Yeah for OptOutPrescreen. Takes less than a minute to have five years of no credit card offers in your mail box.
Unless they are not who they say they are and half of Ukraine is gonna have a big party now with my social and other info. Well – luckily https is still pretty safe,
and so is google showing the site as the first hit, as long one is careful.
I was expecting the Opt Out process to be tedius. Turns out it wasn’t at all. Nice. Now let’s see when the letters top coming in …
Walter Murch is easily my second most favorite editor.
I really like how his talks focus on new aspects, and yet they are coherent. Since he is a coherent. It is always nice to listen to somebody who thinks for himself.
Not just repeats what others might have said. Even when he talks about ‘The Tell Tale Brain” – a book that I read and loved myself – he is able to give it an interesting
new perspective for me.
I sometimes wonder what the ratio of people that think as astute and independent as he does would need to be so that it would change the world.
My guess is that it actually very small. My fear is that the ratio in reality is even smaller than that.
Dear Google, I understand that one might feel sometimes the urge to rock the boat. That’s OK. google+ did not hurt. The black top bar is fine. Google Reader is a bit of a different story. But I’ll manage. But, please, please, pretty please: DO NOT let those people anywhere near gmail.
Just keep it working. As it is. It is great. No need for social features. No need for Buzz/Wave/whatever-you-fancy.
I’d be happy to give you even more money for it. Just don’t mess with it.
Please.
Pretty Please.
looks like Munch got it right (there are clips inside of the slideshow)
This one will be tricky to explain to the wife
Upside is that it’ll last around 400 years or so. No joke. Some of the machines in my dads work shop are older than 120 years. I could not destroy them when I was young. That makes them very indestructible.
During childhood we build an idea of our surroundings. Kids figure stuff out quiet naturally. It’s what we are wired to do. When are young. Or when we like to learn.
I don’t think that this is a big deal – since people always did adopt to new ways of communicating. Reading and Writing are similar techniques that are ‘no natural’.
I think that it is a big deal – since more and more of our world is made up by glowing rectangles. We are what we watch. And what we watch could be controlled by some few corporations. No need to put people in pods like in ‘the matrix’ and maintaining them. They can do that themselves AND be under tight super vision.
I guess we will find out which one it will be.
A recent lecture by David Simon
Very much worth seeing. He has his own perceptive that is coherent and thoughtful and based on his first hand experience. For me was able to shed some light on why the USA is the country with the biggest jail population. According to him 7% of inmates are there for violent crimes. Prisons are a profitable and growing business in the US. I don’t agree on his views in terms of labor. Would maybe be nice if the world would still be like he sees it. Small countries like Germany can still work under those premises. But only since they supply the rest of the world with their products. You don’t see many US made cars in Germany. Robots don’t need unions. Things have changed so dramatically in the last 10, 20 years. But the political system and peoples minds and perceptions are stuck in some fairy tale land of the 50s.
Yesterday two ‘science stories’ ‘broke’: “Neutrinos traveling faster than light” and “Computers can read images out of the brain”. I am borderline clueless on matters of physics, so I leave that one alone. The fMRI mashup by Nishimoto et al is borderline in my view. The presentation of their findings makes it way to easy to drum up headlines like “Brain Imaging Reveals What You’re Watching” or “Scientists Reconstruct Brains’ Visions Into Digital Video ”
Only spending little time with the setup it seems that the experiement pretty much reveals that 5,000 hours of youtube video are so stereotypical that even a fMRI of the v1 can match some patterns back. For a given individual, after hours of learning. To suggest that the video shown on the right as ‘coming out’ of the brain is extremely misleading.
Having two of those studies in one day means nothing of course. But one can go off on a tangent and wonder why – I am sure wonderful – people and scientists drop science in exchange for head lines and eyeball. Maybe it is time to decide over the 2012 budget? And I am sure that given realities of today it is much to get money for “we can go back in time” or “we can film your dreams”.
I have doubts that the Manhattan Project would have a chance today. Rewind to 1940: Some professors had drawn some numbers on chalk board. Up this day only very few
people understood what they were talking about. I certainly have no clue. They had no computer simulated films. They had no precedence. The bomb they were talking about
was by multiple magnitudes bigger than anything that had done before. There was nothing in reality to show for. Just scribblings on a chalkboard. And some common consensus among a few people. One could see this happening if they would have asked to disappear into the desert to do a bit of thinking. But they needed a bit more: Factories bigger than anything else that had been built. And 10% of all electricity in the entire US to run them. To make a handful of matter that -according to science- might make one big boom.
All based on science. And politicians and military people did go with it. And they built different models that both worked after five years.
iTunes just rejected to play a song that I purchased 3 years ago, since it told me I need to authenticate my current computer.
Instead of trying to figure out what is broken with the Apple authentication for that song I just went ahead and bought it again on Amazon. Without CRM.
Apple is notorious for having one of the worst user management systems for their online services. The documentation of my Apple ID changes and resets
spans many pages. There are none for other systems and services that I used equally long.
Funny how one company can be so great in a couple of areas and fail so consistently in others.
Adweek ventures into cultural history. And – in my opinion – they actually do succeed.