Month: January 2014

Good urls matter

~10 years ago, jon udell was one of my favorite thinkers about the web. after a long hiatus, he is coming back to form, here on why good urls matter.

In a 1997 keynote talk Andrew Schulman put up a slide that contained just a URL: UPS Tracking “Think about what this means. Every UPS package has its own home page on the web!” Also, potentially, every bank transaction, every calendar appointment, every book (or paragraph within every book), every song (or passage or track within every song), every appliance (or component within every appliance). If we needed to, we could create URLs for grains of sand, each as compact and easy to exchange as Andrew Schulman’s Fedex URL. The supply of web names is inexhaustible, and the universe of their meaning is unbounded.

Industrial scale cloning

in case you were confused where biotech progress happens these days.

A cloning factory – an incredible notion borrowed straight from science fiction. But here in Shenzhen, in what was an old shoe factory, this rising power is creating a new industry.

Selling Shame

we have made some tiny steps in the right direction since then. of course as long as you still get all that “for womenz” pink-colored shit, it isn’t that much better.

Prison admission falling

I was startled and encouraged to see that under current policies, we are at a 20 years low in the prison admission rate.

a little bit of good news in an otherwise pretty bleak field: the “war on drugs”

France Uber mob

Taxi protest in Paris turns to guerrilla warfare as Uber car attacked on freeway

totally predictable, and makes you wonder whether entering france is just a huge PR move to generate disgust with the incumbents.

Online as a % of total video

Canada 20%, Australia 16%, US 16%. EU countries 3% to 8%. China 58%

as usual, europe is behind with internet usage, but china, wow.

Museum Cholera

Using specimens from the Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, researchers from the at McMaster University and the University of Sydney have mapped the genome of the 19th century cholera bacterium that killed millions of people during the 1800s.

the mutter museum in philadelphia is well worth a visit, and they still contribute to medical science 156 years after being founded with that purpose.

Cardboard Robots

saturday nights in bushwick

Crowdsourced dating

McCarthy sets up dates with men using OK Cupid, and uses her phone to stream a live video feed of the outings to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform. The turkers observe the interaction and text realtime suggestions on what McCarthy should do in order to have an optimal date.

Sleeve tats security

the future will be scaaaary, and you’ll be saved by a guy with tribal sleeve tats from an anti virus company. lol