J.R.McHale

Building an Internet of Things

The Agence France Presse v. Morel legal case and the issue of the use, by news agencies, of images from social networking websites such as Twitter

The Gizmodo Warrant: Searching Journalists in the Terabyte Age

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg9qnWg9kak

Tiny Hong Kong apartment transforms into 24 rooms using sliding dividers.

“Kentucky Derby” by Andrea Cohen, a poem about “jockeys, ponies, and golden eggs filled with candy, and how quickly races are won when you’re drinking.”

I can watch Al-Jazeera live on my iPod Touch anywhere on earth with an internet signal, but I can’t watch CNN. I can view EuroNews in real time from my office computer in Cairo, but not Fox News. I can watch BBC’s Arabic network live in my lap on a Wi-Fi-enabled jet 30,000 feet above the Atlantic, but not NBC. American TV news organizations may claim to embrace the digital age, but this is studio-concocted nonsense. Not a single major cable or broadcast news network in the United States consistently streams their programming in real time.

Soup: “Blogger” Isn’t A Pejorative

RIP Malcolm McLaren: wreath on the back of the hearse carrying his casket.

So now we know what Zuckerberg’s megalomania is, and he’s brilliant, and hired the right guys … to make it happen. But think about the role he’s cast himself in for a minute. Facebook is to be the identity system for the web. A company? That just can’t work.

Dan Chiasson, writing in the New York Review of Books on The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis: “The stories can seem like impersonal, even cruel personals ads, as though their author were paying for space by the word…. It is possible to regard Davis’s interest in human beings as more forensic than empathic, as though she were running a clinical trial. But I think the days of regarding her this way are now over, with the publication of this magnificent volume. Joyce called his Dubliners style a ‘scrupulous meanness’: Davis is the heir to that style, and to another, earlier heir to it, Samuel Beckett. But this is one bright and comprehensive book of life, a kind of handbook of human paradox.”

Wow, Maryland, that’s some state song you have:

“Maryland, My Maryland!
She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb;
Huzza!
She spurns the Northern scum!
She breathes! She burns!
She’ll come! She’ll come!
Maryland! My Maryland!”

(via The Volokh Conspiracy law blog)

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/30183073001?isVid=1

James Dean pulls a gun on Ronald Reagan (in newly discovered tv footage)

According to people like Verizon’s CEO, the US is number one in broadband, no question about it. But one only has to look around the world to see just how specious such claims are. Take Hong Kong as an example. City Telecom made waves a few months ago with its US$13, symmetric 100Mbps connections. Today, the company slashed prices on its much faster 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home offering; a fully symmetric, 1Gbps connection costs HK$199… or US$26 a month.

If you had told me, though, that a new science fiction novel had just come out featuring a planet on which vast turbulent structures of glass fly through the global atmosphere, posing a dire threat to machinery and drifting across whole continents in a kind of low-intensity storm of aerosolized crystal, I would, naively, never have assumed that such a thing might also be possible here on earth.

nevver:

The Ramones – An Autobiography, Alejandro Cesarco

Lifehacker: 10 Ways to Access Blocked Stuff on the Web

Happiness: No Purchase Necessary, Says Study

A sunny day in LA: City Hall reflected in the face of the new police headquarters.

© 2010 j.r.mchale

Core Memory: Photographs of Vintage Computers

Spin’s fifteen best record stores in America. No. 1 = Amoeba Records, Hollywood.

Photo by colonelchi from flickr: CC (Creative Commons) BY-NC-ND 2.0