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zkarl: Final touch(Vovinam) whoa

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:42:23 -0400

zkarl:

Final touch

(Vovinam)

whoa

"Wearing a set of goggles that distorts reality isn’t the first thing to come to mind when I imagine..."

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 12:20:45 -0400

“

Wearing a set of goggles that distorts reality isn’t the first thing to come to mind when I imagine freedom.

Make no mistake, Google Glass is a fascinating innovation that has serious transformative power. Hopefully it can have significant benefits for the world that are both fun and educational.

Still, hearing the suggestion of “a future where you spend more time focused on the people you are with and the experiences you are having” seems entirely incongruent with the product being discussed. When spending time with people, isn’t it easier to focus on being with them when you are actually with them?

As for experiences, not everyone is obsessed with their mobile phones when they live their day-to-day lives. Plenty of us actually spend time doing things without being tethered to our devices all day. I know it’s hard for some that are immersed in tech to comprehend this, but it’s true. Seriously, I have friends that do all sorts of things that don’t even involve a plug. Crazy, I know.

To be clear, I’m no luddite. I love technology. I’m especially enamored with it’s abilities to empower people to spread information and unify around common ideals. That said, I fear this quote represents a darker side to the future we are headed towards. One in which we are disconnected from each other, and as a result, humanity. Maybe it’s not either/or… one can only hope.

”

- Josh Stylman / Racing the Sundown: The Glass Collective: See More, and Farther

in response to the Glass Collective Announcement particularly this quote:

“Glass represents a future of freedom. A future where you spend more time focused on the people you are with and the experiences you are having, rather than focused on your mobile device. Glass brings you the important information, context, and moments when you need them most.”

===

I do believe that Google Glass will change the way people interact with their world but to claim that something strapped to your face will be less distracting to others than a phone you can put away is absurd.

~future glasshole
(via msg)
seems to me the most obvious initial apps are professional - jobs where currently people use radios, blueprints, dashboards. maps etc.

Little Inferno is an iOS game where all you do is burn stuff so...

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 23:15:01 -0400

Little Inferno is an iOS game where all you do is burn stuff so you can buy more stuff to burn. No timer, no score, no winning. Just burning stuff.

update: and it’s great!

"The Internet is a big fan of the worst-possible-thing. Many people thought Twitter was the worst..."

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 22:45:47 -0400

“The Internet is a big fan of the worst-possible-thing. Many people thought Twitter was the worst possible way for people to communicate … One recipe for Internet success seems to be this: Start at the bottom, at the most awful, ridiculous, essential idea, and own it.”

- Paul Ford

Bitcoin May Be the Global Economy’s Last Safe Haven - Businessweek
(via fred-wilson)
true.

Three eras of currency

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 01:00:25 -0400

Commodity based, e.g. Gold

Politically based, e.g. Dollar

Math based, e.g. Bitcoin

"Culture is suspicious of technology. Politics is mostly indifferent to and above it. War-making uses..."

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 23:10:16 -0500

“Culture is suspicious of technology. Politics is mostly indifferent to and above it. War-making uses it, but maintains an arms-length separation. Business? It gets into bed with it. It is sort of vaguely plausible that you could switch artists, politicians and generals around with their peers from another age and still expect them to function. But there is no meaningful way for a businessman from (say) 2000 BC to comprehend what Mark Zuckerberg does, let alone take over for him. Too much magical technological water has flowed under the bridge.”

- http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/08/a-brief-history-of-the-corporation-1600-to-2100/

newyorker: Cartoon by Ward Sutton. For more from this week’s...

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 01:26:31 -0500

newyorker:

Cartoon by Ward Sutton. For more from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/WqSOMI

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 00:31:00 -0500

As the art of reading after a certain stage in one’s education is the art of skipping, so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. The first effect on the mind of growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to be performed by a single act. Lazarus has called this the progressive condensation of thought.

But in the psychological sense it is less a condensation than a loss - a genuine dropping out and throwing overboard of conscious content. Steps really sink from sight. An advanced thinker sees the relations of his topics in such masses and so instantaneously that when he comes to explain to younger minds it is often hard to say which grows the more perplexed - he or the pupil.

In every university there are admirable investigators who are notoriously bad lecturers. The reason is that they never spontaneously see the subject in the minute articulate way in which the student needs to have it offered to his slow reception. They grope for the links but the links do not come. Bowditch said that whenever his author prefaced a proposition by the words “it is evident…” he knew that many hours of hard study lay before him.

William James - The Principles of Psychology

454 W 23rd St New York, NY 10011—2157: Well right, naturally you should hate spirituality.

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 17:54:38 -0500

454 W 23rd St New York, NY 10011—2157: Well right, naturally you should hate spirituality.:

America had sent the squarest motherfuckers it could find to the moon and the moon sent back humans. Armstrong became a teacher, then a farmer. Alan Bean became a painter. Edgar Mitchell started believing in UFOs. And also managed to crystallize the experience of seeing your entire planet at once:

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”

(People: April 8th, 1974)

“America had sent the squarest motherfuckers it could find to the moon and the moon sent back humans. Armstrong became a teacher, then a farmer. Alan Bean became a painter. Edgar Mitchell started believing in UFOs.”

"The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us."

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 21:15:49 -0500

“The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.”

- Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, speaking to GQ for a profile of Netflix chief Reed Hastings.

This will go down as the year that HBO either made the right choice or the wrong choice not to go after the stand-alone Netflix model. Netflix is coming out swinging with House of Cards and then Arrested Development. HBO continues to hide behind big cable.
(via parislemon)
good to see someone trying to create real competition in this market.

