March 2011
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What is a "technology writer"?
A few weeks ago, Alexis Madrigal — a chum and one of my favourite science and technology writers — punted a question out to his Twitter followers: “If you could hire any three journalists working primarily online today, who would they be?”.
It was an interesting question, though I struggled to answer, and he got plenty of response since he’s big on the internets. (In fact,...
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Three things I found out today
⌘ You can’t get blood from a stone, but you can get a very red liquid pouring out of a glacier.
⌘ IM is one of those tools that a lot of journalists don’t use and should — I remember in the Guardian offices it was barely touched, despite being bloody useful. Is it just a generation gap?
⌘ I told a friend recently that the phrase “fun run” was an oxymoron. Today I ran...
Silicon Alley rises again
The New York Observer has launched a new tech blog called BetaBeat, about the city’s technology scene. It’s got an honourable mission statement that essentially boils down to “we don’t want to be like all those other shitty blogs repeating the same piece of crap funding news, we want to bring you stories about the people who make the scene move”.
I like it so far...
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Three things I found out today
⌘ Mice sing to each other in voices that are way beyond our hearing range.
⌘ You can produce some truly stunning images with just a telescope and a camera. (OK, not just any old telescope and camera, but still).
⌘ If newspapers die out completely, the biggest loser may be the stock photographer: after all, how else will they sell their pictures of businessmen reading the newspaper and looking...
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Three things I found out today
⌘ Forget Charlie S***n: James Franco has managed to win the internet.
⌘ The technology industry has experienced a lot of change in its lifetime. But I think medicine has seen even more rapid, radical change. Not everyone agrees, but it’s worth thinking about the challenges on both sides and what one can learn from the other.
⌘ If blue whales were like people, they’d all die of...
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Three things I found out today
⌘ The treatment of Bradley Manning, the alleged source of the Wikileaks diplomatic cables, is a disgusting. It’s a travesty that Barack Obama — who made such a noise about treating prisoners properly while running for office — is complicit in this.
⌘ In 1989, 2 million people joined hands all the way from Tallinn, through Riga, to Vilnius.
⌘ Sometimes the future is beautiful.
Weeknotes 47
This past week was a strange one, all tides and comings and goings.
It started with ebullience and an unexpected £60 victory in a local pub quiz. That winningness fed into the energy I’ve been feeling over the last few weeks, something that’s building up as I spend more time running. I’m still doing it all in the gym, of course — let’s not pretend that when I exercise...
Three things I found out today
⌘ Journalists, enabled by the web, are increasingly defining success according to exposure, and news organizations are increasingly defining success according to the limitation of exposure.
⌘ One of the buildings I pass on my way into London is an asylum for idiots.
⌘ Very few ideas are unique - many great inventions were produced by several people, separately, at the same time. Here’s...
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Three things I found out today
⌘ There is a definite reason you should slice meat against the grain.
⌘ Twitter is at its best when unexpected news happens. It is at its worst when pre-orchestrated events take place. After a few weeks of watching so many interesting messages cross my stream about Egypt and, the torrent of brainfarts depicting every single second of the iPad 2 launch or the TED conference were a huge...
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Three things I found out today
⌘ Germans buy more Ikea furniture than anyone else.
⌘ A single city block in New York can change drastically over the course of a few generations, as this piece — from wilderness to brothels to the Apple store — shows. (via Phil)
⌘ While I wouldn’t go as far as suggesting that any readers with impaired vision should suddenly start running solo, but it’s amazing what technology can...
The power of history
You may or may not be familiar with Adam Curtis, the award-winning British documentary maker who was behind great films like The Power of Nightmares and The Trap.
His films are usually dissections of power and control, watching the way our attitudes are manipulated or changed over time. I like to think of him as a sort of epidemiological historian who works through the medium of TV.
Two years...