Sebastian's Interesting Items

WIREDoo search engine gets running man stamp of approval (video)

2011-10-24T03:59:00Z

MC Hammer already proved that you only need one hit record. But can you get by with just one search engine? Not if you believe his pitch to the Web 2.0 Summit this week, which promoted a "deep search" technology called WIREDoo. The rapper-approved tool emphasizes relationships rather than keywords, which yields very different results to Google's. Type in 90210, for instance, and instead of pages of links about the TV show, the pre-beta WIREDoo brings up stuff about the neighborhood -- schools, homes, the crime rate and other supposedly useful information. You'll find the full presentation after the break, but don't expect any nostalgic dance moves -- Hammer is serious about this, just like he was about those revolutionary tablets.

Continue reading WIREDoo search engine gets running man stamp of approval (video)

WIREDoo search engine gets running man stamp of approval (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 23 Oct 2011 23:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink CNET | Information Week | Email this | Comments

Densely-linked cluster of 147 companies control 40% of world's total wealth

2011-10-23T05:07:05Z

The network of global corporate control (PDF), a study published in PLOS One, analyzes the ownership structures of the world's corporations and finds a tightly-knit cluster of 147 entities control 40 percent of the world's wealth. Not only is this creepy inasmuch as it puts a lot of power into a small number of hands, but it also suggests that the governance of much of the world's wealth is closely correlated, so one disaster could sweep like wildfire across them all:

The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

(via Kottke)

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world [newscientist.com]

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel..."

2011-10-20T22:30:41Z

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have”

- Steve Jobs

Meanwhile, back in the States.

2011-10-19T22:16:00Z

Meanwhile, back in the States.

Accelerometer-based keylogger in your phone guesses your PC keyboard typing from your body's motions

2011-10-20T11:29:35Z

A Georgia Tech team has built a working app for latest-generation mobile phones that uses the built-in accelerometer to guess which words you're typing on your PC's keyboard, by measuring the movements of your body as you type.

The technique works through probability and by detecting pairs of keystrokes, rather than individual keys (which still is too difficult to accomplish reliably, Traynor said). It models “keyboard events” in pairs, then determines whether the pair of keys pressed is on the left versus right side of the keyboard, and whether they are close together or far apart. After the system has determined these characteristics for each pair of keys depressed, it compares the results against a preloaded dictionary, each word of which has been broken down along similar measurements (i.e., are the letters left/right, near/far on a standard QWERTY keyboard). Finally, the technique only works reliably on words of three or more letters.
For example, take the word “canoe,” which when typed breaks down into four keystroke pairs: “C-A, A-N, N-O and O-E.” Those pairs then translate into the detection system’s code as follows: Left-Left-Near, Left-Right-Far, Right-Right-Far and Right-Left-Far, or LLN-LRF-RRF-RLF. This code is then compared to the preloaded dictionary and yields “canoe” as the statistically probable typed word. Working with dictionaries comprising about 58,000 words, the system reached word-recovery rates as high as 80 percent.

(via /.)

(Image: Keyboard, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from bull3t's photostream)

Georgia Tech Turns iPhone Into spiPhone [gatech.edu]

John Cage

2011-10-20T00:00:00Z

"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry."

Nokia Q3 2011 earnings: operating profit sinks 60 percent, but sales beat estimates

2011-10-20T10:18:00Z

Man, can Nokia World get here any faster? Nokia needs Windows Phone in perhaps the worst possible way, and if you had any doubt whatsoever on that, just take a look at the outfit's woeful Q3 2011 earnings. Right off the top, net sales dropped 13 percent year-over-year (and three percent from Q2), while operating profit plummeted a staggering 60 percent year-over-year (and 36 percent since the prior quarter). All told, the company recorded net sales of €9 billion ($12.35 billion), and while things are gloomy in comparison to the glory days, it still has a whopping €5.1 billion ($7 billion) in its coffers. And the good news doesn't end there. The company's shares actually surged on word that the losses weren't as bad as anticipated, and that overall sales beat estimates. Only in a stock market can the loss of €68 million ($93 million) be "positive," but hey -- we're sure Nokia will take all the silver linings it can find. Of course, things should be on the up-and-up after a spate of WP7-based Nokia devices are revealed later this month in London, but it still remains to be seen how soon the company can ship, and if it can penetrate a smartphone market that's gaining iOS and Android loyalists by the truckload each day. Hit the links below for more percentages than the average simpleton can shake a stick at.

