Category: interesting
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Planning for the Worst Case Scenario
Eliezer Yudkowsky on planning for the abyssal. Never mind hindsight on the real-estate bubble – there are lots of things that could potentially trigger financial catastrophes. I’m willing to bet the American government knows what it will do in terms of immediate rescue operations if an atomic bomb goes off in San Francisco. But if…
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The Storytelling of Ian McEwan
I’ve never read any of Ian McEwan’s novels, but after reading a lot of intriguing stories about his writing style (specifically, this article discussing McEwan’s Enduring Love) I think I may have to add him to my reading list. This comprehensive look at Ian McEwan’s life and writings—full of insights and observations—will hopefully pique your interest too. via Arts…
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The Urban Paradox
With all the benefits cities bring to their inhabitants there are also numerous drawbacks; drawbacks that could, if not accounted for and studied, spell the end of cities as we currently know them. That’s the view of Geoffrey West—president of the Santa Fe Institute—as he discusses what needs to be done to safeguard the future…
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The Places We Live
The Places We Live exhibits awe-inspiring photos of slums in combination with stories from the people who inhabit them. Well worth enduring the Flashtastic interface for. In 2008, for the first time in history, more people will live in cities than in rural areas. One-third of these urban dwellers—more than 1 billion people–live in slums.…
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The Trough of No Value
The trough of no value is the concept that most objects go through fluctuations in their real-world worth: the trough is that seemingly never-ending time between used/junk and antique/collectible. Unfortunately the majority of my possessions fall into this category, including, it appears, those vintage Wharfedale speakers that I was looking for this past weekend (apparently I…
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Year One in Review
366 days, 616 posts and 15,144 spam comments later, I am happy and proud to announce that Lone Gunman is now one year old (founded on February 29th 2008, I suppose it’s not even that, is it?). LG has evolved into something completely different to what I had first envisaged and the whole experience of…
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Portfolios Instead of Diplomas
Jeff Jarvis agrees with teacher Mark Pullen’s opinion that the education system should be modified to produce portfolios instead of, or in addition to, qualifications. Perhaps we need to separate youth from education. Education lasts forever. […] What if we told students that, like Google engineers, they should take one day a week or one…
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Timeline of a Car Crash
In designing the Falcon XT, Ford engineers set out to discover the anatomy of a car crash and found that the accident is typically over before we’re even consciously aware of it happening. This is a reconstruction of a crash involving a stationary Ford Falcon XT sedan being struck in the driver’s door by another…
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Conversations with Charlie Rose
The archives of Charlie Rose are available on the official website and this past weekend I watched these excellent conversations: An excellent talk on technology and innovation with Marc Andreessen, a man with impressive Valley credentials: co-founder of Ning, co-author of Mosaic, founder of Netscape, investor in Digg and Twitter, and board member of Facebook…
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Wasting Our ‘Cognitive Surplus’
From a speech he gave at the Web 2.0 conference in April 2008: Clay Shirky tracks the history of our cognitive surplus, explaining what we could, or need to do with it: So how big is that surplus? If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit,…