How is it that it’s been four whole days and nobody’s alerted me to BuzzFeed’s Wikipedia Band Name Generator? My band is called Newport Historic District, and our first album is titled, “Cooling Influences of the World.” The album cover will be an artful crop of this image.

One eyebrow raises: The Minneapolis Star Tribune published an original article about the Singularity.

Both eyebrows raise: They illustrated the story with this image, by Mark Boswell.

I sort of love this. Thanks, Taylor.

Farhad Manjoo on the Web, c. 1996:

In 1996, Americans with Internet access spent fewer than 30 minutes a month surfing the Web, according to Steve Coffey, who’s now the chief research officer of the market research firm the NPD Group. (Today, we spend about 27 hours a month online, according to Nielsen.)…

The biggest site, by far, was AOL.com; 41 percent of people online checked it regularly. Many didn’t do so on purpose: With 5 million subscribers, AOL was the world’s largest ISP, and when members loaded up the Web, they went to the company’s site by default. For similar reasons, AOL’s search engine, WebCrawler.com, was the second most popular page. Netscape, the Web’s most popular browser, and Compuserve and Prodigy, the nation’s other big ISPs, also had top pages.

Yahoo, which Media Metrix ranked No. 4, just after Netscape, was one of the few sites in the Top 10 that wasn’t affiliated with an ISP or a browser. Its main feature was its directory, a constantly updated listing of thousands of sites online. To produce the directory, Yahoo employees

Nate Silver, the web’s Statistician Laureate*, created a statistical model to predict the winners of the six major Oscar categories. He got four out of six right, missing Pen

Oh, man — Lifehacker has a powerful strategy for home office clutter. The principle is, don’t add more shelves to organize your stuff or spaces to put it in — they’ll just fill up with more junk, like cars and highway lanes in Atlanta. Instead, eliminate physical matter wherever you can, by scanning and shredding your files. Then, you must prebind yourself into a limited, manageable, securable amount of space. You must move your workspace into the closet.

Attentive Snarkmarket readers may know that this is where it gets interesting.

You see, one of the Snarkmasters already has a workspace in his closet, and while not an exact copy, it actually looks a whole lot like that very elegant picture above. And sometimes we joke about the whole “office in a closet” idea.

Another Snarkmaster, who lives in a city that, while not cheap, offers a whole lot more square feet for the money than the locale of SM#1, has a whole library in his apartment, filled with bookshelves and comfy chairs and file cabinets. But it’s also full of empty boxes, piles of books and papers, strollers and baby toys, the occasional laundry basket full of clothes, old card catalogues that are really cool-looking but that he hasn’t figured out what to do with, and these super-beautiful pocket doors that he uses to just close up the whole mess while he taps away on his laptop in the dining room.

The point is, one of these methods has achieved a kind of zen simplicity. The other may very well offer its own path to enlightenment, but it’s going to require a lot of digging to come out on the other end. So, to you, sir, kudos.

Here’s something for Dan: the European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin is offering a new four-year degree in Value Studies:

This is the first degree programme to be structured around the concept of value. In current academia, the fundamental types of value, and the questions and concerns which attend them, are separated out into several departments. Too often, the result is that the most important questions we expect academia to address are lost in the pursuit of specialized training. ECLA, in contrast, is a college without departments, where the different norms, claims and ideals we live by, and the different forms of theoretical work they inspire, are brought together in a single programme of study. Throughout the four years, students work with academics from different backgrounds on moral, political, epistemic, religious, and aesthetic questions, with the understanding that such questions are naturally and deeply connected. The programme is designed for students who want to combine their pursuit of special interests with a demanding studium generale and serious reflection on the meaning of education.

There are three area components to the value studies major — Art and Aesthetics, Ethics and Political Theory, Literature and Rhetoric — and each student picks TWO of these as concentrations.

The faculty — who all seem to be quite young — is packed to the gills with Committee on Social Thought refugees from Chicago, so you know that everyone there spends their time pondering Big Ideas. (Disclosure: I spent a year in Chicago doing an MA loosely associated with the Social Thought gang, and while it ultimately wasn’t for me, I am a sucker for this stuff. When someone starts talking about ideas of virtue in Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Weber, I pee my pants a little.)

I’m also fascinated by the idea of swapping “departments” for “norms, claims, and ideals.” It’s just enough of an isomorphism that you can still see it as a specification, but just differentiated enough that you can give it a completely different interpretation.

John Gruber on reducing friction between thought and expression:

Friction is a problem for software in general, not just programming languages specifically. There

Colleges abroad are porting the American liberal arts college, but even the branches opened by American universities are a little bit different:

Arguably the most ambitious attempt at a branch campus yet is underway in the United Arab Emirates. While there are also plans for graduate programs, NYU Abu Dhabi is to be, over time,

This essay by Ben Mathis-Lilley on why Conan O’Brien, haters aside, will kill as the new host of The Tonight Show, is merely probably true. However, this collective autobiography of O’Brien fans is right on the money:

Even Conan’s biggest fans are worried that he’ll fail or, worse, dumb down his act in an attempt to imitate Leno’s lucrative inanity. In this scenario, success is a more horrifying possibility than failure. I know about that last part because I’m one of those fans, a member of the demographic most likely to view Conan with love and affection: people who reached late-night-TV-watching age at around the same time Conan’s show started getting good, around 1995 or so. If you’re like me, you started watching Conan regularly at around age 13 or 14, and continued as a highly regular viewer for the next eight or nine years, your loyal fandom enabled by the fact that, as a teenager and then a college student, you had no problem staying up until 12:40 every night. (Fortunately, my turn toward marginally more responsible sleep/lifestyle choices has coincided with the rise of DVR.)

In fact, this observation is so good, I can’t believe BML doesn’t capitalize on it. This is why Conan will kill at 11:30 — because his fan base isn’t in their teens any more. We’re in our thirties, close enough, or older. We don’t even like to stay up that late, we’ve got to TiVo the damn show. And Jay Leno’s fans don’t want to stay up past eleven. The show will be a success not because Conan’s “matured” but because We Are Old.

I started seriously watching Conan in my freshman year of college; as a kid, I used to sneak downstairs to watch Johnny Carson. The Tonight Show w/ Johnny offered adulthood at its most enigmatic and alluring; with Jay, it seemed phony, bloated, contrived — above all, to be avoided. Hence, cartoons and Conan.

We’re the people who watch The Tonight Show now. Does it feel too soon?

So many gems in Roger Ebert’s remembrance of his relationship with Gene Siskel. Here’s one:

He got his second job, as the movie critic of the CBS Chicago news, because the newscast was bring reformatted to resemble a newspaper city room. Van Gordon Sauter, the executive producer, recruited Gene on the theory, “Don’t hire someone because they look good on TV; hire them because they cover a beat and are the masters of it.” Gene speculated that was the reason for the success of our show: We didn’t look great on TV, but we sounded as if we might know what we were talking about.

The rest you should find for yourself.