December 30, 2011
by Daniel J. Wilson
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Culturally, and in their daily lives, Americans continue to glide through a ghostly land of opportunity they can't bear to tell themselves isn't real. It's the most dangerous lie the country tells itself.
—Stephen Marche: We Are Not All Created Equal
It is easier to climb the social ladder and earn more than one's parents in the Nordic countries, Australia and Canada than in France, Italy, Britain and the United States, according to a new OECD study.
December 17, 2011
by Daniel J. Wilson
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Trying to govern a complex society of 310 million people via a museum piece like the Senate is like trying to operate an airline whose fleet consists of Wright Flyers.
Why in the hell does Wyoming (population 563,626 in the 2010 census) have the same number of Senators as California (37,253,956) or Texas (25,145,561)? Cattle don’t get to vote.
December 15, 2011
by Daniel J. Wilson
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When British conductor and musician Clive Wearing contracted a brain infection in 1985 he was left with a memory span of only 10 seconds.
The infection – herpes encephalitis – left him unable to recognise people he had seen or remember things that had been said just moments earlier.
But despite being acknowledged by doctors as having one of the most severe cases of amnesia ever, his musical ability and much of his musical memory was intact.
—Martin Vennard: How can musicians keep playing despite amnesia?
December 11, 2011
by Daniel J. Wilson
1 Comment
So, what we’re seeing isn’t the expansion of our social network; it’s the shrinking of what and who we care about. My Facebook feed is full of what friends are listening to, what friends are reading, etc. And frankly, I don’t give a damn. I would care if they told me personally; I’d even care if they used a medium as semi-personal as Twitter. The effort required to tweet tells me that someone thought it was important. And I do care about that. I will care much less if Spotify and Rdio integrate with Twitter. I already don’t care about the blizzard of automated tweets from FourSquare.
—Mike Loukides: The end of social
I’ve been happy to see fewer and fewer friends using foursquare. Now if I could just hide the Spotify autoposts…
December 9, 2011
by Daniel J. Wilson
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If we’ve got the Kyoto treaty driving us towards a zero carbon house, how can we possibly expect consumers to manage those homes efficiently if we’ve got all these different systems and they’re not integrated[?]
…
This one device that controls 50% of your home's energy wasn't being innovated at all. It seemed like it was stuck in the ’80s.
—Colin Calder (Passiv Systems) and Tony Faddell (Nest) on their smart thermostat projects
December 4, 2011
by Daniel J. Wilson
1 Comment
The PC is dead. Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don’t merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we’re seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other—and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse.
—Jonathan Zittrain: The personal computer is dead
How much computing freedom and personal privacy are we willing to give up for convenience? I’m less and less comfortable with the balance being struck.
December 2, 2011
by Daniel J. Wilson
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Anyway, my point is that the Big Six’s pig-headed insistence on DRM on ebooks is handing Amazon a stick with which to beat them harder.
November 29, 2011
by Daniel J. Wilson
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I had an idea today for a stove that turns off burners if no weight is atop. Yes, I left the burner on one night when I went out. Necessity is the mother of invention, so perhaps forgetfulness is a distant cousin.
There is already a patent on file, but I can’t find a manufacturer that has put it into production.
November 27, 2011
by Daniel J. Wilson
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With D’Angelo, the four songs I’m not drumming on are the songs I’m jealous of. Bill Withers’ former drummer, James Gadson—71-year-old cat—is playing this rhythm and the final result was just, I’ve never been so jealous at not being part of the creative process.
November 27, 2011
by Daniel J. Wilson
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In the pages of this sketchbook, which hardly anyone but Kare has seen before now, she created the casual prototypes of a new, radically user-friendly face of computing — each square of graph paper representing a pixel on the screen.
—The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face