Anything he could do for them would only comprise a small push in a positive direction before the tremendous momentum of their negative tendencies reasserted itself.
—George Saunders, from Tent City, U.S.A, GQ Magazine, September 2009
If you’re interested in counter-culture, outsiders or homeless, crazy people in a tent city, you’ll dig this.
Craig Mod starts putting some critical thinking towards the tablet page:
Tablets are in many ways just like physical books–the screen has well defined boundaries and the optimal number of words per line doesn’t suddenly change on the screen. But in other ways, tablets are nothing like physical books–the text can extend in every direction, the type can change size. So how do we reconcile these similarities and differences? Where is the baseline for designers looking to produce beautiful, readable text on a tablet?
This essay looks to address these very questions. This essay also marks the release of an HTML baseline typography library for tablet reading. It’s currently iPad optimized. It’s called Bibliotype and the hope is for it to provide a solid base atop which we can explore. It’s very rudimentary, but rudimentary is a damn fine place to start.
Nation Post: Leaked U.S. cable lays out North American ‘integration’ strategy
The integration of North America’s economies would best be achieved through an “incremental” approach, according to a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable.
The cable, released through the WikiLeaks website and apparently written Jan. 28, 2005, discusses some of the obstacles surrounding the merger of the economies of Canada, the United States and Mexico in a fashion similar to the European Union.
“An incremental and pragmatic package of tasks for a new North American Initiative (NAI) will likely gain the most support among Canadian policymakers,” the document said. “The economic payoff of the prospective North American initiative … is available, but its size and timing are unpredictable, so it should not be oversold.”
This clip of John Stewart critiquing Donald Trump’s choice of pizza parlor to take Sarah Palin to, as well as Donald’s bad form in eating of said pizza is pretty awesome:
Like Stewart, I’m also a mutt from New Jersey who spent the weekends of his youth visiting his grandmother in Middle Village, Queens and I have to agree with him.
You broke my heart, Donald.
Shameful.
We’ve all be coping with the poor notification system in the iOS for quite some time.
Just remember, last June Apple poached the engineer who invented webOS notifications.
Apple knows how how bad the situation is.
I’m looking forward to next week’s WWDC keynote.
Patrick Rhone on how amazing Microsoft’s Kinect is and how they don’t know know how to use it in any capacity except as a toy:
It is really is an amazing and magical technology. Think about it. You are using natural real-world movement to mimic an action and it is happening in real time on a screen in front of you. No special gloves, wands, cables. Nothing. Just you. You pretend. It makes it real.
The problem is that Microsoft does not, can not, see it that way (and perhaps never will). They invented a device from the future yet could not untether themselves from the past and present. They could not see the potential to change the world with this device because they are too wedded to the idea that it had to work with the present. So, instead, it is just a toy, nothing more.
Over at Harvard Business Review, Umair Haque talks about the opulence bubble we’re in:
To illustrate why I ask, consider this set of questions: How’s your house price doing? Where would your 401K be, if central banks withdrew life support for banks? How steep is a college education this year (hint: on average, 10-15% more than last year)? How are weekly grocery and gas prices doing? Where are commodity prices — not to mention gold — headed? Bubble, bubble, toil, and trouble: these days, it seems, everywhere you look, there’s a bubble inflating — or popping.
I believe the mini-bubbles above are different ripples in what might call the surface of a superbubble: an opulence bubble. Here’s what I mean by opulence bubble: our conception of the good life, as I’ve discussed with you, has been centered on what I call hedonic opulence — having more, bigger, faster, cheaper, now. But we might be finding out, the hard way, that the pursuit of lowest-common-denominator industrial age stuff might have been steeply overvalued, in terms of its social, human, and financial value. And now, it’s coming back down to earth.
When the iPad was announced in April of 2010, the jokes didn’t stop.
Of all the great names to use — “Slate”, “Canvas” (via Daring Fireball), hell even plain “Tablet” is good — I find it amusing how many other “Pads” are on the market now:
MSI WindPad
Viewsonic ViewPad
HP TouchPad
LG Optimus Pad
Asus Padfone
The advice you usually get when launching a new product is to set it apart from the competition. This isn’t the case in the tablet market because none of the iPad competitors have a value-add or anything they do better than the iPad (OK, the TouchPad looks good, if it ever launches).
So instead of making themselves unique, even if it’s on the surface, they’ve all decided to blend in with their main competitor.
The Awl: Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert
Experts, geniuses, authorities, “authors”–we were taught to believe that these should be questioned, but until now have not often been given a way to do so, to seek out and test for ourselves the exact means by which they reached their conclusions. So long as we believe that there is such a thing as an expert rather than a fellow-investigator, then that person’s views just by magic will be worth more than our own, no matter how much or how often actual events have shown this not to be the case. For us to have this magic thinking about “individualism” then is pernicious politically, intellectually, in every way. That is not to say that we don’t value those who can lead the conversation. We’ll need them more and more, those “who are able to marshal the wisdom of the network,” to use Bob Stein’s words. But they might be more like DJs, assembling new ways of looking at things from a huge variety of elements, than like than judges whose processes are secret, and whose opinions are sacred.
I think about this idea of experts, DJs and curation in relation to current events in technology like Drudge Report’s continued success (on page of curated links) and GroupOn (curated products and events with quality writeups).
