• Seven ways of web seaching.
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  (tags: internet search toread aggregated funny)

• Corn Plastic to the Rescue
  (tags: tech environment agriculture nature renewable)

From chapter 4 of The Singularity Is Near:

Although we have the illusion of receiving high-resolution images from our eyes, what the optic nerve actually sends to the brain is just outlines and clues about points of interest in our visual field. We then essentially hallucinate the world from cortical memories that interpret a series of extremely low-resolution movies that arrive in parallel channels. In a 2001 study published in Nature, Frank S. Werblin, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley, and doctoral student Boton Roska, M.D., showed that the optic nerve carries ten to twelve output channels, each of which carries only minimal information about a given scene. One group of what are called ganglion cells sends information only about edges (changes in contrast). Another group detects only large areas of uniform color, whereas a third group is sensitive only to the backgrounds behind figures of interest.

“Even though we think we see the world so fully, what we are receiving is really just hints, edges in space and time,” says Werblin. “These 12 pictures of the world constitute all the information we will ever have about what’s out there, and from these 12 pictures, which are so sparse, we reconstruct the richness of the visual world. I’m curious how nature selected these 12 simple movies and how it can be that they are sufficient to provide us with all the information we seem to need.”

• Photos of El Bulli meals.
  yum.
  (tags: photos travel food restaurants cool)

• Bakersfield Californian licensing Bakotopia software.
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  (tags: newspapers community social journalism)
• The New Yorker on Wikipedia.
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• A 1993 rape in cyberspace.
  (tags: article community journalism toread internet culture)
• WaPo’s Ehrens on blogging Enron.
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  (tags: blogging journalism newspapers toread article)
• Ken Jennings takes on Jeopardy.
  rex!
  (tags: funny internet writing games)

I’ve been a bad blogger. When the site I’m working on is launched (aaaaany minute now), I’ll make it up, I promise. But since I can’t sleep and am up at kind of an ungodly hour, I’d like to take a moment to geek out over Google’s answer to Sourceforge. Sourceforge drives me nuts. There’s tons of good stuff there, but how’s anyone supposed to find it? GCode is much prettier. Of course, the Googletrons say, “We really like SourceForge, and we don’t want to hurt SourceForge.” I say fiddle while they burn, Eric Schmidt. Fiddle while they burn! OK, back to my cave. (Waxtastic.)

• Logos redone Web-2.0 style. (♥)
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  (tags: 2.0 design funny)

• Linklater interviewed in comic form.
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  (tags: comic movies interviews)
• 9/11 Report: a graphic adaptation.
  (tags: books politics comic beautiful journalism tobuy)
• Starbucks frappuccinos out-fat Big Macs.
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  (tags: diet obesity)

You’re familiar with the basic idea: mass culture is diminishing, and niche culture is ascendant. You probably know the reasons behind it:

a) It’s becoming much cheaper and easier to produce stuff (books, music, movies), so there’s a lot more of it.

b) That stuff is becoming much cheaper and easier to distribute, so you can get it no matter where you are.

c) Filters like search engines and recommendation engines are making it much easier to find the best stuff.

And you probably know what all this means for business: there’s now significant money to be made in offering products that appeal to the few instead of the many.

And many of you already know that these ideas underpin a phenomenon that has been dubbed “the Long Tail” by Wired editor Chris Anderson. You may even, like me and Anil Dash, have been a subscriber to Anderson’s blog on the topic.

Now there’s a book. So what haven’t you heard about the Long Tail?

Read more…

• Open-source project management app.
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  (tags: business opensource projects tools)