Internet

Aliens in the valley

Seth Fiegerman | Mashable | 3 December 2014

History of Reddit. Starts slowly but picks up speed in the second section. Reddit’s co-founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman wanted to build a website for ordering takeaway food. Paul Graham sensibly told them to think of something else. They looked at Delicious and decided they could do a better job of pooling and ranking most-shared links. The stroke of genius was to enable and rank comments.

Language

There is no language instinct

Vyvyan Evans | Aeon | 4 December 2014

Nor, probably, a universal grammar anchoring all human languages, as Noam Chomsky argued. His conjectures were brilliant but wrong. Children learn language, as they do many other things, by trial and error. “Children have far more sophisticated learning capacities than Chomsky foresaw.” At the age of nine months, most children are already hard at work decoding what the adults around them are trying to say.

Food

This means raw

Alexandra Kleeman | Guardian | 3 December 2014

A week among the fruitarians at the Woodstock fruit festival on a diet of 80% fruit plus occasional raw vegetables. For breakfast a pound of kiwi and a pound of orange juice; for lunch two pounds of bananas wrapped in lettuce leaves; for dinner two pounds of tangerines with celery and red peppers. You feel pretty good, at least at first, but you go to the loo a lot. “I told him I hadn’t been raw for very long.”

Computing

On file formats, very briefly

Paul Ford | Manual | 3 December 2014

File formats encode the history and the ideology of the internet. “The Photoshop format is more like a legal document. Parts are open to interpretation. The computer is the ultimate judge, but you never know how it will rule." As for Microsoft Office: “The file formats specifications are of a most disturbing, fascinating quality; one can read through them and think: Yes, I see this. I think I understand. But why?”

Climate change

Changing climates of history

J R McNeill | Public Books | 1 December 2014

The new prominence of climate change in discussions of the future is matched by the new prominence of climate change in discussions of the past. Historians are increasingly invoking environmental factors to explain wealth and poverty, stability and change – a shift away from the discipline’s traditional practice of explaining human affairs in terms of human initiatives arranged as social and political forces.

Business

Mean people fail

Paul Graham | 28 November 2014

Successful start-up founders tend to be good people. Mean people fail, because they fight, and you don’t learn by fighting. “When you think of successful people from history who weren’t ruthless, you get mathematicians and writers and artists. Their m.o seems to be spreading. The games played by intellectuals are leaking into the real world, reversing the historical polarity of the relationship between meanness and success."

Wearable computing

Long live smart glasses

Rachel Metz | MIT Tech Review | 26 November 2014

Google Glass was a breakthrough idea, prematurely executed. Smart glasses need the kind of rethink which turned the Newton into the iPad. “Researchers are going to keep plugging away until we get to a point where the technology blends into the glasses themselves, rather than sitting so obviously atop them.” The prism-like display was obnoxious. The next generation of smart glasses may be more like contact lenses.

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