“Dallas and Los Angeles represent two distinct models for successful American cities, which both reflect and reinforce different cultural and political attitudes. One model fosters a family-oriented, middle-class lifestyle—the proverbial home-centered “balanced life.” The other rewards highly productive, work-driven people with a yen for stimulating public activities, for arts venues, world-class universities, luxury shopping, restaurants that aren’t kid-friendly. One makes room for a wide range of incomes, offering most working people a comfortable life. The other, over time, becomes an enclave for the rich. Since day-to-day experience shapes people’s sense of what is typical and normal, these differences in turn lead to contrasting perceptions of economic and social reality. It’s easy to believe the middle class is vanishing when you live in Los Angeles, much harder in Dallas. These differences also reinforce different norms and values—different ideas of what it means to live a good life. Real estate may be as important as religion in explaining the infamous gap between red and blue states.”
Redefining windblown.
“Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. When asked to do this, English speakers arrange time from left to right. Hebrew speakers do it from right to left (because Hebrew is written from right to left).
Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south, time went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.”
Jay-Z & Marvin Gaye - Partylife (Brooklyn Soul Remix)
via alexbeaudet
“Good documentation is condescendingly terse, and Git’s documentation is like an art critic who giggles at you. (The description of git-rebase is “Forward-port local commits to the updated upstream head”. Oh, fuck off.)”
“The problem is that the social networks we’re creating online don’t match the social networks we already have offline. This creates many problems, and a few opportunities.”
- Paul Adams, User Research for Social at Google
This slide from Paul’s presentation seems obvious and it’s mainly a critique of Facebook (they even make a reference to scaring young, ten year old swimmers with pictures of a gay nightclub). To me, it shows something interesting—which is a kind of taxonomical approach to thinking about relationships, which seems pretty wrong-headed and inorganic. It seems much more congruent with the idea of social software to have platforms that implicitly teach people that they’re making things for public consumption (yay tumblr!) rather than try to have extensive class models for how you want to relate to people. Tumblr should ship Paul and Google some t-shirts that say, “Tumblr is Facebook for Grown-ups.”
The Hemingway Look-Alike Society
My friend, Henry, expects me to win before 2050.
“The error could hardly have been more awkward. Governed by India but claimed by China, Arunachal Pradesh has been a source of rankling dispute between the two nations for decades. Google’s sudden relabeling of the province gave the appearance of a special tip of the hat toward Beijing. Its timing, moreover, was freakishly bad: the press noticed that Google’s servers had started splaying Mandarin place-names all over the state only a few hours before Indian and Chinese negotiating teams sat down for talks in New Delhi to work toward resolving the delicate border issue.”
John Gravois, The Agnostic Cartographer
“It is said that every map is a political statement. But Google, by trying to subvert that truth, may just be intensifying the politics even more.”
Clayton is about to hit some really cold water. The past few days have been excellent.
“Several people have told me they like the iPad because it lets them bring the Internet into situations where a laptop would be too conspicuous. In other words, it’s a hip flask. (This is true of the iPhone too, of course, but this advantage isn’t as obvious because it reads as a phone, and everyone’s used to those.)”
“The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.
The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don’t mean to imply they’re all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I’d rather live in a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about.
Most people won’t, unfortunately. Which means that as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of “normal” is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.”
