Nailchipper: category

In the latest issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr wrote piece titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” that raises interesting issues regarding the effects of Google on the way we read. Carr looks at history for significant technological shifts and its reception. One of the oldest - and I think most interesting - is [...]

Nationalism appears to be on the rise again. But this time around, it looks to be a gentler breed: proud, pragmatic and less antagonistic.
The world feels like it’s slowly congealing, not into a sort of gray homogeneous mush, but into a diverse federation of cultures that identify strongly with their heritage and decidedly work together [...]

I imported my posts from the Future of the Book. I haven’t had a to chance to import the comments but I will possibly do that at some point in the future.  I’ve also been developing a new WordPress plugin that allows users to reorder the posts on my blog by simply dragging and dropping. [...]

I’ve just returned from an amazing trip through South America. I started in Argentina and made my way north, through Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru, eventually flying back home from Lima.
But now, I am back in the States and enjoying transitioning back to normal life.  I hope to develop a few projects that have [...]

I live in Facebook land, but frequent a summer home in the Wikipedia islands. Where do you live?

I’ve never been a big fan of zoos. When I visit them I feel horrible for knowing what these animals must endure (like the polar bear I saw in Central Park licking a block of ice on a hot summer day) and then feel guilty for getting pleasure out of seeing these awesome creatures. But [...]

CommentPress has been getting really nice attention: Kathleen Fitzpatrick recently published “CommentPress: New (Social) Structures for New (Networked) Texts” with the Journal of Electronic Publishing at University of Michigan this fall.

This connection, in CommentPress, of an experiment into the organization of digital text with a desire to promote social interaction within and around it offers [...]

“What if you could travel to parallel worlds: the same year, the same earth, only different dimensions…?”
That’s the opening line to one of my favorite science fiction shows in the 90s called “Sliders.” The premise of the show was simple: a group of lost travelers traverse through different dimensions where history has played itself [...]

Harper’s Magazine recently redesigned their website and Ben wrote a post that jostled a few ideas i’ve had floating in the back of my head. I posted this as a comment to his post, but I wanted to get it up on my site also:

Harper’s has a new web concept designed by Paul Ford [...]

I love “This American Life” on NPR. I recommend most, so I feel silly highlighting just a few, but I have to start somewhere. Here are a few recent episodes I really liked:
The Golden Apple:
The This American Life [...] document one day in a Chicago diner called The Golden Apple, starting at 5 a.m. [...]

From CNN:

When Knut [...] was born last December, his mother ignored him and his brother, who later died. Zoo officials intervened, choosing to raise the cub themselves.
“Feeding by hand is not species-appropriate but a gross violation of animal protection laws,” animal rights activist Frank Albrecht was quoted as saying by the mass-circulation Bild daily, which [...]

In college, I rarely locked my room and people knew it and I don’t think i’ve ever had anything stolen. I also know of numerous occasions when people went into my room, got something they needed and returned it when they were done. And it never bothered me.
In the other side of the spectrume: I [...]

Last week I went to an exhibit on Robert Moses, the legendary New York city planner, at the Museum of the City of New York. All the while making sure we drove through as much of the city that he helped develop as possible.
While Moses was complicated man, and views on him vary a great [...]

Yahoo! recently announced a new service called pipes that hopes to bring the ability to “mash-up” to the common folk.
As always, Tim O’Reilly has a very good description:
Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mash-up, providing a drag and [...]

I’ve always been fond of economics. To me, economics has always felt like a logical extension of computer science. (Elaboration: the science of computers is actually done by mathematicians and computer scientists apply these ideas to become ‘computation experts’ ). Since modern economies are driven by technology, often involving computers, and technologies change the way [...]

Imagine a world without publishers, broadcasters or record labels. Imagine the complex infrastructure, large distribution networks, massive advertising campaigns, and multi-million signing contracts provided by the media incumbents all gone from our society. What would our culture look like? Will the music stop? Will pens dry up?
I would hope not, but I recently read Siva [...]

College, for me, as it is for many, was a profound experience where I learned, most importantly, how to look and analyze the world in a way that was relentless, but rewarding. As a child I believe I collected lots of information, but reserved judgment on many of them. I was able to hold contradicting [...]

Last week, the London Times reported that the Wikipedia founder, Jimbo Wales, was announcing a new search engine called “Wikiasari.” This search engine would incorporate a new type of social ranking system and would rival Google and Yahoo in potential ad revenue. When the news first got out, the blogosphere went into [...]

There are some interesting changes happening this blog now… I’ve had a few big changes lined up for the mid-term future, but this change will come into effect immediately.
I’ve been an adjunct member of the Institute for the Future of the Book for the past few months now and to be perfectly honest, it has [...]

At Future of the Book we recently hacked Wordpress to allow comments to tie to specific paragraphs in the text and I think it turned out pretty well. Other people seem to think so [1][2][3]. In just a few sleepless nights we had fully functional comment system that worked well enough to launch [...]

