Without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.
Cyberscholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, as quoted in The New York Times magazine piece “The Web Means the End of Forgetting” by law professor, Jeffrey Rosen.
David Fincher’s upcoming film (October 2010): The Social Network, about the founding and founders of Facebook.
When people need to kick back, have fun, and party, I will be there, unlike your pathetic fonts. While Gotham is at the science fair, I’m banging the prom queen behind the woodshop. While Avenir is practicing the clarinet, I’m shredding ‘Reign In Blood’ on my double-necked Stratocaster. While Univers is refilling his allergy prescriptions, I’m racing my tricked-out, nitrous-laden Honda Civic against Tokyo gangsters who’ll kill me if I don’t cross the finish line first. I am a sans serif Superman and my only kryptonite is pretentious buzzkills like you.
An imagined short monologue by the typeface, comic sans. By Mike Lacher in McSweeney’s. Read the whole thing.
“Through the Lens of Zoe Strauss”, a short film (5:38) by Ted Passon on Philly photographer, Zoe Strauss (Zoe’s blog; Zoe’s flickr – a storage spot for her raw and unedited photos).
(Source: http://vimeo.com/)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9qE-qXI11I
Music for the World Cup: Botswana guitar picking.
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
My favorite music of the first half of 2010:
(No particular order)
Cults: 7” single: available here for free.
Dum Dum Girls: I will be
Beach House: Teen Dream
Woods (nu folk): At Echo Lake
The New Pornographers: Together
Otis Gibbs (alt country): Joe Hill’s Ashes
Pascal (swedish rock): Orkanen närmar sig
The National: High Violet
Fang Island: Fang Island
Are Cameras the New Guns?
In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.
Even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists.
This is unbelievable. People need to understand the scary, long term effects of limitations on civil rights.
See Also:
Randy Balko: On recording police officers.
Here’s How The Government Can Fix Silicon Valley: Leave It Alone. Silicon Valley has fueled much of the growth in our economy over the last few decades and has created amazing (and highly profitable) companies that are making the world a much better and more interesting place to live. All that happened while the government ignored us. We don’t want handouts. We don’t want ‘public-private partnerships,’ and we sure as hell don’t want legislation. Just let us do our thing and maybe say thanks to those companies that create jobs by the hundreds of thousands and send in those humongous corporate tax payments on profits. Because all you can do is screw up something beautiful. Really.
Michael Arrington in Techcrunch responding to a friend’s email request, made on behalf of The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, asking for ideas on how President Obama and the Federal Government can increase high-tech entrepreneurship in America.
The Paris Review now has a blog.
What you need to learn is that being creative is not enough in this business. You have to become technical. Creative people are born creative – you’re lucky. Technical people however can never be creative. Its something they’ll never get. You can’t buy it, find it, study it – you’re born with it. Too many creative people don’t want to learn how to be technical, so what happens? they become dependent on technical people. Become technical, you can learn that. If you’re creative and technical, you’re unstoppable.
Robert Rodriguez on film-making.
The Globe and Mail: Toronto’s Transformation to Silicon Valley North: “’There’s a new emergent scene going on in Toronto,’ says David Crow, a strategist for Microsoft, and a long-time organizer of the city’s tech community. ‘We have great talent and great opportunity.’ After years of nurturing a tight-knit tech community, Toronto seems to be reaching a critical mass – not just of homegrown companies, conferences, and networks, but of ties to a global industry.”
See also:
Techcrunch: Canada Now Somewhat Less Anti-Startup: “Canada isn’t shy about making life difficult for startups … [b]ut a change in Canadian tax law last week is designed to spur U.S. venture investments in Canadian startups and make Canada less of a leper colony for tech entrepreneurs. The change allows foreign investors in most Canadian startups to avoid ‘literally hundreds of pages of documents’ to be filed and processed on a sale of a startup, sometimes by each limited partner in a venture fund. That burden meant that most venture firms simply ignored the Canadian market.”
