I have written previously and with great despair of my (eventual?) surrender to sleep. By that, I mean giving in to the fact that I am older than I was when I could thrive on relatively little sleep, and given the realities of my daily life, relying on late-night internetting and whatnot for my treasured self-actualizing alone time may simply no longer be an option. I am too exhausted when I cannot afford to be. I have yet to change... Read more
I’ve never read a Jonathan Franzen novel, and I’ve been inclined to maintain that status quo considering the territory Franzen has staked out as the Internet’s Chief Fist-Waver. At least, that’s the impression one might fairly get from the aggregate of his commentaries on technology in recent years. So, anyway, though I guess his books are supposed to be great, I’ve felt like I could pass. I mean, why should I invest so much time in the work of a... Read more
Ilya Somin kind of blew my mind with this piece at Cato’s website, and it briefly shook my belief in a strong central government. Briefly! Ever so briefly. What I think Somin gets right is the diagnosis of a particular problem: voters’ abysmal political ignorance. No matter how much smarter we as a society might get, no matter how much more information is instantly available to us, we are still grotesquely stupid when it comes to government and politics, with... Read more
Alex Payne helps me understand what really differentiates the ideas behind iOS and Android: Everything from Android’s name to its styling speaks to an aesthetic that’s technical and a touch retro-futuristic. After years on iOS, parts of Android look and feel cool, but the slightly anxiety-inducing cool of science fiction. The skeuomorphic approach that’s now been abandoned in iOS 7 may have been goofy, but it was the logical extreme of Apple’s clear intent that the iOS experience should blend... Read more
Jed Groettum watched these shows so you don’t have to. Law & Order: SVU: A quick recap so far of that Law and Order SVU episode you just turned on halfway through: Some people were just walking along doing a normal everyday thing and they stumbled on a body. Then the detectives showed up and were like, “What the fuck?” Then they found a person they thought made sense as the killer, and brought him in. But then, some shit... Read more
If you don’t want to have your mug showing up all over the Web, appearing to endorse products and services in Google’s ads, go to this site, scroll the bottom, and uncheck the box that says, “Based upon my activity, Google may show my name and profile photo in shared endorsements that appear in ads,” and click save. It’ll prompt you with some crap about making it easier for your friends to discover blah blah blah, just confirm, and go... Read more
I’m definitely very glad that I began the Obcast. For years I’d toyed with the idea of doing my own podcast, but I always hesitated because it felt kind of pointless, as in, “oh boy, another podcast by a nerdy atheist type.” But then I let go of being terribly concerned of where a hypothetical podcast would fit in the grander online universe of content, and instead rested upon the simple idea that it’d be a lot of fun to... Read more
Remember how I was all, hey Google, I don’t use Google+ and Google Now all that much because I don’t feel like you really know me well enough to curate content for me. Wanting to give the Googlers another shot, I installed the official iOS apps to let it learn about me some more, and see if that at least improved the Google Now experience. Here’s what I got yesterday: Me and Google clearly need to talk. Read more
There is a theme gaining traction in some of the writing I’ve come across lately, and I think I just want to flag it as a compelling topic to which I’d like to return in more depth. It’s the idea of Silicon Valley and the tech industry as a new kind of religious center, where there is a sort of blind faith, a zealotry about the redeeming power of technology and the Internet. You can probably already predict the contours... Read more
I woke in a bed. In a room. In an inn. More than that was not immediately clear to me. It felt exactly like someone had hit me in the head with a church. This is the character Kvothe from Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind after a day of danger and derring-do. Let me tell you why I love this quote, and let me do it backward. The obvious part is the idea of a church, an enormous... Read more
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