Nokia Q3 2011 earnings: operating profit sinks 60 percent, but sales beat estimates originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Oct 2011 06:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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TMI Obituary

2011-10-20T10:02:08Z

Did we really need to know about the pocketknife thing?

iPhone 4S supports GLONASS satellite system, much to the delight of Russia

2011-10-20T11:02:00Z

What does a Russian satellite system have to do with the iPhone 4S' GPS capabilities? Allow us to explain. Russian site iPhones.ru recently noticed that the 4S' spec page lists support for both assisted GPS and GLONASS -- the Kremlin's global navigation satellite system and acronym for GLObalnaya NAvigatsionnaya Sputnikovaya Sistema. The country launched GLONASS 35 years ago in the hopes that it would eventually provide an alternative to GPS and the EU's forthcoming Galileo, thereby reducing Russia's dependence upon US- or Europe-operated systems. The global system has since been beset by delays and budgetary setbacks, but last week, a Russian rocket successfully launched the 24th and final GLONASS satellite, completing the constellation and inching the infrastructure closer to full activation.

News of the iPhone 4S' support has already elicited a delightfully surprised response from the Russian media, with daily Vedomosti writing: "If the iPhone 4S really does have Glonass navigation, this would be the first time the Russian system reached the world market." (Nokia, it's worth noting, announced in August that it would manufacture GLONASS-compliant handsets, while Samsung's High Fidelity Position app offers similar compatibility.) In light of Russia's economic and regulatory climate, however, the move may not seem so shocking. The Kremlin already imposes import taxes on handsets that don't support GLONASS and, as Russia's iGuides.ru points out, has even threatened non-compliant devices with an outright ban. Apple, meanwhile, has made no secret of its interest in expanding its influence within the country, with CEO Tim Cook recently referring to the Russian market as "more promising." It remains to be seen whether this added support results in sharper navigation capabilities, or if it enhances Apple's presence within Russia, but it's certainly a compelling development, nonetheless.

[Thanks, AXR]

iPhone 4S supports GLONASS satellite system, much to the delight of Russia originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Oct 2011 07:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink 9to5Mac | iPhones.ru (Russian), iGuides.ru | Email this | Comments

The Logistical Mess Created by Ice Cream Sandwich For the Android Update Alliance

2011-10-20T12:00:00Z

The release of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich yesterday is going to pose a bit of a problem for the Android ecosystem. Overall, Ice Cream Sandwich should prove to be a boon for the leading smartphone platform. There will be new devices with great new functionality and user interfaces coming from the top manufacturers in the world. What is not to like?

The problem that the Android ecosystem is going to face is how to bring the majority of released devices up to date to version 4.0. At Google I/O in May, Google announced the "Android Update Alliance," a partnership between the top OEMs and major carriers. Little has been heard from the Update Alliance since. The nature of what Ice Cream Sandwich brings to the table is going to make the alliance's job all that much harder.

Sponsor

The Alliance & Its Goals

The Update Alliance includes Verizon, HTC, Samsung, Sprint, Sony Ericsson, LG, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Motorola and AT&T. The goal is to make sure that new Android devices get platform updates for 18 months after initial release as long as the hardware allows.

There is no coincidence with the 18-month update guarantee and the fact that all four of the major U.S. cellular carriers allow users to upgrade their phones 18 months into a 24-month contract. If devices no longer get new platform updates then a user may be more likely to go buy a new device.

Android took a major jump in functionality at version 2.2 Frozen Yogurt. It was the first time that Flash worked on Android. Froyo was also the first time that Android was enabled for applications like Netflix to make the jump to devices. The jump between Eclair 2.1 and 2.2 is really where the whole "fragmentation" and user outcry that they were not getting platform updates in time came from. Gingerbread 2.3.4 was released and those with Froyo did not cry quite as loud as they did when jumping from Éclair to Froyo. Gingerbread, in the longer scheme of Android evolution, was a minor update.