This is nice…. windy eh?
6. Future of the Book
Ostensibly about exploring the shift from the printed page to the networked screen, Future of the Book stumbles across a variety of new ideas along the way, such as creating a wikibook on gaming. Although occasionally windy, Future of the Books is on the precipice of something [...]

In New York City we are in the the later stages of autumn. The trees are bare and brown leaves litter the streets. It rained last night, so many of the leaves are wet, but most are easily taken by the wind. The breeze is really strong and my cloths easily press against my [...]

The notion of “software as service” is challenging the concept of software similarly to the way today’s global economy is challenging the idea of what it means to be a company.
As bizarre as it might sound, Japanese brands are often manufactured in the United Sates, while American cars are often manufactured in Mexico. If parts [...]

The political right is going through interesting changes right now. The war hawks from the neoconservative pillar of the political right is crumbling as support for the Iraq War dwindles.
Corruption in the congress has led to the resignation of major figures like Majority Leader Tom Delay. A sex scandal has led to the resignation [...]

Does milk ever go bad anymore? I remember when milk went bad.

Megan McArdle, over at Jane Galt, used a term that I’ve never heard before, but I really like:
Agnotheist: An agnostic who puts a very, very low –yet non-zero! — P-value on God.
That very small, yet non-zero P-value is as certain as we will ever be to knowing anything about the universe.

On Monday, Adriene Jenik, who is Associate Professor of Computer & Media Arts at UC San Diego, stopped by for what turned into an interesting discussion on the future of libraries. Adriene is a telecommunications media artist who has experimented extensively in virtual performance with projects like Desktop Theater and SPECFLIC, an ongoing “speculative [...]

Ever imagine what the footage would be like if in films they shot entire scenes of character saying their life stories? You know, the scene where they show the begining and the end of the conversation and suggest that they’ve been speaking for a long time by having them finished a large meal or having [...]

For those in power, the abstraction that a television screen or computer screen provides is both necessary and dangerous. It is necessary because it allows us to model increasingly complex devices and accomplish ever sophisticated tasks. Dangerous because the ramifications of these models on the real world are sometimes masked or not apparent.
Autocrats and aristocrats [...]

A technology called Photosynth, developed by Microsoft Research in collaboration with University of Washington, has the potential to change the way we look at maps.

Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space.

This is quite possibly one of the most [...]

I read The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil a few months ago, and I found it to be thought provoking book and highly recommend it (I did find Kurzweil’s fascination with living forever somewhat bizarre). One of the most interesting topics I was exposed to was on the movement [...]

I jumped out of a plane two days ago and now I am finally coming to terms with what’s happened to me. I think i’ve had an adrenaline rush that began to wear off only yesterday.
The most nerve racking part of this adventure was the drive the to skydiving ranch, where we nervously joked [...]

I jumped from an airplane this morning…… and I survived.
This picture is of my sister, who jumped right before me.

I could not afford the extra $80 for mid-air pictures (after already spending $185), but here a few more of my sister.

On a very interesting series on PBS, Bill Moyers interviews Mary Gordon.

Author Mary Gordon is widely regarded as one of the leading chroniclers of contemporary Catholic life in America. Her literary oeuvre - novels, short stories, essays, and personal memoirs - paints a rich picture of the complexities of faith, morals, politics, and religious and [...]

Nailchipper is going through a redesign, so expect things to look strange in the next few days. The top navigation wont work until the end of the week (except the “weblog” link) and some of the font sizes will be a bit funky while I play with the stylesheets. I asked Dylan Knight Rogers create [...]

The following was a comment I wrote in Future of the Book, in the post Rosenzweig on Wikipedia.
While some people think that finding an error in Wikipedia is a sign of its weakness, I am reassured that this is Wikipedia’s greatest strength.
I found this quote in the essay particularly interesting:

The limited audience for subscription-based [...]

The New York Times had an article called “Growing Wikipedia Revises Its ‘Anyone Can Edit’ Policy“, which I found fairly interesting, but was bothered by some of the quotes I read, especially those of Nicholas Carr.

Ideals always expire in clotted, bureaucratic prose. It distances the killer from the killing.
–Nicholas Carr

Poetic, but has little to do [...]

I found a very interesting essay in the New York Times, called “The End of Authorship” by John Updike, and then realized that it was being discussed on the Future of the Book.
While Ben Vershbow was critical of the essay because he thought Updike is a “nostaligic elitist”, I thought I’d defend the essay’s sentiment, [...]

From Wikipedia:

This page highlights images that we find beautiful, shocking, impressive and informing. It is the visual equivalent to featured articles and, as such, even more subjective.

This is a featured picture, which means that community consensus has identified it as one of the finest images on the English Wikipedia, adding significantly to its accompanying article.

The [...]

I found the best oranges in the world and they are located right……. here. It’s in the local c-town, town, town, town, town, town…