Idle Words > Talks > Haunted By Data This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 1, 2015, at the Strata+Hadoop World conference in New York City. The video version is here (20 mins). In preparing this talk I decided to check out the data landscape, since I hadn't seen it for a while. The…

https://locusmag.com/2018/07/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/

The smartest animals on my farm aren’t my bees ( although they possess the genius of the algorithm ). It’s not the horses or the goats or even the dogs. The barn cat is pretty smart, but only in fairly limited circumstances, and the house cats are useless. Obviously it’s not the sheep or the…

If my gravestone says, “Sid Meier, developed Civilization,” I’m happy with that. It’s a game I’m happy to be known for. — Sid Meier Sid Meier During Sid Meier’s astonishingly productive first ten years as a designer and programmer, games poured out of him in such a jumble that even his colleagues at…

GOOGLE MAPS’S MOAT How far ahead of Apple Maps is Google Maps? DECEMBER 2017 ⚠️ Tap or click any image to enlarge Over the past year, we’ve been comparing Google Maps and Apple Maps in New York, San Francisco, and London—but some of the biggest differences are outside of large cities. Take my…

Gathering essential books and democratizing human knowledge for future generations Photo by Megan Bayley. “ W hat books would you want to restart civilization from scratch?” The Long Now Foundation has been involved in and inspired by projects centered on that question since launching in 01996.…

On November 5th, right after halftime against the Hawks, I had a panic attack. It came out of nowhere. I’d never had one before. I didn’t even know if they were real. But it was real — as real as a broken hand or a sprained ankle. Since that day, almost everything about the way I think about my…

We are building a 10,000 Year Clock. It's a special Clock, designed to be a symbol, an icon for long-term thinking. It's of monumental scale inside a mountain in West Texas. The father of the Clock is Danny Hillis. He's been thinking about and working on the Clock since 1989. He wanted to build a…

“You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” — Daniel Patrick Moynihan — “We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.” — Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A…

Michael Rogalski For 60 years, American drivers unknowingly poisoned themselves by pumping leaded gasoline into their tanks. Here is the lifelong saga of Clair Patterson—a scientist who helped build the atomic bomb and discovered the true age of the Earth—and how he took on a billion-dollar industry…

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis 1. We are living in an age in which the behavioral sciences have become inescapable. The findings of social psychology and behavioral economics are being employed to determine the news we read, the products we buy, the…

https://www.recode.net/2017/4/12/15274220/jeff-bezos-amazon-shareholders-letter-day-2-disagree-and-commit

I. ‘Doomsday’ Peering beyond scientific reticence. It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the…

Optimus Prime—the software engine, not the Autobot overlord—was born in a basement under a West Elm furniture store on University Avenue in Palo Alto. Starting two years ago, a band of artificial-intelligence acolytes within Salesforce escaped the towering headquarters with the goal of crazily…

While millions of astronomy enthusiasts chase the moon’s shadow on the ground during the August 21 total solar eclipse , four NASA personnel are going to have front row seats. Two pilots and two technicians will race the big black spot at 50,000 feet, well above any cloud cover. And at 400 mph,…

Many business leaders hesitate when you ask them to share their biggest mistake. Not Cynthia Maxwell . She keeps hers front of mind. In fact, she turned it into a management tool that she uses every day. Back when Maxwell was the Director of Engineering at Yahoo!, she was tasked with building a…

Nation-States as We Know Them Will Cease to Exist not Because of a Who, but a What — And it’s Already Here Misplaced Money I bought a couple bitcoins in 2013. I bought them through a Bitcoin exchange and I can’t find a record of the transaction now. I’ve searched old emails and note files and can’t…

L ike most 25-year-olds, Julia Rozovsky wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. She had worked at a consulting firm, but it wasn’t a good match. Then she became a researcher for two professors at Harvard, which was interesting but lonely. Maybe a big corporation would be a better fit. Or…

https://www.wired.com/story/why-you-will-one-day-have-a-chip-in-your-brain/?mbid=nl_7517_backchannel_p5

Scientist Marie Jackson has said Swansea lagoon’s seawall should be built using Roman concrete.Photograph: Tidal Lagoon Power/PA Their structures are still standing more than 1,500 years after the last centurion snuffed it: now the Romans’ secret of durable marine concrete has finally been cracked.…

We Are All Kasparov When Deep Blue beat the world chess champion 20 years ago, we learned a huge lesson. Just not the one we thought. (Stan Honda / Getty Images) T he room where it happened was decked out like a faux study—a place where a couple of friends might engage in a friendly game of chess.…

Looking about me upon the wide waste of liquid ebony on which we were thus borne … I now began to watch, with a strange interest, the numerous things that floated in our company. I must have been delirious – for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several…

by Frida Alim, Nate Cardozo, Gennie Gebhart, Karen Gullo, and Amul Kalia Download the report as a PDF . EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Students and their families are backed into a corner. As students across the United States are handed school-issued laptops and signed up for educational cloud services, the way…

Is it worth the trouble? In 1942 Albert Camus wrote a book called “The Myth of Sisyphus”. It is about the one truly important philosophical problem: Given the circumstances of our existence, shouldn’t we just kill ourselves? This is his answer: At first Camus describes those moments in our lives…

L ast year, a strange self-driving car was released onto the quiet roads of Monmouth County, New Jersey. The experimental vehicle, developed by researchers at the chip maker Nvidia, didn’t look different from other autonomous cars, but it was unlike anything demonstrated by Google, Tesla, or General…

Neural networks as the architecture of human work In the brain there are neurons that link as a result of being active at the same time. This firing together creates a connection. On the Internet there are servers and people that are linked in temporal interaction, sometimes as a result of being…

Opinion Here’s Why Students Need Many Maps to Understand the World In an effort to “decolonize” the curriculum and show the true size of Africa and Latin America, Boston is using another flawed map. World map (Robinson projection) by Nicolas Raymond via Creative Commons R ecently, administrators at…

Here, in its original layout, is Joan Didion’s seminal essay “Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power,” which was first published in Vogue in 1961, and which was republished as “On Self-Respect” in the author’s 1968 collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.​ Didion wrote the essay as the magazine was…

While the hard realities of Mars — it’ll mess with our bodies , our minds and our spaceships — matter a whole lot when we consider traveling to the red planet, it’s also worth thinking about why humans would want to go there in the first place. Yes, we could probably figure out the resources thing,…

How Wikipedia Is Cultivating an Army of Fact Checkers to Battle Fake News The online encyclopedia has been fact checking the Internet for more than 15 years. Now it wants to bring its skeptical eye to the masses. By Jared Keller (Photo: Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images) Just over a year ago,…

Ars at SXSW 2017 Stranger Things wanted its music to be “something people talked about” Former VP laments that even now, sharing medical data is awful Muppet Guys Talking explores Jim Henson’s tech, genius, generosity Wowing and washable: Google’s smart jacket wears and works well at first glance…

A common thread in the study of organizational culture is the idea of culture as a unifying force that brings people together to work productively toward the attainment of organizational goals. In this approach, organizational culture is understood as a variable to be used in projects of social…

The Wrecknology Boom Or, how not to waste your life on stuff that doesn’t matter. A pps, gadgets, bots. Soon your self-driving car will tell your smart fridge that you’re out of lab-synthesized-meal-substitute and a delivery drone will drop it off without you even having to waste your precious time…

Americans are working longer hours and working later into life than ever before, so it's not surprising that almost 60 percent of Americans feel vacation-deprived, according to Expedia's 2013 Vacation Deprivation study . And even when they are getting some R&R on the beach, 67 percent of vacationers…

…we frankly couldn't afford to outbid Le Chiffre… accountants seem to be running MI-6… not that I have anything against accountants. Many of them are lovely people… It's amazing what you can do with Photoshop these days, isn't it? I think your odds are improving, Mr. Bond. - Rene Mathis, "Casino…

GIF Remember that animation making the rounds on the internet some months back, the one that depicted "the true orbit of the planets" as a mesmerizing vortex? The animation, while beautiful, was decidedly unscientific. Featured above is a more accurate animation, served up with a hearty helping of…

GIF Perhaps no other landmass in the world has undergone as many political changes during the past 5,500 years than Europe. Thanks to the work of Groovy Historian, we can now visualize this evolution. Groovy Historian required 20 maps to chart this cartographic history ; here's a sampling: Circa…

On December 9th, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart—along with 17 researchers from Stanford—gave a 90-minute live public demonstration of the technology they'd been working on for the previous 6 years. It changed the face of technology—and you can watch it in full here. The presentation was the first time…

When Seinfeld Met Beatrix This is what would happen if Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld, and Quentin Tarantino walked into a bar. G-Shock GA700-1A Watch Sporting an all-new case silhouette and both analog and digital readouts, the G-Shock GA700-1A Watch is an ideal entry point to this iconic brand. The…