Defining the 15-minute city

Christoph Grienberger oversaw all mathematical works written by Jesuit authors, a role akin to an editor at a modern scientific journal. He was modest and productive, and could not resist solving problems. He reasoned that since a 1:10 gear could allow one person to lift 10 times as much as one unassisted, if one had 24 gears linked to a treadmill then one could lift the Earth… very slowly.

The 'megascale' structures that humans could one day build

Louisville’s Mayor on What President Biden Means For Cities

In his book The Mysterious Flame (1999), the British philosopher Colin McGinn argues that it is impossible to understand the phenomenon of consciousness because we cannot get outside of our minds to discuss it. We are inescapably trapped within the network of neurons whose mysterious experience we are attempting to analyze. Likewise, I would argue that we are imprisoned within our own cosmos of meaning. We cannot imagine a universe without meaning. We are not talking necessarily about some grand cosmic meaning, or a divine meaning bestowed by God, or even a lasting, eternal meaning. But just the simple, particular meaning of everyday events, fleeting events like the momentary play of light on a lake, or the birth of a child. For better or for worse, meaning is part of the way we exist in the world.

Is Life Special Just Because It’s Rare?

Ball Chair

An article in the New York Times from 1966 called the Ball Chair the most antisocial, leave-me-alone-chair in Europe, fascinating more to men than women. The design was described as the ideal chair for the businessman who wants to seclude himself from all the noise at home and get some peace to read the newspaper.

Top 10 classic stories retold

Moment To MomentWhy Richard Linklater makes movies.

Pause. Reflect. Think

By suggesting that her readers (the general public) need to learn to think clearly, and helping to provide the means, Stebbing was adding herself to a long line of philosophers known as ‘freethinkers’. ‘Freethinking’ dates back to the European Enlightenment and originally involved rejecting religious authority and academic dogma in the light of new developments in science. Essentially, freethinkers pushed for a democratisation of knowledge and believed we should follow our own reason over the Bible or ancient philosophical texts. The frontispiece to Thinking to Some Purpose even includes a quotation from the 18th-century philosopher Anthony Collins, who literally wrote the textbook on freethinking. The quotation, which is from Collins’s A Discourse of Free-thinking (1713), reads: if we have a right to know any Truth whatsoever, we have a right to think freely … there is no other way to discover the Truth.

‘There is an urgent need today for the citizens of a democracy to think well.’ These words, which could have been written yesterday, come from Thinking to Some Purpose, a popular book by the British philosopher Susan Stebbing, first published in 1939 in the Penguin ‘Pelican’ books series, with that familiar blue-and-white cover. This little book, which could easily be slipped into a pocket and read on the train, in a lunch hour, or at a bus stop, was pitched at the intelligent general reader. In Thinking to Some Purpose, Stebbing took on the task of showing the relevance of logic to ordinary life, and she did so with a sense of urgency, well aware of the gathering storm clouds over Europe.

Open data — A world in which vital and useful data is shared between all parties and made open for anyone to utilise, rather like a commons.Privacy First — digital platforms should minimise the data created about users and personal data should remain private and under individual control by default. Sharing data should happen only in the most necessary circumstances and everything should be encrypted.Data ownership — People should be able to take control of the data they generate through the framework of ownership and it should be within their right to license the use of that data to whomever they choose.

In part, Swash acts as a basic enough tool to allow people to have a genuine say over what data from their browser they’d like to share (and monetise) and what they would prefer to remain private. It turns out that, given the chance at reclaiming some of their power or imagining an alternative to data tyranny, consumer indifference fades away.

Privacy is dead. Long live data ownership.

