Matt Lehrer: Archive

“The single best tech idea of 2009, though, the real life-changer, has got to be Readability. It’s a free button for your Web browser’s toolbar (get it at lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability). When you click it, Readability eliminates everything from the Web page you’re reading except the text and photos. No ads, blinking, links, banners, promos or anything else. Times Square just goes away.” —David Pogue: The 5th Annual Pogie Awards for the Year’s Best Tech Ideas

I completely agree. I use it dozens of times a day.

Dec 30, 20094 notes

#technology #web #2009

Dec 22, 20092 notes

#twitter #technology

“If you don’t have employer-based coverage, Medicare, Medicaid, or anything else, and premiums won’t cost more than 8 percent of your monthly income, and you refuse to purchase insurance, at that point, you will be assessed a penalty of up to 2 percent of your annual income. In return for that, you get guaranteed treatment at hospitals and an insurance system that allows you to purchase full coverage the moment you decide you actually need it. In the current system, if you don’t buy insurance, and then find you need it, you’ll likely never be able to buy insurance again. There’s a very good case to be made, in fact, that paying the 2 percent penalty is the best deal in the bill.” —Ezra Klein

Dec 22, 20092 notes

#healthcare #politics

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

Via givemesomethingtoread.

Dec 22, 200921 notes

givemesomethingtoread:

The key to the biggest number contest is not swift penmanship, but rather a potent paradigm for concisely capturing the gargantuan.

(Thanks, Tristan!)

This is a computer science theory/history, logic, number theory beauty. My favorite paragraph:

Indeed, one could define science as reason’s attempt to compensate for our inability to perceive big numbers. If we could run at 280,000,000 meters per second, there’d be no need for a special theory of relativity: it’d be obvious to everyone that the faster we go, the heavier and squatter we get, and the faster time elapses in the rest of the world. If we could live for 70,000,000 years, there’d be no theory of evolution, and certainly no creationism: we could watch speciation and adaptation with our eyes, instead of painstakingly reconstructing events from fossils and DNA. If we could bake bread at 20,000,000 degrees Kelvin, nuclear fusion would be not the esoteric domain of physicists but ordinary household knowledge. But we can’t do any of these things, and so we have science, to deduce about the gargantuan what we, with our infinitesimal faculties, will never sense. If people fear big numbers, is it any wonder that they fear science as well and turn for solace to the comforting smallness of mysticism?

Reverse Lake Wobegon Effect

cdixon:

Bill Gates walks into a bar, suddenly the average wealth of people in the bar goes from thousands to millions. And also now everyone in the bar except Bill has below average wealth. Similarly, contributors to user generated websites like Wikipedia are almost all below average. There are a few people who contribute a ton, and a whole lot of people who contribute very little. This is why it is often very hard for people to conceptualize how these user generated sites work- there is no “average user” to imagine yourself as.

(Basically paraphrasing from Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody)

Aaron Swartz disproved this for Wikipedia:

When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

Most of the content is written by an “expert” on the topic and then it is cleaned up and made to look the way you expect a Wiki entry to look by a small army of Wikipedia insiders. In that sense, it’s easier to imagine yourself as an average user. There’s something you know well and could share with the Wiki world. Then one of the Bill Gates types (who distort the number-of-edits average) can go in and clean it up.

Dec 16, 200916 notes

zachklein:

I roared with a belly laugh when I read this headline in bed earlier today. Could Capitol Records truly be this misguided? Do they not realize that if you were to sort Internet brands by those most emblematic of creativity — not piracy — that Vimeo would line up at the top? Lip-dubbing is harmless and perfectly fun, and ultimately will define the aesthetic of an Internet generation. Other than for some petty legal jockeying towards a greater strategy can I imagine why this record company would try to sink such a potentially valuable lifeline — Lip-Dubbing and Vimeo create tremendous relevance and usefulness for their catalog!

If anything better underlines my point it’s an email I received from Sean Nelson, the frontman of the band Harvey Danger, whose song Flagpole Sitta we’ve now infamously lip-dubbed:

That Flagpole Sitta video made me incredibly happy, just when I thought there was NOTHING that could make me listen to that song again. A thousand thank you’s.

Capitol, you’re a bunch of goof-balls. This lawsuit is the tactical equivalent to pooping on someone’s birthday cake.

I, for one, am willing to boycott Capitol artists unless they reconsider, and I implore other labels to pivot and spur conversations with Vimeo in order to determine a simple process to give people access to copyrighted music for personal video that is satisfactory for all. Preemptive strikes simply won’t do anymore!

Please reblog, or honk, if you agree.

Their business model is dying and they’re doing their best to make it worse. Via Zoya and NY Mag:

The top-selling record of 2000, ‘No Strings Attached’ by *NSYNC, sold 9.93 million copies. The top-selling record this year, Taylor Swift’s ‘Fearless,’ is likely to sell a quarter of that. As of this past June, with the closing of Virgin Megastore in Union Square, there is no major record-store chain in New York City.

Dec 16, 2009456 notes

#music

“The cumulative devaluation of the Zimbabwe dollar was such that a stack of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (26 zeros) two dollar bills (if they were printed) in the peak hyperinflation would be needed to equal in value what a single original Zimbabwe two-dollar bill of 1978 had been worth. Such a pile of bills literally would be light years high, stretching from the Earth to the Andromeda Galaxy.” —John Williams: Prepare For The Hyperinflationary Great Depression

Dec 15, 20094 notes

#economy #inflation #hyperinflation

Play

#music #apple #lala #technology

“Americans want our country to be secure. Most want Obama to succeed. And so we hope that we won’t get bogged down in Afghanistan while our adversaries regroup elsewhere, that the casualties and costs can be contained, that the small, primitive Afghan Army (ravaged by opium, illiteracy, incompetence and a 25 percent attrition rate) will miraculously stand up so we can stand down. We want to believe that Obama’s marvelous powers of reason can check a ruthless enemy and reverse decades of tragic history in one of the world’s most treacherous backwaters. That’s the bet Obama made. As long as our wars remain sacrifice-free, safely buried in the back pages behind Tiger Woods and reality television stunts, he’ll be able to pursue it.” —Frank Rich

Dec 5, 20091 note

#war #obama #afghanistan #politics

“Through a mix of documents unearthed by Freedom of Information Act requests and the aforementioned recording, Soghoian describes how ‘the government routinely obtains customer records from ISPs detailing the telephone numbers dialed, text messages, emails and instant messages sent, web pages browsed, the queries submitted to search engines, and geolocation data, detailing exactly where an individual was located at a particular date and time.’” —Sprint fed customer GPS data to cops over 8 million times

Dec 1, 20091 note