“A cat wearing a short tie plays music on a cat-shaped keyboard (“Pancake Meowsic Video,” 185,459 views). A woman performs sun salutations with a cat on her back (“Cat Loves Yoga,” 1,539 views). A man slaps two cats on an ironing board to the beat of “Atmosphere” (“Cat Slap Joy Division,” 357,605 views; watch this one). (Now, I mean.) Kittens try to keep up with an accelerating treadmill (“Treadmill Kittens,” 3.4 million views). A fat cat walks on an underwater treadmill (“Fat Cat Walking on Underwater Treadmill,” 133,434 views). Two cats cuff at a treadmill in perplexed inquisition (“Cats Try to Understand Treadmill,” 1.9 million views). Search YouTube for “cat treadmill” and see how many results there are. Or, actually, don’t.”
– “In Search of the Living, Purring, Singing Heart of the Online Cat-Industrial Complex,” Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Wired
Cat videos are central to our cultural ethos. They were invented in 1894 by the father of the American entertainment industry, Thomas Edison:
“I saw the best minds of my generation in chat rooms with the worst minds of my generation destroyed by bad Yelp reviews and a troll on Angies list after failed ebay auction bids dragging themselves through google adwords looking for SEO optimization while stirring to Kelly Clarkson on Itunes.
Message t shirt donning hipsters burning for the extra cash to afford optimized DSL connections and emoticon responses that stave off acronym exhaustion. Sat up chewing nicotine gum in the LCD monitors earthy glow floating over contemplating John Travolta’s latest disgruntled masseuse. Sober on Setraline who bared their brains to Yahoo after passing the CAPTCHA under a clever seeming screenname and saw Mohammedan menaces make the TSA frisk them at LAX.”
ENIAC, the first general-purpose computer, was built in 1946 and contained 19,000 glass vacuum tubes. Everything old is new again: Tube computers are back.
It seems that the materials of solid-state devices offer resistance to electrons, which slows down computing speeds. Electrons travel though a vacuum, though, with ease and great speed. New vacuum devices will be smaller, cooler, and more advanced, and the next generation of tube computers will weigh considerably less than ENIAC’s 27 tons.
“Last year, Royal Pingdom, which monitors Internet usage, said that in 2010, 107 trillion e-mails were sent. A report this year from the Radicati Group, a market research firm, found that in 2011, there were 3.1 billion active e-mail accounts in the world. The report noted that, on average, corporate employees sent and received 105 e-mails a day.
Sure, some of those e-mails are important. But 105 a day?
All of this has led me to believe that something is terribly wrong with e-mail. What’s more, I don’t believe it can be fixed.”
– “Disruptions: Life’s Too Short for So Much E-Mail,” Nick Bilton, New York Times
Image (“Bathsheba Reads King David’s Email, after Rembrandt”) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.
This, children, was the sound of the Internet in the last century. It is the sound of a computer modem connecting with a telephone line.”Telephone lines” were copper wires connecting these things in homes and offices to each other, and you talked into them ….
Oh, never mind.
More:
“The Mechanics and Meaning of That Ol’ Dial-Up Modem Sound,” Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic
Tom Scocca, managing editor of Deadspin, feels dread when he gets an email with a Microsoft Word document attached:
“Time and effort are about to be wasted cleaning up someone’s archaic habits. A Word file is … cumbersome, inefficient, and a relic of obsolete assumptions about technology. It’s time to give up on Word.”
“Death to Word: It’s time to give up on Microsoft’s word processor,” Tom Scocca, Slate.
It’s a long article, 1405 words with 7596 characters. How do we know? We pasted it into memory-hogging, metadata-infested, editorially intrusive Word and used the word count feature. That’s really the only thing the program’s good for.
Millions of people use their smartphones to access information, and software developers have been optimizing websites for mobile devices. Google has a new initiative to reach those neglected by these efforts, rotary phone users. Google is asking developers: ”Ready to Go Ro?“ The new rotarization tool set was introduced today, April 1st.
Anonymous, the phantom hacker group responsible for headline-grabbing online protest actions, threatened to shut down the Internet on March 31st. They would use the nuclear option, a DNS amplification attack. The result would shut down email, corporate and government websites, communications and defense systems, banking and financial transactions, and electric grids and water systems around the world. It would be a global catastrophe.
Apple has introduced the new iPad 3, featuring an outrageous display, so your iPad 2 is now totally obsolete. The tech-savvy folks at Wired have devised some ways to re-purpose that old iPad 2. One of our favorites: cutting board .
“20 Ways to ‘Recycle’ Your Obsolete iPad 2,” Christina Bonnington, Wired
Image (“Christian Ludwig II, Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, With His iPad”) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.
After 244 years, Encyclopaedia Britannica will cease publishing paper editions and become a solely digital resource. Britannica has had digital editions on CD-ROM and online for the last thirty years, and will continue updating and publishing online. Unlike Wikipedia with its anonymous authors and crowd-sourced editing, digital Britannica will still be produced by professional editors and named authors who actually know what they’re writing about.
More:
“Wikipedia Didn’t Kill Britannica. Windows Did,” Tim Carmody, Wired
“Change: It’s Okay. Really.” Britannica Editors, Britannica blog
