Beijing's Temple of Heaven is one of the world's most popular tourist spots. As such, it has a busy public restroom. The administrators felt that people were using too much toilet paper so they installed a toilet paper dispenser with facial recognition. — Read the rest
In 2005 a young man from England created a website called The Million Dollar Homepage and sold advertising space on it. The page is a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid (1,000,000 pixels) and he sold the pixels for $1 each. The page has 2,816 links in it. — Read the rest
This old Mental Floss post collects salesmans' miniatures from the 1930s, including mausoleums, swimming pools, Persian rugs, and more — but the gem is this gorgeous neon sample-case.
Molly Sauter (previously) describes in gorgeous, evocative terms how the algorithms in our life try to funnel us into acting the way we always have, or, failing that, like everyone else does.
Data scientist Hillary Mason (previously) talks through her astoundingly useful collection of small shell scripts that automate all the choresome parts of her daily communications: processes that remind people when they owe her an email; that remind her when she accidentally drops her end of an exchange; that alert her when a likely important email arrives (freeing her up from having to check and check her email to make sure that nothing urgent is going on). — Read the rest
Our friend and frequent Boing Boing contributor Clive Thompson has a piece in the January/February issue of Smithsonian magazine entitled "Rage Against the Machines." He explores the 19th century Luddite Revolution, the first rebellion against automation, comparing it to the upcoming robot workforce revolution. — Read the rest
Author Clive Thompson once wrote an essay about the experience of reading War and Peace on his iPhone. On his blog, he writes about how Sarah Boxer read Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, all 1.2-million words.
From Boxer's essay:
— Read the restSoon you will see that the smallness of your cellphone (my screen was about two by three inches) and the length of Proust's sentences are not the shocking mismatch you might think.
Eric Harshbarger's weird, laser-engraved dice are a tour-de-force: a pair of D6s for figuring out where to go for dinner in NYC; another D6 to figure out which die you should roll; an all-20s critical hit D20; Sicherman D6s that have different faces to a normal D6 pair, but the same probability distribution; punctuation mark dice (I've had students who were definitely using these); dice for indecisive people, and so on.
Bernie Sanders's fans in the venerable virtual world Second Life have established a HQ, "a Roman-themed hangout space in a peaceful meadow, where Bernie supporters often gather to share news of their favorite candidate," but their peace was shattered when Second Life's Donald Trump supporters laid siege to the building, firing virtual guns whose rounds exploded into swastika flags at Sanders central.
Sonia Livingstone, an LSE social psychology prof, gives us a peek into the results from The Class, a year-long, deep research project into the digital lives and habits of a class of 13 year olds at an ordinary school.
Silicon Valley is raiding technology departments of universities around the U.S.—can tech academia survive?
Back then, the women themselves were sometimes called “computers.” They used these machines to compute.
"Are you having a big, breakthrough idea right now? A few hundred people around the world are probably having the exact same insight at the exact same time," writes Clive Thompson, author of Smarter Than You Think, over at Medium. — Read the rest
In 1959 Xerox released the 914 photocopier. It weighed 648 pounds, but it was a huge improvement over previous document copying technologies, which used wet chemicals.
Clive Thompson looks into the business of robot handwriting, which is increasingly being used by junk mail companies to trick recipients into thinking someone cares about them.
Over at Medium's The List, Clive Thompson argues that a 1974 science fiction novel for teens called Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy "nailed everything we're arguing today about personal drones, privacy, and the danger of government overreach." I can't wait to read the book!
"Now that people have several devices at work—a laptop, a phone, a tablet—they're finding their way to a similar trick, where they use each piece of hardware for a different purpose. Consider it a new way to manage all the digital demands on our attention: Instead of putting different tasks in different windows, people are starting to put them on different devices." — Read the rest
Clive Thompson writes about the growing body of evidence about the negative impact of electronic messaging on workplace productivity. Not only has the smartphone extended the working week to something like 75 hours for the US workers in a recent survey, but some daring experiments suggest that when limits are put on electronic messaging (for example, a ban on out-of-hours emailing), that productivity and quality of work soars — along with the happiness and quality of life of workers (these two phenomena are related). — Read the rest
Clive Thompson, 45, marvels at the sudden attacks on Millennials — roughly speaking, people born since the late 1970s. As a Gen Xer, he remembers how things were exactly the same for his lot, until, just as suddenly, the ranting op-eds dried up. — Read the rest
