Away
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“There’s nothing stupid about seeing Google being pitted “versus” other...”
– John Gruber, ‘Google Versus’
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“It’s time to stop thinking of computer programming as a specialty subject....”
– Why High Schools Should Treat Computer Programming Like Algebra - Jordan Weissmann - The Atlantic (via infoneer-pulse)
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Taking Down Disqus Comments
I am finding that Disqus style comments are increasingly out of step on Tumblr. The overwhelming majority of interaction here is native Tumblr reposting, likes, and replies.
If you are a Tumblr non-user, I suggest you get an account and try it. Here’s a post where I describe how rich the ‘inside view’ is at Tumblr.
If you’d like to chat with me about something posted here...
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“People tend to sit most where there are more places to sit.”
– William H White, The Social Life of Small Places
And, in cities, what other characteristic jumps out about where people sit: there are many people sitting there, too, so — at peak times — it turns out to be a place where it is difficult to find a place to sit.
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“All new ideas comes from dreams.”
– Tomonori Kagaya (via Springwise)
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Facebook Phone Flops
Wow, it’s even worse of an idea than I thought.
Zach Epstein, HTC First discontinued by AT&T: First ‘Facebook phone’ a flop
The HTC First, or “Facebook phone” as many prefer to call it, is officially a flop. It certainly wasn’t a good sign when AT&T dropped the price of HTC’s First to $0.99 just one month after its debut, and now BGR has confirmed that HTC and Facebook’s little...
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“Families who are living in poverty did not spend this nation into debt, and we...”
– Kirsten Gillibrand 