Although Andreessen has been a board member of Facebook, Hewlett-Packard, and eBay, he doesn’t take many board seats in a16z’s portfolio companies, preferring to train his eyes on the horizon. Andreessen is tomorrow’s advance man, routinely laying out “what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years,” as if he were glancing at his Google calendar. He views his acuity as a matter of careful observation and extrapolation, and often invokes William Gibson’s observation “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Jet packs have been around for half a century, but you still can’t buy them at Target. To smooth out such lumps in distribution, Andreessen disseminates his views via every available podcast and panel discussion and CNN interview slot: he’s a media soothsayer, Andreessen the Magnificent. He also tweets a hundred and ten times a day, inundating his three hundred and ten thousand followers with aphorisms and statistics and tweetstorm jeremiads. Andreessen says that he loves Twitter because “reporters are obsessed with it. It’s like a tube and I have loudspeakers installed in every reporting cubicle around the world.” He believes that if you say it often enough and insistently enough it will come—a glorious revenge. He told me, “We have this theory of nerd nation, of forty or fifty million people all over the world who believe that other nerds have more in common with them than the people in their own country. So you get to choose what tribe or band or group you’re a part of.” The nation-states of Twitter will map the world.

Tomorrow’s Advance Man

Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana

Today, most of us accept that the Internet is important, but this is a recent phenomenon. As late as 1995, astronomer Clifford Stoll wrote an article for Newsweek, entitled “Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana,” which includes this unfortunate analysis: Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping — just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet — which there isn’t — the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: Salespeople.

In 1837, Charles Babbage set out to build something he called The Analytical Engine — the world’s first general-purpose computer, that could be described in modern times as Turing-complete. In other words, given enough resources the machine that Babbage was building could compute anything that the most powerful computer in the world today can compute. The computation might be slower and the computer might take up more space (okay, amazingly slow and incredibly huge), but his design matched today’s computational power.

Can-Do vs. Can't-Do Culture

Unfinished manuscripts that lay behind Palestinian critic’s stated contempt for fiction

Singer’s demo caused quite the stir and for good reason: tools such as this will continue to improve, and we all know it. It signals a future where many of the tasks we perform now will be automated or at least aided by AI. Technology that has the potential to eliminate tasks, and by extension the potential to eliminate jobs, will invariably elicit some fear. This is especially true in an industry that already has a firm grasp on how technology can disrupt entire industries. While AI will no doubt eliminate the need to manually perform many tasks, its benefits will also open up opportunities and help to automate menial tasks which will free us up to focus on the more meaningful work that provides additional value. The question becomes: how might we leverage AI and the benefits it brings to help in the design process? Additionally, how might things go wrong when leveraging AI in the design process?

Benedict Evans, the tech analyst, argues “when software becomes part of society, all of society’s problems get expressed in software”. But innovation, while a force for good, is also reshaping our lives. Businesses, communications, cities, even political systems are being altered and destabilised in ways beyond the control of nations.

Danny Hillis, my mentor as we were working at Thinking Machines in the early 1980s, often said, “We want to build a machine that will be proud of us.” We were bringing up the next generation. In my conversations with Carl Feynman at that time, we thought if we were going to be bringing up our new overlords, they should at least read good books. While not of the Internet yet, the computer we were building did share the recognition of the importance of the network, of the interconnections of the links. The machine we were building was called the “Connection Machine,” where the connections between the processors were seen as important as the tens of thousands of processors themselves. The difference between this machine and the Internet was that these processors were not yet spread around the world.This imagining of a machine’s view of us, a machine that is distinct from us, a machine that has evolved beyond us, brings me around to my original ill-formed vision in 1980 of what I could help make the Internet become: a network of people, the library, and machines. I did not see it in a light that was either glorifying or terrifying, but rather as a major inevitable project that could be built well or badly, and I could help build it well. In that way it could be a major positive step forward.

Timekeeping devices have trans­formed civiliza­tions more than once. As Lewis Mumford pointed out in 1934: “The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern indus­trial age.” Today, it is again a timekeeping device that is trans­forming our civiliza­tion: a clock, not computers, is the true key-machine of the modern infor­ma­tional age. And this clock is Bitcoin.

