Jason Kottke on how “the iPhone is still from the future in a way that most” single-purpose electronic devices aren’t:

Once someone has an iPhone, it is going to be tough to persuade them that they also need to spend money on and carry around a dedicated GPS device, point-and-shoot camera, or tape recorder unless they have an unusual need. But the real problem for other device manufacturers is that all of these iPhone features — particularly the always-on internet connectivity; the email, HTTP, and SMS capabilities; and the GPS/location features — can work in concert with each other to actually make better versions of the devices listed above. Like a GPS that automatically takes photos of where you are and posts them to a Flickr gallery or a video camera that’ll email videos to your mom or a portable gaming machine with access to thousands of free games over your mobile’s phone network.

I think this is a pretty big deal, because it gives Apple and other makers of multifunction devices a more competitive position. It isn’t just that the iPhone has a camera, so you don’t need another camera – it’s that the iPhone’s wireless, sync, display, and other built-in features actually make it a BETTER solution for taking mobile pictures than any standalone camera.

This suggests a solid principle for multifunction devices (which also happens to be the one proffered by Umair Haque) – not innovation, but awesomeness. Adding extra features alone only adds value arithmetically, if that. (Sure, it’d be nice if the Kindle also had a calculator, but it wouldn’t really make it any better as a reader.) Extra features that in turn make each other work better adds value geometrically, at least. And the iPhone’s base of being a portable device with a nice screen, good UI, wireless connectivity, and ability to sync with a computer and cloud store — all, except wireless, foundational technologies of the original iPod — give it an incredibly wide base for adding geometric value.

It’s important, too, that the iPhone, like all media devices, doesn’t just compete for attention based on its features or costs; it’s also in competition for the geography of the human body. It’s what you put in your pocket, what you mount in your living room, what you stow away in your bag when you get on an airplane.

After we retired the Atari, my brother bequeathed me his Commodore 64 and his collection of 5.25″ floppies. Few of the disks had proper labels. Here and there you could make out a word crummily penciled onto an aging sticker. I dimly understood that most of the set had been copied from copies of software owned by my brother’s friends, but mostly, I just knew that they were mine now.

Far too much of my childhood was spent methodically inserting floppy after floppy and uttering the magic words that would reveal its secrets: LOAD "$",8,1

A jumble of code would cascade onto the blue screen, the processor would begin to whir, and after a few minutes, more often than not, it would groan and cough and settle to a halt. This meant the disk had been corrupted.

But every now and then, I’d slip in a disk and something marvelous would occur: inside the computer I could hear a stirring accelerating into flight, the cursor on the screen would disappear, the field of blue would change to black or white, and a program would begin.
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David Owen has a new book, titled Green Metropolis, that will be released next week. His 2004 New Yorker essay “Green Manhattan” [PDF] is a classic. The book looks like an extended treatment of the same idea.

Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares, as wastelands of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams. Yet residents of compact urban centers, Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all, spend far less time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan–the most densely populated place in North America–rank first in public-transit use and last in percapita greenhouse-gas production, and they consume gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-1920s, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. They are also among the only people in the United States for whom walking is still an important means of daily transportation.

These achievements are not accidents. Spreading people thinly across the countryside may make them feel green, but it doesn’t reduce the damage they do to the environment. In fact, it increases the damage, while also making the problems they cause harder to see and to address. Owen contends that the environmental problem we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world’s nonrenewable resources, is not how to make teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The problem is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan, whose residents presently come closer than any other Americans to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will have to come to terms with.

I think I forgot to post this a month or so ago when I couldn’t stop listening to it. Some genius had the amazing idea to remove the backing vocals from all the tracks on the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. The result is kind of breathtaking, especially “God Only Knows”:

The difficulty and the peculiarity of these vocal lines can get obscured in the full versions. Just listen to the fugue section of that song. Man.

And of course, “Sloop John B,” my other favorite song from Pet Sounds:

(MetaFilterrific.)

George Packer on the death of Sultan Munadi: “It’s Always the Fixer Who Dies.”

Great, great, great AskMeFi thread: In the art forms you are experienced or well versed in, what kinds of stuff is notorious for being only liked by the experts, and what kinds of stuff is notorious for only being liked by less experienced or educated casual consumers?

