Interesting. Some of the Gawker Media blogs (LifeHacker, Gawker, and Gizmodo) have started including comments, but only by invited users. It’s a Gmail-like invite system, the FAQ explains, where these special invitees get more invitations to give to trusted friends and cyberacquaintances. (Via Steve Rubel.)

Font junkies like me will love Typetester, a Web-based font comparison tool. (Spotted all over, most recently at Lifehacker.)

This is an old link, but seeing as I need to decorate my workspace, I’ve been casting many a curious eye at the Rasterbator, which lets you make giant, nicely pixellated mosaics of any image you’ve got.

OK, I’ve written exactly six posts so far in September, and the month is almost over. For those of you who didn’t know, this is because I’ve been in the process of moving to Minneapolis. Ruminations on moving will happen once I’m sitting at my computer in my apartment, which won’t happen for at least a week. For now, Robin does a pretty good job, no?

The Singularity begins the moment when humans create a technology more intelligent than themselves. Singularity theorists like Ray Kurzweil argue that the rate of innovation on earth has been increasing exponentially since before we got here, and now rests on the brink of outpacing human ability to keep up with it. When that happens, the theory goes, humans become obsolete and machines take over, innovating faster than we can possibly imagine.

For a primer on the concept, try this Vernor Vinge essay, what some call the first articulation of the Singularity. Vinge is something of a Singularity pessimist; in most of the outcomes he posits, life gets pretty bad for humankind. Kurzweil, whose new book is the catalyst for this post, takes a much cheerier view; the Singularity means humans will pretty much be over mortality, poverty and disease.

The kicker? Whenever they estimate how soon we’ve got till the Singularity, Vinge, Kurzweil and others talk in terms of years. Not millennia, not centuries, barely even decades. (Vinge: “I’ll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.” Kurzweil: “By 2030, a thousand dollars of computation will be about a thousand times more powerful than a human brain.”) Folks like Kevin Drum think 30-40 years are a generous estimate. (Drum: “Seems to me that the Singularity should be right on our doorstep, not 40 years away.”)

Of course there are critics of these ideas, including folks like Jonathan Huebner, who actually think technological innovation is slowing to a halt. (Some criticism of the criticism.)

Interestingly, the Long Bet between Kurzweil and Mitchell Kapor on this topic (the very first Long Bet) has folks split exactly 50/50 as to whether it will play out like Kurz says.

More on the Singularity and Kurzweil’s book:

• KurzweilAI.net:: Tons of articles from Kurzweil and his fan club.
• InstaPundit: An interview with Kurzweil.
• Acceleration Watch: More Singularity theorists.

While chatting online with a friend today about language, I ran across this wonderful list of expressions we use everyday with potentially nautical origins, including “by and large,” “the whole nine yards,” “jury rig,” “taken aback,” “windfall” and “toe the line.”

Via Waxy, cf. the ending of EPIC 2015.

Neighbornodes are group message boards on wireless nodes, placed in residential areas and open to the public. These nodes transmit signal for around 300 feet, so everyone within that range has access to the board and can read and post to it. This means that with a Neighbornode you can broadcast a message to roughly everyone whose apartment window is within 300 feet of yours (and has line of sight), and they can broadcast messages back to you. Boards are only accessible from computers that go through the local node.

Additionally, Neighbornodes are linked together, making up a node network to enable the passing of news and information on a street-by-street basis throughout the wider community.

I did it today. I had an omelette in a bag. And it was the best. (via)

If only this online dictionary/thesaurus (based on the Project Guttenberg e-text of Webster’s Unabridged) were available as a Google Desktop plugin.

As Jack Shafer noted in Slate, reporters — especially broadcasters — seem to have abandoned their fealty to the “objective” institutional voice when it comes to Katrina. From the visceral anger of FNC’s Shep Smith and CNN’s Anderson Cooper to the quiet candor of headlines on WashingtonPost.com, this catastrophe seems to have made journalists visibly mad, and it’s showing through the coverage.

I haven’t read or heard any complaints. It seems fitting that reporters should be outraged along with the rest of us at the bumbling of those in command. And it seems appropriate that journalists are batting away the lulling equivocations of politicians with the constant reminder that our people are dying unnecessarily and in droves.

What comes to mind again and again is Jehane Noujaim’s documentary Control Room, a look at Al Jazeera’s coverage of the war in Iraq. Before Control Room, I knew Al Jazeera only as an anti-American propaganda outlet. After Control Room, I wondered how Americans could regard Al Jazeera as any less objective or more jingoistic than our domestic news sources. U.S. news organizations shared the perspective that whether the war was generally “right” or “wrong,” U.S. victories in Iraq were always “good.” Control Room showed journalists at Al Jazeera questioning this lens, turning the issue back always to the point that overshadowed everything, the only point that seemed salient — our (their?) people are dying unnecessarily and in droves.

So the folks at Al Jazeera aired the footage of children dying we were mostly spared here in the U.S. And while U.S. news outlets demurred, Al Jazeera baldly speculated about the role oil played in the invasion. From the American perspective, Al Jazeera’s coverage felt out-of-balance. But to journalists for whom Iraq had been home, who grew up immersed in the country and its history, this frame is the only one that makes sense.

We know perfect objectivity is impossible. We also know there may be value in striving for it. What we don’t remember is how much objective truth is determined by the broadness or narrowness of our frame. In a newsroom entirely contained within the Middle East, the death of a child at the hands of a soldier is only that — a blameworthy, unmuddied wreck. Stretch your frame across the Atlantic, to a newsroom in Virginia, and that same death becomes a tragic but small part in a “victory,” a march forward for democracy.

In a newsroom safe from the ravages of floods and fires, an anchor urges a shakened reporter, “Let’s have some perspective.” In a giant, too-small dome littered with the bodies of the dead and the waste of the living, the reporter shouts back, “This is perspective.” And maybe they’re both right.

Update: Howie Kurtz breaks it down.

This link to the Web site of a professional photo retoucher has been floating around for a few days now, but I hadn’t clicked on it. When I did … wow.

It’s mostly images of models and celebrities, including many shots of Alicia Keys and Halle Berry. I was actually surprised at how good most of these models looked in the original photograph. I was expecting Attack of the Pores; instead I got Return of the MAC.

What’s shocking is exactly what the photo artist has removed or “enhanced” in image after image. He relentlessly edits out things like elbows, wrists, muscles, skin, hair, anything that disrupts the illusion of a perfectly curved body. And it’s only by looking at the before and after photos that it would dawn on you, “Wait, this model apparently has no knuckles.” It’s literally dehumanizing, and not even in a post-post-feminist kind of way.

The New Yorker special section on Katrina includes a shell-shocked commentary from New Orleanian Nicholas Lemann as well as from the typically incisive David Remnick, and an illuminating 1987 piece by John McPhee.