If you could travel back or forward in time where would you go?
The past is in some sense safer since we have some vague idea of its context. However, the further back we go the less we know of it. Travelling to the past also has the added allure of answering currently unanswered questions such as: what were the dinosaurs really like? The fact that we have knowledge of the past makes it less mysterious as a destination in some ways but we can be more certain that it will be a time worth visiting.
I’d visit the future as long as I knew I could come back safely. I’d like to see how technology impacts human evolution, maybe millions of years from now. Eventually, you could have human dimorphism where some humans become so dependent on machines that they become febrile and delicate, whereas others become more physical. The more physical humans might be the breeders or something crazy like that. I think lack of physicality and diminished sex drive are probably linked. Exercise is known to increase testosterone levels.
General
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Aug 04
Big questions
25
Aug 04
Gmail invites!
I finally managed to get five Gmail invites! Yay! I’ve been waiting forever.
24
Aug 04
Average is beautiful
- The Face of Tomorrow. Via Take one hundred people and create a composite face from their faces. The result makes me think that the ideal of human beauty is not particular but average. The composites are all good looking, so take one hundred people strip the unique characteristics or oddities and you have a good-looking person. Strange.
- Boring game? Outsource it. A sure sign of cultural decadence
- The democratization of advertising revenue. Google lets Blogger users in on a piece of the ad game.
- Analog meets digital. A typewriter (yes!) that collects the input you use while typing into a buffer then sends as an email. Via.
- NYT on Team America.
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Aug 04
In blogging news: Six Apart hires Brad Choate
Six Apart, the blogging software business founded by the creators of Movable Type, has hired one of their most productive and talented volunteers, Brad Choate. It will be interesting to see what they come up with in the upcoming releases of Movable Type. The more people they hire the more important it will be to keep growing the business and begin selling a lot more MovableType and TypePad subscriptions. The addition of Choate may increase their capabilities in the direction of supporting more dynamic content in MT and that in turn could lead to the development of additional products. We will be watching with interest.
19
Aug 04
RSS Feeds
I’m the king of missing important details, so I noticed a while back that the RSS feeds for LNS were not working then I promptly forgot this. Today I noticed it again and it took me all of two seconds to fix. The point is, the feeds are working now, which means you can just view the feeds without coming to the main page of the site.
To that end here are some cool RSS/XML tools that might help you.:
- Convert eBay searches into feeds with RSSAuction.com
- Create a calendar and share with friends in RSS
- Sage News Aggregator extension (plugin) for Firefox
18
Aug 04
The trend toward commercial blogs
I’ve been watching Boing Boing pile on the ads and cluttering their front page for the past few months. They need a fresh redesign of the site if that’s what they want to do. The Boing Boing people have some ties with Denton and the Gawker Media crowd and it seems like they’re trying to do something along the same lines by placing prominent advertisements along each side of their page. Boing Boing shoots for a more eclectic and general subject matter, whereas most of Gawker Media’s sites are based on targeted themes (most likely to concentrate on a target ad base), for example: their gadget site, Gizmodo, and their porn site, Fleshbot. Is this the start of a trend toward more commercial blogging? With the proliferation of so many personal blogs is there a demand for strict content-based blogging? Do more blogs need editors to be successful? Will more blogs jump on the ad bandwagon?
Update: Most of the editors at Boing Boing are also contributors to Wired or Wired Magazine. Back in June, I speculated on the link between BB and Gawker Media because of all the gratuitous cross-posting and mentionitis going on at the time. Back then, Wired/BB contributor Xeni Jardin denied a link or deal between Boing Boing and Gawker, yet now at Nick Denton‘s website it describes Gizmodo (the gadget blog) as: “Gizmodo, a blog for the gadget obsessive, recently partnered with Wired Magazine. ” Interesting?
Edit 19:56 CST: Maybe, but Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, points out in the comments below that there is no money changing hands between Gawker/BB/Wired and that the relationship could be best characterized as that of mutual admiration:
“I’m a big fan of Gizmodo (and Nick’s other projects), so when we launched Gadget Lab, our weekly email newsletter, we agreed to highlight some Gizmodo content in exchange for a link on their site. Just a trade, with no money changing hands.”
This may all be true, although I would argue that since all three groups derive most of their income from advertising revenue that this amounts to a de facto business relationship as items of value are being exchanged as part of an agreement. It goes without saying that I do not have a problem with business of this type, only that it is important to know that such relationships exist.
Related:
18
Aug 04
Targus mini-mice
I went to Office Depot on my lunch break yesterday and found a good deal on a Targus mini optical mouse for my laptop. It’s petite and winds up into this little button-shaped, spring-loaded coil dealy. It even comes with its own velvety bag for protection in your laptop bag. I like it a lot, a lot better than using the touchpad on the laptop. After using it for a while when you switch back to your desktop mouse it feels like you’re pushing a giant brick around. You can pick them up at Office Depot for $9.99 after rebate. The retail is $19.99 with an instant rebate of $5 and a mail-in rebate of $5. That’s the best deal I’ve seen anywhere.