What forces are driving the rapid technological developments that continue to shape our world? According to author Peter Nowak it is a very unholy trinity; the war, porn and fast food industries. In this talk at Gleebooks, Nowak brands the internet as “military made, porn perfected” and explains his thesis and looking at how these industries drive technological change.
This series of films investigates how people have been colonised by the machines they have built. Although they may not realise it, the way many people see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers. Not just politics and the economy — but also in the way bodies, minds, and even the whole of the natural world are perceived.
This post pulls a random vintage ad from the RSS feed of a vintage ad page on LiveJournal.
I rather liked the animated gif that Google showed yesterday to mark the anniversary of the discovery of x-rays 115 years ago. So, if you missed it, here it is again:
TechCrunch reports on a nice bit of Twitter technology now available for WordPress. It’s called Blackbird Pie and makes a graphical representation of a tweet to embed in your blog, such as: This saves you the time having to cut, copy and paste a screenshot when you want to show …
My three video collections over at VodPod: VodPod lets you collect videos from web sites with a browser button (if it is able to find an embedded video in the page) and it lets you follow people who collect videos as well (and be followed) . It …
Via TED: David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut — and it may just change the way we see …
Via the Commonwealth Club: Nicholas Carr, Author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains in conversation with Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet …