Posts by matt

There is nothing socially redeeming about the game Dad ‘n’ Me. It is violent, pointless, endless, and addictive. There’s not even the ironic, hipster sheen that normally comes with playing video games past the age of 17. Why would you want to throw your life away at such a young age? Do not click here and play this game, because it will actually rot your mind. I link to it merely to warn you away.

Clearly you, too, are wondering when the movie trailer mashup meme is going to die. But I still have to link to this one. Partly because it’s well-done, but mostly because there’s a shout-out to my favorite critic, “Chester Munro.”

If you enjoy the articles below, I imagine you’ll consider subscribing to the periodicals that published them, or at least buying The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2005, where they’re all assembled. Enjoy.

• The American Scholar: My God Problem, by Natalie Angier
• The New Yorker: Hollywood Science, Connie Bruck
• The New York Review of Books: Out, Damned Blot!, Frederick Crews
• The New York Review of Books: Twilight at Easter, Jared Diamond
• Popular Science: My Little Brother on Drugs, Jenny Everett
• The New York Review of Books: Stumbling Into Space, Timothy Ferris
• The New Yorker: Getting Over It, Malcolm Gladwell
• The New Yorker: Personality Plus, Malcolm Gladwell
• The New Yorker: The Grief Industry, Jerome Groopman
• The New York Times: Keeping the Faith in My Doubt, John Horgan
• Wired: The Homeless Hacker vs. The New York Times, Jennifer Kahn
• Discover: 20,000 Microbes Under the Sea, Robert Kunzig ($)

The Atlantic Monthly: A Two-Planet Species?, Wililam Langewiesche ($)

• The New York Review of Books: Crossing the Red Line, Bill McKibben
• Esquire: Please Stand By While the Age of Miracles Is Briefly Suspended, James McManus
• The New York Review of Books: Getting in Nature’s Way, Sherwin B. Nuland
• Wired: To Hell and Back, Jeffrey M. O’Brien
• The New Yorker: The X Prize, Ian Parker ($)
• The New York Review of Books: In the River of Consciousness, Oliver Sacks
• The New Yorker: Miracle in a Bottle, Michael Specter
• Scientific American: The Curious History of the First Pocket Calculator, Cliff Stoll ($)
• The American Scholar: Dining with Robots, Ellen Ullman ($)
• Popular Science: 106 Science Claims and a Truckful of Baloney, William Speed
• Discover: Whose Life Would You Save?, Carl Zimmer

$ = subscriber-only. Here’s 2004.

Via Unmediated, the GPS-enabled TrackStick has a very limited, but possibly very interesting function: “It tracks where it goes, and it remembers where it’s been.” Although Telespial Systems, the company behind TrackStick, seems to be most excited about its snooping potential — Spy on your kids! Watch your employees! — I love the idea that I could keep it in my pocket for a few months and produce an incredibly detailed map of my life.

Anytime this Greasemonkey script sees a price written in U.S. dollars on a Web site, it adds the current equivalent value in barrels of crude oil. I’m going to enable it for a while and see if it heightens my awareness of what “the price of oil rose $4 a barrel” means in everyday terms, or if it just annoys me. (Greasemonkey? Infosthetic.)

Amorphia Apparel. I especially like this. (Projects.mefi.)

A post on MicroPersuasion this morning reminded me of something I ran across a few months ago I thought was amusing and revealing. It’s the definition of “journalism,” from the 2000 American Heritage Dictionary:

1. The collecting, writing, editing, and presenting of news or news articles in newspapers and magazines and in radio and television broadcasts.

2. Material written for publication in a newspaper or magazine or for broadcast.

3. The style of writing characteristic of material in newspapers and magazines, consisting of direct presentation of facts or occurrences with little attempt at analysis or interpretation.

4. Newspapers and magazines.

5. An academic course training students in journalism.

6. Written material of current interest or wide popular appeal.

For the first week since I’ve been keeping track of it, Firefox is more popular than Internet Explorer with visitors to Snarkmarket (for the week beginning March 1 and ending March 8). 46.64% of visitors over the past week used FF, compared with 41.24% who used IE. IE won out by a slight margin (44.56% to 42.85%) over the month from Feb. 8 to Mar. 8, but FF is trending up:

1/11-2/8: IE (49.25%), FF (39.07%)

12/14/05-1/11: IE (47.97%), FF (39.71%)

11/16-12/14: IE (51.7%), FF (35.73%)

10/19-11/16: IE (59.2%), FF (25.6%)

The iPod Moment: When a technology no one knew they wanted becomes indispensable.

Before the iPod came along, no one was sitting around saying, “You know, it would sure be nice to have a portable library of all the music I could ever hope to listen to.” A year after it first came out, I was still asking what the big deal was. After all, portable CD players that could play MP3s had been around for a while without totally taking off, and they could carry a decent amount of music. Who needs to have every song they own in their pocket?

Then I was given an iPod, and suddenly that need was mine. Yes, Master Jobs, I understand now. It was a fundamental shift in music delivery. I will never question you again. Lead me.

Yesterday, I got into a long conversation with my boss about iPod moments for other technologies, especially photos. And it reminded me that I had to blog about Memory Miner.

Read more…

Bah. Don’t believe Joe Strupp. The South Dakota Argus Leader‘s “brave” resurrection of the wikitorial isn’t a wiki at all. It’s a plain old blog that allows moderated comments.