Examples of artists (or works of art) beloved almost exclusively by other artists in their domain include Rothko, Linux, Cloud Gate, Yasujirō Ozu, Ernie Bushmiller, Rush, the screenplay “BALLS OUT” (pdf) and Paranoia Agent.

There are also some fun minor art-snob arguments, and mini-digressions on the nature of taste. As well as a terrific New Yorker essay I never read about the appeal of Charles Bukowski.

We’ve been talking a lot about the future of digitization, about how much digitization needs to improve, about the severe limits that digitization still imposes on many things—books, for instance.

So, here’s a change of pace. Here is the almost perfectly digitizable object, almost perfectly digitized.

Small objects, easy to photograph in their entirety? Check.

Defined number of important views? Check. (Obviously two.)

Standard set of metadata? Check. (And click on one of the images above to see an example.)

So, given the ideal material for a digital archive, the American Numismatic Society delivers. There’s a powerful search engine but their collection is pretty browsable, too. And, listen, I only collect coins that I intend to spend on the train, but I defy you not to get a little lost in these pages.

And every coin has its own stable permalink! Swoon!

The only thing missing is that you can’t heft the coins, feel their contours. Fair enough. But I’ll bet you could even generate 3D models from these images, using the depth information implied by the shadows. When I finally have a home 3D printer I’ll crank out some of these guys and send ’em around.

And you know, ancient coins are perfect tokens of historical imagination, especially when captured so crisply. They’re totally familiar but deeply strange. You can imagine keeping one in your pocket, feeling it in your hand.

Check these off the list. Now we just gotta get those books right.

If you don’t watch Mad Men, and haven’t read or don’t know about Phillip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint, this doesn’t mean anything to you.

If you do, and have, these two guys seem as far apart as any two white men inhabiting New York in the sixties could reasonably be.

And yet, there’s something about Draper and Portnoy’s shared desire to jump out of history (the history of the world, the history of their own families), their sense that this is the time to do it, and that sex and language are the mechanisms to do so, that pulls the two together. If they met, I think they’d have a lot to say to each other.

(Inspired by this 40th-anniversary article about Portnoy’s Complaint in the Guardian.)

Joni Evans’s memoir-ish essay nicely connects the late Mad Men-era (in her case, of publishing, not advertising) to the digital present by way of an archaeology of office technology. It’s the intermediate transformations she registers that are more interesting, and maybe – arguably – more significant:

The Xerox machine meant that suddenly, not one manuscript was submitted to one publisher, but that 10 copies went to 10 publishers simultaneously. The first publisher to claim the book won, cutting a six-week process to six days or sometimes six hours.

Agents soon realized that they could auction books to publishers and not settle for the first bid. Knopf would bid against Putnam, Simon & Schuster would bid against Random House, and so on. The fax machine accelerated the process of signing contracts, and beamed manuscripts overseas for worldwide auctions.

Our lives changed. Agents descended on our formerly humble authors, empowering the new literary lions with Hollywood-like contracts and making us dizzy with new rules.

We were all drunk on the new attention. We hired public relations firms, sought Barbara Walters interviews and romanced the

Jamais Cascio on devices that pay attention:

Imagine a desktop with a camera that knows to shut down the screen and eventually go to sleep when you walk away (but stays awake when you’re sitting there reading something or thinking), and will wake up when you sit down in front of it (no mouse-jiggling required).

Or a system with a microphone that listens for the combination of a phone ringing (sudden loud noise) followed by a nearby voice saying “hello” (or similar greeting), and will mute the system automatically.

When you go down this road, extrapolating from existing abilities (accelerometers, face and voice recognition, light detection) to more complex algorithms, the possibilities get correspondingly more complicated:

What prompted this line of thought for me was the story about the Outbreaks Near Me application for the iPhone. It struck me that a system that provided near-real-time weather, pollution, pollen, and flu (etc.) information based on watching where you are — and learning where you typically go, to give you early warnings — was well within our capabilities.

Or a system that listened for coughing — how many different voices, how often, how intense, where — to add to health maps used by epidemiologists (and other mobile apps).

It seems to be almost an axiom that the applications of digital technology that are potentially the most beneficial for the aggregate likewise require the most information from the individual user – and therefore creep us out to the point where we’re reluctant to put them into practice. There’s got to be a name for this paradox – a digital analogue to The Fable of the Bees.