- In Flawed, Epic Anonymous Book, the Abyss Gazes Back (Wired) — Quinn Norton’s review of a book about Anonymous is an excellent introduction to Anonymous. Anonymous made us, its mediafags, masters of hedging language. The bombastic claims and hyperbolic declarations must be reported from their mouths, not from our publications. And yet still we make mistakes and publish lies and assumptions that slip through. There is some of this in all of journalism, but in a world where nothing is true and everything is permitted, it’s a constant existential slog. It’s why there’s not many of us on this beat.
- Titan (GitHub) — Apache2-licensed distributed graph database optimized for storing and processing large-scale graphs within a multi-machine cluster. Cassandra and HBase backends, implements the Blueprints graph API. (via Hacker News)
- Extra Second This June — we’re getting a leap second this year: there’ll be 2012 June 30, 23h 59m 60s. Calendars are fun.
- On Creativity (Beta Knowledge) — I wanted to create a game where even the developers couldn’t see what was coming. Of course I wasn’t thinking about debugging at this point. The people who did the debugging asked me what was a bug. I could not answer that. — Keita Takahashi, game designer (Katamari Damacy, Noby Noby Boy). Awesome quote.
ENTRIES TAGGED "creativity"
Walking the tightrope of visualization criticism
The balance, fairness and realism of our visualization criticism must improve.
A creative field, such as visualization, will have many different interpretations and perspectives. The resolution and richness of this opinion is important to safeguard.
Four short links: 15 June 2012
On Anonymous, Graph Database, Leap Second, and Debugging Creativity
Top stories: February 27-March 2, 2012
The evolution of privacy, a call for Maker-friendly cities, publishing's shifting business models.
This week on O'Reilly: Mike Loukides examined the clumsy state of human connections in our tech products, Dale Dougherty made the case for Maker-friendly cities, and we looked at key shifts in publishing's business models.
Permission to be horrible and other ways to generate creativity
Denise R. Jacobs advocates for new approaches to work and community.
Author and web design consultant Denise R. Jacobs reveals lessons she learned about creativity while writing her first book. She also discusses her efforts to give women and people of color more visibility in the tech world.
Four short links: 30 January 2012
Human Labour, Kinect in Laptops, Web Fonts, and Brain Boosting
- Improvisation and Forgiveness (JP Rangaswami) — what makes us human is not repetitive action. Human occupations should require human intellect, and there’s no more human activity than making a judgement call when processes have failed a customer.
- Kinect Tech in Laptop Prototypes — “waving your hands around at your laptop” will be the new “bellowing into your walkie-talkie phone”. (via Greg Linden)
- Beautiful Web Type — demo page for the best from Google’s web fonts directory. Source on GitHub.
- Ethics of Brain Boosting, Discussion (Hacker News) — this comment in particular: in my initial reckless period of self-experimentation, I managed to induce phosphenes by accident — blue white flashes in the entire visual field, blanking out everything else. Both contacts were in the supraorbital region. I ceased my experiments for a while and returned to the literature. And you thought that typo where you accidentally took the database offline was bad ….
On pirates and piracy
The media industry's wholesale takeover of creativity is the real piracy.
Mike Loukides: "I'm not willing to have the next Bach, Beethoven, or Shakespeare post their work online, only to have it taken down because they haven't paid off a bunch of executives who think they own creativity."
What we could do with really big touchscreens
Ten-inch tablets are just the start of the touchscreen publishing revolution.
If we could combine the touchscreen's ability to signal our layout wishes with the large displays and workspaces that many of us enjoy at our work desks, wouldn't that change the kinds of documents we create?
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