Edit -- Sentence above edited as it could be misconstrued that Netflix uses Flash on Android devices. That was not the intention of the sentence but rather that Froyo was the first time that Flash was enabled on Android devices. Coincidentally, other video standards were also supported, making Netflix possible as well.

Ice Cream Sandwich is not a minor update. This is a completely new version of Android, built on top of Honeycomb version 3.x, not on top of version 2.x. That is why the update process for existing smartphones is going to be difficult.

Fragmentation & Skins

As Phil Nickinson of Android Central points out in his recent article on Android fragmentation (which was a response to this article by Molly Wood of CNET), the types of updates that we have seen this year for Android really have very little to do with the Update Alliance. Nickinson correctly points out that the updates that came from May through the summer were more or less already planned by the OEMs and carriers. It is also worth checking out the fragmentation charts from Oct. 15 on exactly how fragmented the U.S. Android ecosystem actually is.

The fact of the matter is that the Gingerbread update was not a hard one for the carriers and OEMs to rollout. There was very little jump in functionality. The problem is going to come with how the carriers and OEMs try to reconcile Ice Cream Sandwich into various bloatware and skins.

HTC, which has been one of the OEMs on top of updating its Android line, may be in trouble here. To a certain extent, HTC just had its lunch eaten by an Ice Cream Sandwich. Android 4.0 institutes a lot of what HTC has been doing with its "value added services" and Sense Android skin. On one hand, kudos to HTC for making a great skin for Android. HTC certainly makes a tastier version of Android than Samsung's TouchWiz and certainly the ill-fated Motorola Motoblur. The problem is that HTC is going to have a hard time reconciling Sense to Ice Cream Sandwich because the skin is so baked into the hardware. Motorola and Samsung are not going to have quite as hard a time because the skins the companies use lays more lightly on top of Android than Sense does.

HTC released a statement regarding its Ice Cream Sandwich plans saying that it would "look at the new version" and decide its roadmap going forward.

On the carrier end, as long as the OEMs have Ice Cream Sandwich updated to their existing phones and ready to ship, there is no reason not too. Android over-the-air updates are expensive on the carriers, which is one of the (many) reasons that new Android flavors do not get shipped in a timely manner. This was the problem that Samsung and AT&T had when updating the Galaxy S Captivate from Éclair to Froyo.

One thing that Ice Cream Sandwich does that makes will ease the burden on the OEMs is that it makes Android backwards compatible to a variety of screen sizes. In theory, that should help speed up development cycles. Otherwise, updating older Android phones to ICS is a logistical mess that will only be solved with time as consumers upgrade devices.

Discuss

The Gadget Show builds an FPS simulator that shoots back (video)

2011-10-20T07:50:00Z

Racing simulators are ten a penny, but the closest an FPS player will get to an immersive experience is buying some branded peripherals. Armed with a pre-release level of Battlefield 3, The Gadget Show enlisted a team of design experts to transform a Birmingham studio into an FPS simulator costing £500,000 ($650,000). A four by nine meter video dome surrounds the player as they stand on an omni-directional treadmill that lets you walk wherever you want to go. Ten infra-red motion tracking cameras and a sensor on your gun enables the picture to follow where you point it and a Kinect hack controls your jumping and crouching. The fun doesn't stop there -- 12 paintball markers mean that every time you get shot in the game, you'll feel it. The show airs in the UK on October 24th at 8:00pm, Channel 5. We've got a behind the scenes gallery below (supplied by those lovely people from the show) as well as PR and a trailer after the break.

Gallery: The Gadget Show Battlefield 3 Simulator - Behind the Scenes Gallery

Continue reading The Gadget Show builds an FPS simulator that shoots back (video)

Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment

The Gadget Show builds an FPS simulator that shoots back (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Oct 2011 03:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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U.S. Public Debt: Going Greek

2011-10-20T08:00:32Z

Here is one chart that may be used in our grandchildren’s economic and political history classes. The current debt service burden on the national debt (as % of GDP) is as low as it has been in last thirty years. As one Latin American finance minister used to say, “debt and deficits without tears.”