VC Experts: Canada’s Federal Budget Scores in Overtime for the Technology Community
Photo © 2010 j.r.mchale.
Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez’s eighty-minute film Double Take.
ArtForum on the film: “‘They say that if you meet your double, you should kill him.’ The mantra in Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez’s eighty-minute film Double Take, 2009, suggests that the real must assert itself against its image to prevent its own defeat in an ongoing battle between fiction and reality. The quotation is from the narrative that anchors the film—written by British novelist Tom McCarthy and based on Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘August 25, 1983’—in which Alfred Hitchcock meets an older version of himself.”
Rotten Tomatoes: 70% Fresh
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
The DataPortability Project [is] a registered not-for-profit that exists for the sole purpose of advocating the portability of personal data residing on websites and in networks … [T]he current ToS and EULA model—those hundred page legal documents you are forced to agree to in order to use a service—are often ignored by consumers and hence they are surprised when they get a service enforcing its terms. We believed a simpler way is needed to communicate what a service does with respect to a person’s data and what rights they have over it. Later this month, we will be formally announcing our initiative which we call the “Portability Policy”. This will be a set of questions a company can answer (with no right or wrong answers) that discloses what people can do with their data.
Elias Bizannes – the chairperson and executive director of the DataPortability Project.
The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” Writers Worth Watching
The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” Writers Worth Watching
(updated post: see “Ten over 80” below)
The New Yorker selects its once-every-decade-or-so list of “20 under 40” writers worth watching. Nothing particularly surprising or imaginative in this go-round’s list, which appears to be slanted towards writers with some connection to The New Yorker (e.g., the writer had fiction previously published in The New Yorker)(note: to be considered for inclusion in the “20 under 40” issue, the writers had to supply some material for the issue) and biased against writers who could arguably be called genre writers (e.g., sci-fi, thriller/horror/mystery, etc.). Not to mention the whole ageism thing.
More on the list:
Omnivoracious: The Generation Is Set: The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 List Announced (contains links to each writer’s Amazon.com author page and his/her books)
The Rumpus responds with its “Ten over 80: Writiers to go Back and Read” list: “writers [who] will turn 80 or more this year, and all have been kicking ass for longer than we have been alive.”
Hugh Ferris’ skyscrapers may have been the most influential drawings of his time; every big city has a structure whose architect couldn’t help wondering what this new project would look like if Ferris sketched it.
Literal translation of Manhattan zoning ordinances, Hugh Ferriss, 1916
Hugh Ferriss‘ renderings, at their best, are some of the most evocative examples of American art of the previous century. Perhaps among his best known works is a series of sketches which show the development of form as it responds to building set-back requirements in zoning codes. Organic Processes in design development are here evident, as crystals seem to morph into buildings, their forms the logical result of the maximization of available light for the city below.
Time Out Chicago recommends 13 books as Summer 2010 reads, including “Kraken” by China Mieville: “In his new one, magical underground forces in London want to release a giant squid god, and a hapless cephalopod expert discovers he holds the key to unleashing the deity. We repeat: giant squid god.”
Jolt Digest: the online companion to the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology
Jolt Digest: the online companion to the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology
The Digest features short student-written articles on recent developments in areas such as patent law, copyright, biotechnology, cybersecurity, privacy, telecommunications, and cyberlaw.
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
Philip K. Howard at TED on Four Ways to Fix a Broken Legal System
(Source: http://video.ted.com/)
Facebook, arguably the largest and most important website in the world has most of its content walled off from Google. In fact, the biggest loser in the Facebook privacy debate is not Facebook, it’s Google. Why? Because the more people that put all their status updates, information and pictures behind a wall of privacy, the fewer status updates available to Google (and other search engines as well). The net result is that Google’s mission to index all the world’s information has been irreparably damaged. 500mm Facebook users and most of what they all publish to their networks is unavailable.