Gina Trapani hits on what might turn out to be Twitter’s killer feature:

When you post a question on Twitter and get a dozen replies within the next 10 minutes from actual humans

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Roger Ebert on the value of a blog’s readers:

This has been an education for me. No one will read all the comments except me, but if you did, you could learn all a layman should be expected to understand about the quantum level. You would discover a defender of Intelligent Design so articulate that when he was away for a couple of days, the Darwinians began to fret and miss him. You would have the mathematical theory of infinity explained so that, while you will still be unable to conceive of infinity, you will understand the thinking involved.

The larger post is a lovely, thoughtful meditation on death, identity, and faith:

What I expect will most probably happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function, and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. Perhaps I have been infertile. If I discover that somewhere along the way I conceived a child, let that child step forward and he or she will behold a happy man. Through my wife, I have had stepchildren and grandchildren, and I love them unconditionally, which is the only kind of love worth bothering with.

Also Van Gogh, Tintin, Walt Whitman, and Quantum Mechanics.

Meghan Keane defends X-Men Origins: Wolverine:

Taking Wolverine out of his latex X-Man suit is one of the best things that Twentieth Century Fox ever did. Unlike the swarms of spandex clad action stars that populate most films, Wolverine is a testosterone-fueled revenge fantasy. Other superheros/mutants have actual powers of magical proportions, but Wolverine always beats them. It

Sweet Gods of Heaven and Earth! It’s the best bookporn post ever!

That’s Xu Bing’s Tian Shu (Book From Heaven). Rachel Leow writes:

To make [the four hundred books and fifty-foot scrolls], Xu painstakingly carved Chinese characters into square woodblocks, in just the way his ancient printing predecessors would have done, had them typeset and printed, and the printed pages mounted and bound into books and scrolls.

The result is a truly spectacular display of bookmanship

Following on Robin’s post about Google Profiles, I’ve re-entered this old debate with myself about whether to create a personal web page. It’d be fun, I’m sure, and maybe even useful, but maybe not.

When I first became aware of the internet, the way to show that you were a savvy web-user was to create your own web page. This was where you stored all of your information that you wanted to share with the world: contact info, work stuff, pictures, writings and ideas, and a smartly curated set of links to other sites.

Now, of course, we’ve scattered all of that information all over the web to sites managed by companies (usually) and devoted to that purpose: Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and of course, blogs. Academics (which I am) often keep material on their university pages, but those sites usually aren’t suitable for sharing more than a photo, email address and short set of interests.

Strangely, though, that’s become in a way the preferred style for contemporary home pages — a single page that quickly sends you elsewhere, rather than gathering very much together.

My ideal would be to have a site like Bruno Latour’s, but I don’t have his CV with which to pull it off.

So what say you, Snarkmatrix? How many of you have an all-in-one home page? How does it work for you? If you were putting one together now, how would you do it?

I had occasion this morning to read “The Singularity Is Always Near,” a 2006 essay by Kevin Kelly; if you haven’t given it a look, you should check it out. It’s partly a debunking of Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near, but more precisely, it’s a periodic glimpse into the perpetual history of covert wonder:

I think that technological transitions represented by the singularity are completely imperceptible from WITHIN the transition that is represented (inaccurately) by a singularity. A phase shift from one level to the next level is only visible from the perch of the new level — after arrival there. Compared to a neuron the mind is a singularity — it is invisible and unimaginable to the lower parts. But from the viewpoint of a neuron the movement from a few neurons to many neurons to alert mind will appear to be a slow continuous smooth journey of gathering neurons. There is no sense of disruption, of Rapture. The discontinuity can only be seen in retrospect.

Language is a singularity of sorts, as was writing. But the path to both of these was continuous and imperceptible to the acquirers. I am reminded of a great story a friend tells of some cavemen sitting around the campfire 100,000 years ago, chewing on the last bits of meat, chatting in guttural sounds. One of them says,

“Hey, you guys, we are TALKING!

“What do you mean TALKING? Are you finished that bone?

“I mean we are SPEAKING to each other! Using WORDS. Don’t you get it?

But, it turns out, the problem with television is sports:

The broadband business is doing fine, as costs are coming down. Cable executives do worry that if costs rise as they expect because of surging online video use, they will need to find some way to get prices going up the way they are used to in their video business.

The bigger question is what happens to the video business. By all accounts, Web video is not currently having any effect on the businesses of the cable companies. Market share is moving among cable, satellite and telephone companies, but the overall number of people subscribing to some sort of pay TV service is rising. (The government’s switch to digital over-the-air broadcasts is providing a small stimulus to cable companies.) However, if you remember, it took several years before music labels started to feel any pain from downloads…

The wedge that breaks all this may well be sports. ESPN alone already accounts for nearly $3 of every monthly cable bill, industry executives say. With all these new sports networks pushing up cable rates, at some point people who aren’t sports fans might start turning in volume to Internet services like Netflix. We’re not there yet, but looking at the industry in the last quarter, you can see the pressures building.

Fascinating (and quick!) look at cable companies’ businesses. [Everything in bold is my emphasis.]

Translator/critic Wyatt Mason sums up a year of terrific writerly blogging for Harpers:

According to the webmaster, some hundreds of thousands of people (or “unique visitors,” in the creepily Rumsfeldean turn) have read my posts over the year. Yes, in the web-world, where a nipple slip can net you a million sets of eyes in a breathless blink and click, these are Lilliputian numbers. In my world, however, those are towering digits, enormous for what they might say about the reading life: that there is still, in our noisy culture, a quiet but forcible interest in finding good books to read, and in debating what makes books good.

We “unique readers” know this, in our solitary hours. But it is pleasing, at times, to have company in that knowledge, to know that one isn’t alone in one’s enthusiasms. For my part, I have taken great pleasure in the enthusiasm of readers for this space, and am grateful for the time you’ve spent here. For now, know that I’m turning my attention to other tasks, with the expectation, at some point future, of returning to one not unlike this.

I can’t quite put my finger on what I like about this farewell address (other than that I really like Mason’s blog) — all of the sentiments and tropes are expected, but their subtle, daisy-chained resonances are so gracefully done that it feels both fresh and sincere.

Intriguing aside in this Slate article by Huan Hsu on office workers in China adopting English names:

In the United States, people tend to view names and identities as absolute things

VERY mature books (is 8000 BC old enough?) with an astonishingly sexy zoom feature — similar to Google Maps, but smoother and more natural, especially with a two-finger trackpad. It’s all yours, for free, at the World Digital Library.