The chart may surprise many given the huge run up in the U.S. federal debt over the past 10 years. The data show that the total public debt stock has increased from $5.7 trillion on September 30, 2000 to $14.8 trillion on September 30, 2011.

The net interest cost to service the debt, however, has fallen as percent of GDP due to the sharp drop in the average interest rate paid on the debt, which fell from 6.63% in 2000 to 2.886% on September 30, 2011. Growth also contributed to the drop and as a rule of thumb if the average interest rate is below the nominal growth rate, the ratio falls.

The danger of massive borrowing at record low interest rates is that it makes the borrower extremely vulnerable to an increase in rates. This was the case of the housing bubble. This is the case of Greece. Furthermore, debt and leverage is rewarded in a declining interest rate environment and punished as rates increase. A repeat of the 30-year secular decline in interest rates is not likely.

Rising interest rates can also reduce market confidence in a heavily indebted borrower’s ability to service its debt, which in turn reduces market access and increases the rollover risk of maturing debt. Default, bailout, or, in the case of a country with an autonomous central bank, hyperinflationary monetization of maturing debt becomes the only options.

What puts the “acute” in an acute sovereign debt crisis is the inability to roll over maturing debt. No doubt Secretary Geithner understands this and, as the chart illustrates, is trying to extend the average maturity of the public debt.

Borrowing at low interest rates also raises several questions. What will happen to the U.S. budget deficit if economy picks up and interest rates return to normal? Will the increase in cyclical tax revenues be offset and increase in interest payments on the national debt? What are the political implications as debt service crowds out expenditures in the rest of the budget? Did the Fed enable the borrowing binge by its zero interest rate policy?

Borrowing at low interest rates is the like the analogy of the two frogs in a pot of boiling water. One is dropped into a pot of boiling of water, feels the pain, and immediately jumps out. The other is put into pot of cold water and as the heat is turned up enjoys itself in the Jacuzzi while boiling to death. High interest rates are penal, low rates are not, until they begin to increase.

Greece borrowed most of its bond denominated public debt at an average interest rate of around 5.0 percent. That was some Jacuzzi.

P.S. If you think the U.S. is vulnerable to an interest rate shock, take a look at Japan. Yikes!

Would You Eat This Bacon?

2011-10-20T07:32:08Z

This is an ethical conundrum for the ages.

kumb.com

The Unravelling of the Real 3D Mandelbrot Fractal

2011-10-19T04:30:57Z

via http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/2mandelbulb.html

I’ll Just Cherry-Pick the Negative Part Because I’m a Biased Pro-Apple Shill, Not Because It’s Further Proof That Android Has Endemic Performance Problems or Anything Like That

2011-10-19T04:44:36Z

Vlad Savov, hands-on with the just-announced Samsung Galaxy Nexus:

As to overall performance, we saw a good deal of stutter in the Galaxy Nexus before us. Taps were not always recognized and there were occasional delays in performing an instruction, though in Google’s defense, it was a phone fully loaded with running tasks and the software is being continually improved and optimized (i.e. it’s not yet fully baked). That having been said, it unfortunately remains the case that Android isn’t as swift and responsive as iOS or Windows Phone (or even MeeGo Harmattan on the N9). Or at least it wasn’t on the demo phone we got a look at. The subtle, pervasive lag that has characterized the Android UI since it inception is still there, which is not a heartening thing to hear when you’re talking about a super-powered dual-core device like the Galaxy Nexus.

How To Draw (This Is Not An Article About How To Draw)

2011-10-17T14:56:38Z

easier then it looks

"Some people have it, some people don't."

The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: A Course in Enhancing Creativity and Artistic Confidence is a famous drawing book which uses the insights of neuroscience to improve drawing skills. (Here's how recent the insights are: the author's name is Betty Edwards.)

Nevertheless, this is an outstanding book that everyone should read once, regardless of your interest in drawing.

Given my awareness of the biases and cognitive shortcuts that make our lives easier yet sabotage us, I was surprised that I didn't naturally appreciate what makes people/me terrible at drawing: reliance on cognitive shortcuts, i.e. symbols.