BLVR: How important is reading to your work? TC: I don’t know if this is exactly what you’re asking, but I’ll say this. This has to do with the question of genre, which is often defined in terms of a certain set of tropes or a formula. But there’s this other definition of genre that I find speaks more to me, which is to think of genre as an ongoing conversation. Genre is a conversation between authors, between books, that extends over decades. And one of the reasons I definitely identify as a science fiction writer is because I want to be a participant in the ongoing conversation that is science fiction. My writing is informed by the books I’ve read, so it is a response to what other writers have written. I want to be in conversation with other works of science fiction. 

BLVR: How important would you say the Clarion Workshop was to your development as a writer?  TC: Clarion was a life-changing event not just because of what I learned about writing, but because it made me believe that I could be a writer. Prior to attending Clarion, I’d been working in complete isolation. I didn’t know anyone else who was trying to write science fiction—I knew barely anyone who read science fiction. So I had no one to really talk to about what felt like the central passion of my life. I’d gotten only form-letter rejections; I didn’t know if I was cut out to be a writer. At Clarion people told me that my stuff was good; that was the first time I had gotten positive reinforcement. But it was also the first time that I found other people who shared my passion. A lot of people say that going to Clarion is like meeting a family you didn’t know you had, and to me it definitely felt that way. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who had read the books I had read and understood the things I was interested in and were trying to do the things I was trying to do. I remember, on maybe the first or second night at Clarion, one of my classmates mentioned the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis3 and then started to explain what it was, and I said, “Oh, I know what that is.” And he said, “You’re the first person I’ve met who’s heard of that before.” That sort of thing happened to us constantly. Going to Clarion was how I found there was a community for writers out there that I could fit into. 

It didn’t take long for the founding duo to ship v1. Written in Graham’s beloved Lisp, the site served as a fairly straightforward link aggregator that allowed for upvoting and downvoting. The first 100 accounts on the site were created by either Ohanian or Huffman to give the appearance of activity. A snapshot from the site from that period (thank you WayBackMachine) illustrates just how much of the culture was baked in early on, featuring conspiracy theories, wonkish dev chat, strong opinions, and “spez,” Huffman’s username.

This problem was no secret. Computer scientists had been working on ways to network computers as early as 1962. Then on October 29, 1969—only a few months after Apollo 11 landed on the moon—grad student, Charley Kline, sent a message from his computer at UCLA to a computer some 350 miles north at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). To Kline and his co-conspirator, Bill Duvall, it was no big deal. “It was just engineers working,” said Leonard Kleinrock, a pioneer of computer networking and a leader of the project.

There is something important to be claimed – or reclaimed – from those Macys conversations, for while there was a great deal of interest in how the mind works, there was also a clear and deliberate examination of the role of technology in our lives. In the fading shadows of World War II, it was clear computers would have a profound impact on our futures, and Mead and her contemporaries fretted about how to theorise a cybernetic system in such a way that it could accommodate humans and culture, and even the environment. The atomic bomb was a graphic reminder of the power of technology to profoundly reconfigure the natural world. Participants at the Macy Conferences wanted a different kind of technological future – something far less destructive, although they clearly did not yet grasp the energy needs of the computing systems they were building, and their ultimate cost.

V.C. FOR VENDETTA

It’s Time to Take the Penis off Its Pedestal

Self-Driving Cars Are Coming. Will They Serve Profit or the Public?

