meta

The outboard brain

Looking up old references on brain science (for reasons that will become evident in time), I found this post from last year, about the committee of the self, with some ace comments from Andrew, Tim, Saheli and Matt Penniman.

There’s also this post from February about computers and chess players working not against each other but together. Reading it again, I felt the same thrill I felt the first time; jeez what a huge idea. Human/computer teamwork has such huge (completely unfulfilled) potential. Not interaction; teamwork.

I haven’t been using Snarkmarket as a notebook and reference as much, or as deeply, as I should. There’s some good stuff in here! (I was inspired to go through our brains tag by Tim’s recent archive spelunking. And I haven’t even looked at braiiins yet.)

 

A new roost for @robinsloan

You saw this already if you subscribe to the robinsloan.com feed, but I’ll repeat it here for others who might be interested: I’m going to go work at Twitter! The full story is over here.

Here’s something the snarkmatrix might be interested in. Talking about Twitter, and why I think it’s wonderful, I made this assessment (part of the link above):

Twitter makes me stop and think about language more frequently and more deeply than any other tech­nology in the world.

A little over-the-top maybe, and definitely untrue if you want to be pedantic and call writing itself a technology, etc. But! As I thought about it, I realized there was an essential truth to the statement. Nowhere do I ponder creative sentence construction and word choice more than inside the little box with the 140-character limit.

Snarkmarket blogging will be unaffected. And! It seems apropos to mention it: You can follow @snarkmarket on Twitter, too. It’s entirely redundant if you’re subscribed to the feed, but I know some people who like to track their favorites (ahem) over there, too.

 

Tim on the Wire

The Atlantic Wire, that is. Tim gets a link. Funny, I had no concrete opinion of the Atlantic’s new opinion-aggregation site until now; I think it’s great!

 

Nice work, Matt

Man, I am really digging this new look—and the new features, like THREADED COMMENTS.

Every time I load up the front page (this is quite often) I go “oh, hey there… oh hey there.”

That is all.

 

Investing in Snarkfrastructure

Snarkmarket has new guts and a new look! Let us know if you see anything funky or buggy. There are still plenty of rough edges, but we figure we can just smooth ‘em out in-flight.

Huge thanks to Matt for a new look that’s totally fresh but also faithful to the Snarkmarket gestalt. You’ll notice that it’s more open and, we hope, more readable.

Update: Is it really impossible to make a blog back-end transition without spewing a strange core-sample of posts out into Google Reader? Argh! Deepest apologies, Google Reader subscribers. With any luck the Snarkmarket feed will look normal again… soon…?