If I were to draw a person, I would draw a circle, then two smaller eye ovals, a triangle nose, and double line for a mouth, then tubes for arms and legs. Hence, all my drawings look like they belong on a refrigerator. But that's "how I draw": head= circle, eyes=ovals, legs=cylinders. An example from a children's book I started a long time ago:

And cave=tunnel.

Edwards calls this the "tyranny of the symbol system" because it dictates to us, forces our hand to draw symbols rather than what we see.

But it isn't simply that we draw using these symbols; we perceive using them as well. I don't bother to see the actual shape of a head because it was never important to; in order to see it for what it really is, I need to practice my perception. It is easy for me to see a news story as a manufactured construct, but it never occurred to me I was seeing every day objects wrong. My tilted computer monitor isn't a rectangle; it's a trapezoid.

So "draw what you see" requires practice perceiving things correctly: without the aid of your symbols. So lesson 1: draw something upside down.

Focus on the lines, not on what you think it is.

Symbolic drawing also impairs depth perception, angles, sizes, overlaps. Hold up your hand and point your fingers at your face. How would you draw that? Five long tubes? But in 2D, they're actually irregular stumps.

To relearn perception, Edwards says to hang a piece of glass (or use a window) and place your hand on the other side, close one eye (finally, being a pirate pays off) and draw the outlines you see.

It will feel weird, because you'll want the pencil to go "in" to the glass. Instead, you'll have to draw the line in an unnatural direction that will feel wrong. But practice this exercise enough times and you'll see things differently all the time, you'll be able to switch back and forth between 3D and 2D and witness the impact of perspective in your every day life. Edwards includes the following letter from Van Gogh:

I remember quite well, now that you write about it, that at the time when you spoke of my becoming a painter, I thought it very impractical and would not hear of it. What made me stop doubting was reading a clear book on perspective, Cassange's Guide to the ABC of Drawing; and a week later I drew the interior of a kitchen with stove, chair, table and window - in their places and on their legs - whereas before it had seemed to me that getting depth and the right perspective into a drawing was witchcraft or pure chance.

II.

Though this is a book about drawing, Edwards includes the following quote from George Orwell:

In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.

There is a controversy about whether language expresses thought or creates thought. I don't know. But I do know that language offers a feeling of certainty and masks ignorance.

Your explanation of why Obama or Bush are terrible Presidents are the equivalent of my drawing of a person, the difference is that you can see how my symbolic drawing results in a poor representation of reality, but you are unaware of how your explanations are just as primitive. Take a look at how many times you use a stock phrase or someone else's words ("in my opinion" "it's long been held", "tax and spend" "war of aggression" "fiscal discipline", etc). Cut those out and see what's left. But you'll use more words to cover your revealed ignorance. The problem isn't that you can't express yourself well, the problem, as in drawing, is that you did not perceive well. You relied on symbols, and they made you feel knowledgeable.

No surprise that many "geniuses" report seeing their tasks in two modalities, like the physicist who has a mental image of what the equations represent or the writer who hears his words as music. And when one is stuck at a thought or an emotion, it is helpful to translate pictures into words and words into pictures. (1)

III.

Next lesson: negative space. When you draw a chair, your mind is focused on the shape of the chair, but as this is a 2D drawing the spaces in between the chair are just as real. You should be able to draw a chair by drawing everything else but the chair:

This forces you to pay attention to the shape of the negative space, and also the contents of the negative space.

The analogy to media images is to "see" what isn't there: how is the story constructed out of what is not shown? A typical media maneuver is to show a story without showing you the media itself, because seeing it tells a different story. So as much as this looks cool and makes you feel a certain way:

it really looks like this:

Which doesn't make you feel that kind of way anymore.

You know this, but willingly unknow it to enjoy the movie. But we also willingly unknow that this same setup exists when they're interviewing the President or getting footage of a protest. The top picture doesn't just leave some things out, it leaves almost everything out except one tiny part. The top picture's focus is Indy; what is the bottom picture's focus?

Looking at the bottom picture, try drawing Indy as the product of negative space only. Did you consequently notice the guy behind the idol?

IV.