10 myths about net zero targets and carbon offsetting, busted

Arthur Kleinman

Break Away From Android and iOS: 7 Free Open-Source Mobile OSes to Try

The Right Way to Regulate Algorithms

Which Sounds Are the Most Annoying to Humans?{"@type":"NewsArticle","@context":"http://schema.org","url":"https://gizmodo.com/which-sounds-are-the-most-annoying-to-humans-1846098655","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Daniel Kolitz"}],"headline":"Which Sounds Are the Most Annoying to Humans?","description":"Earlier this month, a kind of chirping, rainforest-y sound sprung up in my apartment. It came from my roommate’s room. At first, I took it for a video game, but then realized the sound materialized even when my roommate was asleep. For days, I wondered about this. At any point I could’ve asked him what the deal was, but I kept on forgetting—the sound was just annoying enough to be notable but not annoying enough to do something about. When I did remember to ask him, during one of the sound’s occasional disappearances, he had no idea what I was talking about. ","dateline":"01/25/2021 at 08:00","datePublished":"2021-01-25T08:00:00-05:00","dateModified":"2021-01-25T08:00:01-05:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","url":"https://gizmodo.com/which-sounds-are-the-most-annoying-to-humans-1846098655"},"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","height":675,"width":1200,"url":"https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_fill,f_auto,fl_progressive,g_center,h_675,pg_1,q_80,w_1200/ysfrxb7ougwtr6l0v3ds.png","thumbnail":{"@type":"ImageObject","height":180,"width":320,"url":"https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_fill,f_auto,fl_progressive,g_center,h_180,pg_1,q_80,w_320/ysfrxb7ougwtr6l0v3ds.png"}},"articleBody":"Earlier this month, a kind of chirping, rainforest-y sound sprung up in my apartment. It came from my roommate’s room. At first, I took it for a video game, but then realized the sound materialized even when my roommate was asleep. For days, I wondered about this. At any point I could’ve asked him what the deal was, but I kept on forgetting—the sound was just annoying enough to be notable but not annoying enough to do something about. When I did remember to ask him, during one of the sound’s occasional disappearances, he had no idea what I was talking about. \n\nThe sound to that point had been a subconscious irritant—by the time I noticed it, I could never say how long it had been going for. But after that exchange, and the sanity-questioning it entailed, roughly half my brain was looking out for the sound’s return. When it did finally reemerge, I burst without knocking into my roommate’s room. “That,” I said. “Oh,” he replied. “The radiator?”\n\nIt was, in fact, the radiator. He hadn’t noticed it.\n\nThis is all to say that, when we are speaking about sounds, “annoying” is a subjective criteria. But there must be, one figures, some consensus on the subject. For this week’s Giz Asks we reached out to a number of sound-experts to find out what that might be.\n\nDr. Tjeerd Andringa\n\nAssociate professor Auditory Cognition, University of Groningen\n\nThe sound of vomiting: elicits a visceral response. The first steps of auditory processing are in the brainstem close to the “disgust” center that is activated when we swallow(ed) something toxic and which activates the muscles to expel it.\n\nIt’s actually pretty simple. In the evolution of vertebrates, the first vertebrate was basically a long tube with on one side the mouth and on the other side the anus. And the only thing that it really had to do was to open its mouth, accept something as food and then digest in that tube. The tube was basically a little garden with all kinds of bacteria. It should not make a real mistake because then it would poison the garden and poison itself. So it was very important for that early vertebrate to make the proper decisions — what to swallow, what not to swallow. That is the reason why all our senses are around the mouth. We taste, we smell, we hear, we see — all around the mouth — so we can make the best decisions of what to eat.\n\nAll the sensors came together at the top of the neural tube. That is our brain stem. That is the level where all the information is processed at the most basic level. That leads to a situation that if you have no time to process the signal in full or to use your higher mental faculties, then you fall back to the lowest form of processing that we have, which is that physiological, low-level form of processing. This is always active in the background, and it has to be overruled by higher levels of processing. But it is always the first response that we get because it’s the quickest. \n\nPretty much all the other sounds are sounds that are relevant to higher cognition. So the scraping of fingernails on the chalkboard probably also has a visceral component, but it’s much further away from our basic responses than vomiting. A baby crying does not make sense for all mammals; it only makes sense for mammals that have babies that actually cry. This is a higher level, more advanced type of processing. And it must be very strong, but it is not as deeply encoded in our body as the response to vomiting. \n\n“The sound of vomiting: elicits a visceral response. The first steps of auditory processing are in the brainstem close to the ‘disgust’ center that is activated when we swallow(ed) something toxic and which activates the muscles to expel it.”\n\nTrevor Cox\n\nProfessor, Acoustic Engineering, University of Salford\n\nPeople’s responses to sounds are learned; what’s most annoying to any given person can be highly individualized, and is intimately connected to circumstance. In general, though, the most annoying sounds are those that get in the way of whatever you’re trying to do. With everyone working at home right now, a neighbor’s DIY drilling might be the most annoying sound.\n\nWhat can heighten annoyance is a lack of control. When your neighbors are throwing a party, the noise is annoying not only because it prevents you from sleeping but because you have no idea when it’s going to end. If you knew in advance when the party might end, the sound would likely be less disruptive.\n\n“People’s responses to sounds are learned; what’s most annoying to any given person can be highly individualized, and is intimately connected to circumstance.”