Star Wars: Machete Order

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 17:14:36 -0500

blam:

Should you watch Star Wars in Release Order or Episode Order? Rod Hilton argues for a third option: Machete Order. Agree or not, it’s a fun read…

ha true

"Scaling is about dealing efficiently with events that occur with a predictable frequency. Hard disk..."

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 23:33:18 -0500

“Scaling is about dealing efficiently with events that occur with a predictable frequency. Hard disk failures are rare catastrophes for individuals. They are an operating condition for data centers.”

- http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/10/15/economies-of-scale-economies-of-scope/

What would be the greatest technological leap you'd have to explain to someone who time traveled from the 1950's?

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 21:56:00 -0500

I possess a device in my pocket that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man.

I use it to look at pictures of cats and get in arguments with strangers.

via

The Cable Company Dickbag Problem

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 19:06:29 -0500

The Cable Company Dickbag Problem:

parislemon:

Susan Crawford for Bloomberg:

The Internet has taken the place of the telephone as the world’s basic, general-purpose, two-way communication medium. All Americans need high-speed access, just as they need clean water, clean air and electricity. But they have allowed a naive belief in the power and beneficence of the free market to cloud their vision. As things stand, the U.S. has the worst of both worlds: no competition and no regulation.

Such an important and easy-to-understand post. Essentially, the U.S. has fallen behind (and continues to fall behind) in high speed internet access because of deregulation gone-bad. It allowed greedy dickbags (the cable companies) to do what they do best (perfect being greedy dickbags).

Just read about how many millions of dollars each of them spend in lobbying to ensure that communities continue to have to pay them (many more) millions for sub-par service. Total. Fucking. Dickbags.

I hope Google (or someone) succeeds in their (insanely expensive) end-around approach. Because it’s pretty clear the government isn’t going to do shit at this point. I wrote this post almost three years ago — what has changed in the meantime? Absolutely nothing. It’s gotten worse. And it will keep getting worse.

Truth

Favorite recent video games & books

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:03:00 -0500

Video games:

Micro miners (ipad) - Look past the hipster 8-bit graphics. It’s a great (light) physics puzzle game.

Flow (iphone) - From the “minute to learn, lifetime to master” genre. Elegant game design.

Letterpress (iphone) - Super fun game that all the techies are playing. Watch out for friends who write Python scripts to cheat! ;)

Bridge Constructor (ipad) - Great puzzle game. Bonus: a painless primer in civil engineering.

Splice (ipad) - Beautiful graphics/sound and really thoughtful gameplay.

Books:

Antifragile - I never really got into Taleb’s earlier books, but this one was great — and a page turner! I could have lived without the personal sidebars but the rest was riveting.

The Swerve - Great yarn. And this guy is obviously a serious scholar (who might be talking down to me slightly — but that’s ok).

Passage to Power - Who knew a story about LBJ could be so engaging?? You always hear he was the “master of the Senate” but learning the detailed mechanics of how he did it is fascinating. The author is so good that he makes a routine Senate vote seem like an action thriller.

Micromotives and Macrobehaviors - This economics classic characterized “emergence” long before it became a trendy buzzword. Clearly and concisely written, and at times profound.

"There is no guy on Zaarly saying road construction is his passion...

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 22:05:43 -0500

“There is no guy on Zaarly saying road construction is his passion. Artisanal road construction, perhaps, but not the actually useful sort.”

http://pandodaily.com/2012/12/09/ask-any-entrepreneur-the-freelance-economy-is-a-suckers-game/

"If Harvard wishes to retain its primary existence as a gigantic profit-maximizing hedge fund, that..."

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 21:40:10 -0500

“If Harvard wishes to retain its primary existence as a gigantic profit-maximizing hedge fund, that is well and good, but meanwhile perhaps it should be required to provide a free top quality college education to a few thousand deserving students as a minor community service.”

- http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/paying-tuition-to-a-giant-hedge-fund/

nevver: Wiki-it true! :)

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 00:54:29 -0500

nevver:

Wiki-it

true! :)

Kitchensurfing Blog: Nothing Restores Humanity Like a Hot Meal

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 01:34:19 -0500

Kitchensurfing Blog: Nothing Restores Humanity Like a Hot Meal:

christmasgorilla:

Hurricane Sandy did a number on New York. While much of the city is returning to normal life, parts of the city are devastated.

At Kitchensurfing, we had an interesting week. But the best part of the week was being inspired by the chefs in our community. We got a call on Thursday from chefs that were headed to the Rockaways to prepare hot food for those in need. We sponsored them and we were shocked to hear the return report. We’ve decided to use our skills to help support our chefs that want to help.

Support Chefs for Sandy

In several communities around New York, people still don’t have power, and many are homeless. There’s emergency relief in place and it is not enough.

A hot meal is humanizing in a way that little else can be. There’s looting, people are afraid, it’s cold, and this week is bringing more bad weather. Kitchensurfing stands for a kind of grassroots hospitality and a belief that breaking bread with someone can right many wrongs. We’re jumping in to help with things that the internet is good at: connecting people together to share and pool resources.

Specifically:
We’re looking for supporters to make small financial contributions towards food costs as our chefs work the kitchens.

We have Kitchensurfing chefs donating their time and skills prepping hot dishes for hard hit areas.

We’ve fronted the cost of transportation to shuttle hot food. We’re going to be partnering with others to shuttle.

We’re subsidizing the ingredients cost for these chefs

We’ve got multiple commissaries that are donating their space for our chefs to come and cook together
Support Chefs for Sandy

nice program

newyorkersunposed: Big Thank you to this gentleman directing...

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 21:20:41 -0400

newyorkersunposed:

Big Thank you to this gentleman directing traffic on 1st and 14th st. We had no power so traffic lights were not working, it was very dangerous and confusing for drivers and pedestrians. This gentleman took charge and started helping the community. We really appreciate your kindness and time! Best AR

awesome