I've only covered a third of the book, but the three lessons discussed here-- drawing an inverted image, drawing a hand on a glass plate, and drawing the negative spaces are sufficient to improve your drawing immensely.

But I wanted to conduct an experiment.

pre-test

An 8 year old girl with Tourette's "copied" the cover of the Junie B. Jones book as part of a book report. Even the slug and the rabbit are unhappy about how they turned out. My experiment was: could she draw better after practicing those three exercises (inverted drawing, hand behind glass, negative spaces)?

This is the first attempt after practicing the exercises:

attempt 1

You can already see the improvement. Notably, she is trying to draw what she sees, and not relying on the default symbolic drawing that gets you slugs and rabbits. But she's not entirely free of the symbolic: the legs and arms are still spaghetti tubes that bend unnaturally; Jim's left hand is not bad but his right hand is still a childish heuristic. This happened not because arms are harder to draw than faces, but because arms are less important to her than faces and so she fell back on the symbolic.

Back to the exercises. Finally:

attempt 2

I realize this looks like the final, polished result, but it is actually only the third time the girl ever drew this picture; there were no other attempts. Note that it is all free hand pencil outline, with no mistakes (except one, behind Meanie Jim's head.) It's an amazing improvement. She is drawing what she sees.

I'd consider this experiment a success, but there is one more thing that makes it all the more significant and the real point of the experiment. If the problems of drawing are not technical skill but cognitive-- if it is truly a problem of perception and not manual dexterity or talent-- then the real work has to be done by the mind, not the hand. In other words, in order to become a better drawer, she shouldn't need to practice drawing, she needs to practice seeing.

So I made her practice the three Edwards exercises in her head. She never drew her hand using a glass pane; she stared at her posed fingers, and imagined how her pencil would move across an imaginary glass pane.

So what you are seeing is not her third attempt at drawing Junie B Jones and Meanie Jim; it is the third time she touched the pencil.

I will point out a tremendous secondary benefit to self-esteem, and now that she knows how to draw, she wants to draw, reinforcing the maxim that the best way to get a child to like doing something is to make sure they are good at doing it.

I wonder how well someone might learn any skill if they imagine practicing the skill. It might not be as good as actual practice, but how not as good is it?

1. A common misunderstanding about Freudian dream interpretation is that the dream images are explained using words, i.e. "I dreamt of a cigar, and a cigar is a symbol for penis." Dream images may be metaphors and rebuses for unconscious thoughts, but the descriptions of dreams are themselves metaphors and placeholders. Example:

"In my dream I saw Tom go over to Sally who was wearing a really bright white shirt."
What comes to mind when you think about the shirt?
"Just that it was so bright."
What comes to mind when you think of the word, "bright"?
Bright? 'Smart', I guess....

De▲th Wish.

2011-10-18T03:19:03Z

via http://deathclockticking.tumblr.com/page/3

Four short links: 17 October 2011

2011-10-17T10:00:00Z

Story Written in Reddit -- historical scifi based on the question "Could I destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if I traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion or MEU?" Movie rights were just acquired by Warners. (via BoingBoing)
Auditing Google -- the comically complex games played to move profits to jurisdictions beyond taxation is under scrutiny, at last. While you dodge taxes like this, you have no high moral ground for "do no evil".
Frontend SPOF Survey (Steve Souders) -- a "frontend SPOF" is any crap whose mere presence can delay the display of your web page. We've been bitten by this on Radar: "ooh, let's try this widget—wait, now it takes 12s to load a page, wtf?"
Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets -- an extension of CSS3, adding nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance, and more. It';s translated to well-formatted, standard CSS using the command line tool or a web-framework plugin.

So great! Fan-made title sequence for the Tintin movie by James...

2011-10-15T22:00:32Z

So great! Fan-made title sequence for the Tintin movie by James Curran.

(via Cartoon Brew)

The Daddy Of The Mac

2011-10-15T22:29:46Z

Folklore.org is a brief history of the development of the Macintosh computer in 119 stories. (previously, previously, previously, previously)

The venerated Steve Jobs is The Father Of The Macintosh. This narrative adds some dimension to his complex personality.