\n\nFlorian Hollerweger\n\nAssistant Professor, Audio Arts and Acoustics, Columbia College Chicago\n\nThe most annoying sound for a human, as we all know, is the sound of chalkboard scraping. It’s terrible! Precisely why that is so remains a bit of a mystery and—I kid you not—the subject of ongoing psychoacoustic research. Even thinking about it (the sound, not the research) makes me cringe. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that the Covid-19 pandemic has brought back to the forefront many traditional contenders for the title of “most annoying sound.” Depending on your living circumstances, the sounds of your otherwise respected neighbors or housemates, for example, may well be much more annoying to you now than they were nine months ago.\n\nThe “most annoying sound for a human” is a surprisingly evasive concept that depends not only on who the human in question is, but also on that person’s circumstances and emotional state. If you think about it, this is a trivial truth only in a superficial sense. Rather, I think of it as a beautiful testimony to the raw emotional power that sound commands over us—not only on the negative end of the spectrum, but also with regards to that most beautiful of sounds: music. Many of the above truisms apply just as well to music—its dependence on the listener’s personal preferences or aversions, stage in life, current emotions, etc. In other words, the same strong reliance on context explains both the “ugliest” as well as the “prettiest” sounds. In my mind this shows that these are really just two manifestations of a larger underlying natural beauty, which we humans can become a part of and nurture (through music, for example), but which ultimately exceeds the value judgements that we can’t quite seem to be able to do without.\n\nA large part of my creative practice and research unfolds in the realm of experimental music and sound art. From this experience I can assert that one human’s “most annoying sound” may well form the basis of another’s most precious music. Perhaps once a Covid-19 vaccine is widely available, you might want to attend an experimental music concert near you, to see which of these two groups you belong to... or whether there is room in between. British composer Trevor Wishart, for example, created a stunningly complex and highly recommended piece of music entitled “Imago” from a single clink of two glasses.\n\n“The ‘most annoying sound for a human’ is a surprisingly evasive concept that depends not only on who the human in question is, but also on that person’s circumstances and emotional state.”\n\nSteven J. Orfield\n\n\nFounder of Orfield Laboratories which provides multi-sensory design, research and testing in architecture, product development and forensics\n\nIn 1990, I moved my perceptual laboratory into the former Sound 80 Studios. Sound 80 was a client of mine for acoustic and lighting consulting, and in 1975, in collaboration with 3M who had just invented multi-track digital recording, they became the World’s First Digital Recording Studio, as recognized by Guinness World Records in 2006. During their time as a client of mine, I sat in that last American album recording of Cat Stevens, Izatso. \n\nI bought the studio to move my company but also to deal with a health issue.\n\nI had just gone through surgery to get an artificial valve, as I was born with a defective aortic valve. I had read the acoustic studies in the medical journals about the noise levels, but when I woke up from surgery, I found that the valve was much louder than claimed in the academic studies. So as I went back to my lab, I measured the sound with an accelerometer (vibration transducer), and with a 1” precision microphone, and I recorded each. Then I did a listening experiment to listen to my heart valve with one ear and the recordings with the other. I spent hours equalizing the sound so that the recording was a close facsimile of what I heard.\n\nThen I did a Stevens Threshold test to see how loud it was. This was done by playing a pink noise track until it was so loud that I couldn’t hear the valve, and then playing the pink noise again from loud to soft until I could hear it. Those two extremes established the threshold for my hearing of my valve.\n\nWhile it was claimed to be about 30 dBA, it was actually able to be perceived into the low 80 dBA range, about 16 times as loud as claimed, and it sounded like I had been implanted with an old mechanical clock.\n\nI went back and reviewed the journal literature again and found out that most of the measurement procedures used by the industry were incorrect, and most of the equipment used was not used correctly. It took me two years to learn to sleep after sleep hypnosis, sleep medicines and special pillows and fans. I was so frustrated that I invited all the American heart valve companies to join me in a conference at my Lab, so that I could show the levels of mistakes they all made, and so that they could start to work on the terribly annoying sound. In 1993, for the first and only time they ever met together the entire industry came to my lab and listened to what heart valve noise really sounded like. They were all shocked and concerned, and many were in violation of FDA requirements because they had been claiming quiet valves.\n\nThis meeting caused new research on porcine (pig) valved to extend the valve life from 5 years to 20 years, and now most implants get a bio-prosthetic valve, that can be implanted through an artery and can be repaired in the same way. I hope that my work with them was helpful in causing a reconsideration of heart valves across the entire industry. It also lead to a Medical article in the Wall Street Journal, where their editor explained to me that many ‘facts’ that he was told in interviews with doctors were false, as they were very defensive about discussing medical problems.\n\nDo you have a burning question for Giz Asks? Email us at tipbox@gizmodo.com. \n\nAdditional reporting by Marina Galperina.\n\n","articleSection":"Giz Asks","keywords":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","@context":"http://schema.org","name":"Gizmodo","url":"https://gizmodo.com","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://x.kinja-static.com/assets/images/logos/amp/logo-gizmodo-amp.png"},"sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/gizmodo","https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxFmw3IUMDUC1Hh7qDjtjZQ","https://twitter.com/gizmodo","https://instagram.com/gizmodo"]},"video":[]}

