What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
Mathew O’Brien, in the Atlantic, reasons on why the Euro is doomed:
The euro zone doesn’t have the fiscal or banking unions it needs to make monetary union work, and it’s not close to changing that. In the meantime, the euro’s continuing flaws continue to suck countries into crisis. And their politics get radicalized.
RA, in The Economist blog had similar thought too..
A clip of Gene Kelly singing in the rain
The Electronic Frontier Foundation makes a case about why a “Hollywood Ambassador” is a bad idea.
An US Senator has introduced a bill in the US Senate to create a new position “Chief Innovation & Intellectual Property Negotiator”.
The USTR has negotiated dozens of agreements and official publications with no true public consultation, upholding the one-sided concerns of Big Media and its allies. The U.S. copyright system is broken, yet we are exporting and reinforcing this broken system through these misguided treaties.
In other words, an Ambassador from Hollywood, paid for by the general public.
Evan Sellinger weighs the social consequences of the collision between technology & etiquette in an information-overloaded world. He says that etiquette norms are not just about efficiency. They’re actually about building thoughtful & pro-social character.
Relationships are fragile, and they require effort to preserve. Shortcuts won’t do; you often have to say more than just the essential facts. Viewing personal communication in overly reductive terms makes tenuous connections even more fragile.
Ha-Joon Chang, writing in the Guardian, demonstrates that the free market is a myth. Company profits depend on the ‘welfare payments’ they get from society.
It is time that we dispensed with the myth that the market is a force of nature that should not be meddled with. Markets are social creations that can be, and have been, modified for social purposes
First Aaron Schwartz, now Andrew Auernheimer. Andrew, a broke & bankrupt geek, has been jailed for 41 months for releasing the email addresses of hundreds of thousands of iPad owners – demonstrating that Apple hosting these confidential details on a public & unsecured server. He’s been live-tweeting his jail term.
And if you’d like to know how revered this fellow is in the Internet community, read his interview with Asher Wolf, an activist.
Andrew Auernheimer – or Weev, as much of the Internet knows him – was found guilty of incrementing a number on a url – doing basic arithmetic – and has been ceremoniously chucked behind bars for the next 41 months of his life – as a result of speaking up to point out a security problem.
Kathy Gannon discovers Afghan villagers flee their homes, and blame US drones.
“These foreigners started the problem,” Rasool said of international troops. “They have their own country. They should leave.”
These incessant drone attacks don’t impact those living thousands of miles away. All we see is text or an occasional graphic about the tragedy that’s unfolding there (as well in other places around the world). Will we ever care?
You may have noticed that Bitcoin is in the news a little more these days – the state of affairs in Cyprus has thrust it into the limelight, with it becoming a more valued currency than either the Euro or the US Dollar. The value of a Bitcoin has gone from $5 (Jan 2012) to currently around $140. If you’d like to understand what Bitcoin is really about, read this primer (pdf file)
The Bitcoin system is unique because it is the first digital store of value which can be safely and securely saved and transacted by individuals, without having to rely on a trusted third party. Once acquired and properly secured, Bitcoins can’t be taken from their owner, by a thief, a bank, or a government. Neither can any entity freeze any account, nor prevent the owner from performing (essentially free) transactions on the Bitcoin network.
Kapil Bhagat is a Mumbai, India based designer whose creative typographic science posters are catching the design world’s attention
Newton drops an “O” to illustrate gravity, a massive “C” in Copernicus reminds us that he figured the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe and placed the Sun, rather than the Earth, at the center. Not only do the posters look great, but they also allow you to memorize who did what.
Jimmy Stamp takes us through the design of the modern chess set:
Prior to 1849, there was no such thing as a “normal chess set.” At least not like we think of it today. Over the centuries that chess had been played, innumerable varieties of sets of pieces were created, with regional differences in designation and appearance. As the game proliferated throughout southern Europe in the early 11th century, the rules began to evolve, the movement of the pieces were formalized, and the pieces themselves were drastically transformed from their origins in 6th century India.