Category: Uncategorized
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Committed to Past Constraints: QWERTY
Something I’ve never thought of reading before: the history of the QWERTY keyboard: With the assistance of […] Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule, [Christopher Sholes] built an early writing machine for which a patent application was filed in October 1867. However, Sholes’ “Type Writer” had many defects, [including] the tendency of the typebars to…
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The Population Decline
At Long Bets, a project of The Long Now Foundation where he is a board member, Kevin Kelly has predicted that “by 2060 the total population of humans on earth will be less than it is today“. The biggest driver of the shift from large families to small families is communication technology and education. As…
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The Four Kinds of Free
In addition to the gift economy, Chris Anderson of The Long Tail describes the three other business models in today’s ‘free’ economy. Paid products subsidizing free products Paying later subsidizing free now Paying people subsidizing free people
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Fight Club’s 8 Rules to Live By
Simple yet excellent. Lateral Action presents 8 Fight Club quotes everyone (not just ‘creators’) should live by. At its core, Fight Club is about living the life you truly want to live, and the hard path to getting there. Tyler helps the story’s nameless hero (usually referred to as Jack) down that path to enlightenment,…
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10 Links for a Better Understanding of Today’s Financial Crisis
One of the few people I listen to on financial matters, Ramit Sethi, has produced a great list of 10 links to walk you through today’s financial crisis — and make you smarter than 99% of other people. I would provide you with the 10 here, but it’s best to go to Ramit’s article for…
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The Negawatt Unit of Power
Seed Magazine highlights the word Negawatt: \né-gə-wät\ n: A measure of the avoided use or the conservation of a unit of energy. Wikipedia goes into more detail: By investing to reduce electricity demand instead of investing to increase electricity generation capacity, this “virtual generation” method can supply growth of supply by improving the efficiency of…
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Data Visualisation: Very Small Array
My latest RSS subscription: Very Small Array Experts in data visualisation (I still can’t force myself to write that word with a ‘z’), each post is full of information and is beautifully presented. Even better, it’s all CC licensed. Some of my recent favourites (some simple, all beautiful): Length of Weekly #1 Songs by Year,…
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World Wide Words
Michael Quinion, the British etymologist, documents the meaning and derivation of words and phrases in the English language. Covering etymology, grammar and neologisms (among others), my favourite aspect of World Wide Words (where he “writes on international English from a British viewpoint”) is the front page Sic! section highlighting common—yet amusing—errors: Charlotte Metcalf’s food column…
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2001: A Google Search
In celebration of their 10th birthday, Google have temporarily opened up their 2001 index for searching. Some interesting searches: 9/11, YouTube, iPod, Ubuntu, flickr. via Link Banana
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Flickr Community Building
Like David, I had seen many people linking to this article profiling Flickr’s Director of Community, Heather Champ, and was unsure why. Once I read it, however, I found it an engaging look at the intricacies of policing an online community. At first glance this parallel society has been made, quite literally, in the image…