Quite a while back I reade a book called Satisfaction: the science of finding true fulfillment. The book is about the scientific escapades of its author, Gregory Berns, as he seeks the answer to a number of questions about happiness. The book varies from extremely technical descriptions of Berns’ research in neuroeconomics to extremely accessible [...]
Yesterday I had a moment I can only classify as Zen. Amidst the flurry of hundreds of RSS chunks, emails and IMs spreading between thousands of people, some signal seemed to appear out of the noise. Unfortunately, I am not omnicient, and cannot put the puzzle together completely. Perhaps someone can enlighten me.
1. Sometime in [...]
Facebook has recently been making big changes, such as offering APIs and experimenting with privacy. Some of these changes have been met with positive feedback, and others with hostility, but it is obvious from these recent experiments that they are testing new waters. Probably the biggest change they have proposed though is opening registration to [...]
Last week YouTube released a new player along with a few other features across the site (for some reason they have yet to blog about these changes). Personally I liked the look and feel of their old player more, but that is beside the point: the new interface exposes the most popular off-site links to [...]
The fifth anniversary of September 11, 2001 was much more respectful than I expected. It seemed that most people remembered the day with a somber reverence that was personal to their experience. One memorial that struck a chord in me took place at MIT:
MIT 9/11 Hack: fire truck on the Great Dome (photo François [...]
While walking through the streets of Florence, we stumbled upon a perplexing piece of graffiti:
I’m sure people have written about MySpace and tagging, but this is absurd. How did AndyG, a 25 year old hip hop artist from Orange County (or a fan) decide to promote his music on an ancient building in Florence?
If this [...]
Weird Al has a way of coming out of nowhere and grabbing the attention of a generation of nerds, well, just about once per generation of nerds. For me it was Michael Jackson (video), for some it was Nirvana (video), and maybe even The Kinks for a few. There is something beatuiful about the nerdification [...]
It’s a well-known fact that pornography drives the development of technology. Whether you’re talking about the Internet, VHS, or papyrus, porn pushed the envelope and paid the way for the development of the underlying media. Well, I hate to admit it, but it appears that pr0n is moving on:
As this Google trend clearly shows, the [...]
Recently Facebook has introduced a few feature which has raised a lot of attention among users and bloggers. This piece of the system, called the News Feed shows you activity of your contacts within Facebook. If your friend posts to their blog, uploads a photo, attends an event or changes almost anything in their profile, [...]