Singapore is building a 42,000-home eco 'smart' city

Li: Yeah. So in terms of where I’m focused on these days, as an investor, I’m focused on backing new platforms that are empowering people to have happier work lives and to do work that they find meaningful where they have more ownership and autonomy and feel more motivated and fulfills in doing that type of work. So it’s really an antidote, I think, to a lot of the gig models of the past, where people were totally alienated from whatever they were creating, didn’t have any sort of ownership or agency to even dictate the terms of their labor. And instead I’m backing new platforms where people are given the tools to be able to monetize their creativity. So, that’s where I’m focused on these days. And that’s where I have the most optimism around technology. Like when I was growing up, there was no path that I could see or that my parents could see for me to monetize a lot of my creative interests.

I think the next step is a subtler balance between individual freedom and collective responsibility. I don’t have a good name for it, so for argument’s sake, I’ve called it collectivism. 

I’m also not surprised that social features, users to users interacting with each other, are working. So it is an interesting space, and it’s definitely something that we’re keeping an eye on. Long-term, though, I think the broader shift that has been true with the internet has been most of the hours of consumption, we believe, will be moving from linear to on-demand. Meaning consumers should be able to consume whatever content that they want on their terms and not necessarily be beholden to someone else’s schedule. So I think it’s a really interesting format from a creation perspective, but I suspect that from the consumption perspective, most of the time consumed will still be on-demand which is what Spotify is known for today.

Design thinking origin story plus some of the people who made it all happen

Victor Papanek arrived on the design scene with Design for the Real World. Highly critical of the design profession he integrated Anthropology into his design practice in an attempt to design socially and ecologically responsible things. “Design must be an innovative, highly creative, cross-disciplinary tool responsive to the needs of men. It must be more research-oriented, and we must stop defiling the earth itself with poorly-designed objects and structures.”

Buckminster Fuller officially began teaching Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science (CADS) at MIT’s Creative Engineering Laboratory. His labs applied scientific methods to generating designs. Buckminster’s approach built on the knowledge of elite teams of engineers, industrial designers, materials scientists and chemists to innovate. “A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.”

Jo Szczepanska provides us an extensive timeline for this “multi-disciplinary, human-centered… amalgamation of approaches that involve research and rapid ideation.” I’ll give you the cliff notes here:

Design Thinking: A Brief History

Fiction Bonus! Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo: I’m unabashedly a part of a young adult fiction book club, so if there’s a fantasy, sci-fi, dystopian, or historical novel that features teen protagonists called to save the world under extraordinary circumstances, I’m there. This is my favorite series in recent memory. It’s two books long and features the most lovable band of crooked thieves you will ever meet attempting a heist that is equal parts madness, redemption and glory. Just pure, wonderful storytelling and a rollicking good time.

Books that Changed My Perspective

The term 'scientific"is to be understood in a broad sense as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be the human spirit, the role of great people in history, or the structure of DNA.

We wanted people to think about the "Internet", which includes, but is a much bigger subject than the Web, an application on the Internet, or search, browsing, etc., which are apps on the Web.

To be sure, many aspects of the life of the mind have been affected by the Internet. Our physical folders, mailboxes, bookshelves, spreadsheets, documents, media players, and so on have been replaced by software equivalents, which has altered our time budgets in countless ways. But to call it an alternation of "how we think" is, I think, an exaggeration.

The most interesting trend in the development of the Internet is not how it is changing people's ways of thinking but how it is adapting to the way that people think. The leap in Internet usage that accompanied the appearance of the World Wide Web more than a decade ago came from its user interface, the graphical browser, which worked around the serial, line-based processing of the actual computer hardware to simulate a familiar visual world of windows, icons, and buttons. The changes we are seeing more recently include even more natural interfaces (speech, language, manual manipulation), better emulation of human expertise (as in movie, book, or music recommendations, and more intelligent search), and the application of Web technologies to social and emotional purposes (such as social networking, sharing of pictures, music, and video) rather than just the traditional nerdy ones.

As someone who believes both in human nature and in timeless standards of logic and evidence, I'm skeptical of the common claim that the Internet is changing the way we think. Electronic media aren't going to revamp the brain's mechanisms of information processing, nor will they supersede modus ponens or Bayes' theorem.

Maeda is to design what Warren Buffet is to finance---a seasoned technologist who spent more than a decade at the MIT Media Lab before becoming president of the Rhode Island School of Design, a partner at VC powerhouse Kleiner Perkins, and now the head of computational design and inclusion at Automattic, WordPress.com’s parent company. Every year, Maeda travels to South By Southwest to deliver his Design in Technology report, a sprawling presentation that outlines the field’s growing impact on technology and business.

John Maeda: If You Want to Survive in Design, You Better Learn to Code

How to Look at Mondrian

“Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.”

What became known as the Google Books Search Amended Settlement Agreement came to 165 pages and more than a dozen appendices. It took two and a half years to hammer out the details. Sarnoff described the negotiations as “four-dimensional chess” between the authors, publishers, libraries, and Google. “Everyone involved,” he said to me, “and I mean everyone—on all sides of this issue—thought that if we were going to get this through, this would be the single most important thing they did in their careers.” Ultimately the deal put Google on the hook for about $125 million, including a one-time $45 million payout to the copyright holders of books it had scanned—something like $60 per book—along with $15.5 million in legal fees to the publishers, $30 million to the authors, and $34.5 million toward creating the Registry.

The stations—which didn’t so much scan as photograph books—had been custom-built by Google from the sheet metal up. Each one could digitize books at a rate of 1,000 pages per hour. The book would lie in a specially designed motorized cradle that would adjust to the spine, locking it in place. Above, there was an array of lights and at least $1,000 worth of optics, including four cameras, two pointed at each half of the book, and a range-finding LIDAR that overlaid a three-dimensional laser grid on the book’s surface to capture the curvature of the paper. The human operator would turn pages by hand—no machine could be as quick and gentle—and fire the cameras by pressing a foot pedal, as though playing at a strange piano.

In light of this, Fuller developed synergetics, a field of study that considers a system to be larger than the sum of its parts, thereby implying that it is impossible to understand a given system only by considering its parts in isolation. In short, Fuller's synergetics champions a holistic approach to thinking about systems, particularly our own planet and the human societies that inhabit it.

A 21st Century 'Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth'