antiorario
Links
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Bruce Schneier on New Tech City
This was on March 4, but I just got to it. A fun episode, even if you already know about this stuff—which never gets said enough anyway.
Terms of Service agreements are an exercise in futility, encrypted email often takes more trouble than it’s worth, and yeah, sure, go ahead and give Facebook a fake name, but don’t think you’re fooling anyone. Companies are collecting your data from just about everywhere, storing it through time unknown, and using it however they want. Oh, and that’s where the FBI-and-friends find it.
Saturday, March 14, 2015
No food shopping when you’re hungry
The New Yorker:
[M]arketing researchers … asked sixty-three undergraduates not to eat for four hours. Then they treated half of them to as much cake as they fancied. All of the volunteers were subsequently presented with a three-quarter-inch binder clip from Staples, asked how much they liked it, and told to take as many more as they felt they needed. The members of the cake-deprived group were no fonder of the binder clips than their peers, but they went home with seventy per cent more.
So that means no trips to the Apple Store either?
Thursday, March 12, 2015
On the Media is doing a podcast on House of Cards
From On the Media:
In this debut episode of On House of Cards, Brooke Gladstone dissects the first episode of the third season with the creator and executive producer of House of Cards, Beau Willimon, and chief national correspondent for New York Times Magazine, Mark Leibovich.
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Sources of Mad Men
From The Gothamist, a listicle I can get on board with. And because these movies are showing in New York until the end of April, there’s a chance I might catch one or two.
Friday, March 6, 2015
Uncanny Bologna
Weird, weird Austrian music video. They must have filmed it in August.
Today the EU is the land of digital myopia
The Verge:
Not all books are equal, said the European Union this week, ruling that ebooks sold in Europe constitute an “electronically supplied service” and so are subject to a higher rate of value-added tax (VAT) than physical books. This means that buying ebooks is likely to become more expensive in some countries, as booksellers raise their prices to pass the cost of increased VAT rates onto customers.
Yes, let’s keep Europe less united
The Council’s position opposes the Commission and Parliament’s original intention of eliminating roaming surcharges for those travelling within the EU by the end of this year.
From incompetence to outright malice, methinks.
Now we’ll need insurance against Google
The customer-service aspect of it is worrisome (online insurance services are notoriously lacking in post-sales assistance), but I also shudder at the idea of buying insurance from a company that controls your own private data (from email to home automation) and knows so much about you. Car insurance is only the beginning, and the least scary, but wait and see what comes next.
Thursday, March 5, 2015
The obscene and the palatable in the new season of House of Cards
Though it’s the poster child for the potential of streaming television, there’s something frustrating and old-fashioned in the fact that all House of Cards episodes are more or less an hour long. International syndication is the reason—abroad, the show airs on actual TV stations—but it means the show often feels padded out, as interminable as a state dinner.
That said, Spencer Kornhaber’s episode-by-episode review for The Atlantic is largely positive.
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
John Gray on evangelical atheism
Like religion at its worst, contemporary atheism feeds the fantasy that human life can be remade by a conversion experience—in this case, conversion to unbelief.
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
A glimpse of a social-network dystopia
Fiction, sure, but for how long?
Monday, March 2, 2015
History, science, and mythology of the vitamin pill
And by mythology I mean, basically, religious belief:
What was particularly appealing about it was that you had these invisible compounds that scientists were increasingly discovering that we need in order to stay alive. But no one knew how to measure them in food, and you couldn’t see them, so you could kind of go crazy with your marketing claims and no one could disprove you.
Friday, February 27, 2015
Thursday, February 26, 2015
The FCC approves strong net neutrality rules
Probably the best news of the day.
La Tour Eiffel goes green
My renewable-energy expert sent more Paris-related news. Just don’t read the comments.
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
About French waiters
Having just come back from a week in Paris, I find this WSJ article particularly appropriate. After two years since my previous trip, I thought wait staff was generally nicer, and with an unusual willingness to speak English. Does it mean that Parisian waiters and restaurateurs are becoming less professional?
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Words of wisdom from Marco Arment
Productivity tip from Marco Arment, who created one of my (and the world’s) favorite web services and iPad apps:
Oh, and dump your cable TV service. Get the shows you actually enjoy from iTunes and Netflix and stop wasting time watching whatever’s “on”.
I’m closer every day to canceling my Sky subscription, as I said I would when I got an Apple TV.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Willingness to believe
Bob Garfield and Seth Mnookin on On the Media, January 7, 2011:
Garfield: There seems to be some human impulse to [LAUGHS] explain complicated or painful or unknowable things in easy terms that snugly fit into some preconceived worldview. So, in the end, is this a vaccine problem we’re talking about here, or is it a human problem?
Mnookin: I think that you got to sort of a crucial point, and it, it even goes beyond people being willing to believe things for which there isn’t evidence. It’s people willing to believe things and being very insistent about believing things for which there is evidence against it.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
On the preservation of digital artifacts
If you really want to protect your family photos, take them off Flickr and your hard drive, get them on paper, and store them in an airtight box.