June 2010
Wednesday, 30 June 2010
APIs and the Growing Influence of Developers
Thinking Out Cloud: “developers are becoming increasingly important when marketing your software”
Dollar should be replaced as international standard, U.N. report says
CNN.com: “Under this proposed system, countries would no longer have to buy up foreign currencies, as China has long done with the U.S. dollar. Rather, they would accumulate the right to claim foreign currencies, or special drawing rights, or SDRs, rather than the currencies themselves.”
Monday, 28 June 2010
Nicolas Hayek, 82, Dies - Introduced Swatch
NYTimes.com: “It was very likely the first time that ordinary people had even considered owning multiple watches.”
Sunday, 27 June 2010
The Quiet Coup
The Atlantic: “Instead, the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system.”
Thursday, 24 June 2010
Confused about who to support for the world cup?
A reminder: “Remember, this isn’t like wearing a Yankee hat into Fenway. This would be more like wearing a Yankee uniform in Alabama in 1863.”
Tax extenders bill fails
Ezra Klein: “As far as the Senate is concerned, the recession is over. The election has begun.” – see also: Paul Krugman
Wednesday, 23 June 2010
Coming Soon: Web Ads Tailored to Your ZIP+4
Wired.com: “Feeva claims its software doesn’t tell marketers anything about web surfers except for their nine-digit zip codes.” … which all but directly identify you.
Monday, 21 June 2010
A Pacemaker Wrecks a Family’s Life
NYTimes.com: “At a point hard to precisely define, they stopped being beneficiaries of the war on sudden death and became its victims.”
Tuesday, 15 June 2010
We will be made out computers before we have electronic medical records
Ezra Klein: “Imagine walking into a bank where clerks scrawled all your information in a giant ledger book. You’d run out and tweet all your friends about this hilarious bank from the 18th century.”
Monday, 14 June 2010
Skulls show New World was settled twice: study
PhysOrg: “This disparity between our results and those of most genetic studies points to a large gap in our understanding of the peopling of the New World.”
Sunday, 13 June 2010
More thoughts on URL shorteners
DeWitt Clinton: “As a thought experiment, imagine that your email provider suddenly started rewriting all of the URLs in your outgoing emails so they could track every link the recipients click on.”
Pre-E3: Hands-on with the ‘disruptive’ Rock Band 3
Destructoid: “This new mode (which applies to guitar, keyboard, and drums) attempts to have players, for all intents and purposes, actually playing the songs – rather than a gem-by-gem simulation of the song’s notes.”
Wednesday, 9 June 2010
Outsmarted
The New Yorker: “The Boca Raton meeting first bore fruit when Exxon needed to open a line of credit to cover potential damages of five billion dollars resulting from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. … but the deal would tie up a lot of reserve cash to provide for the risk of the loans going bad. … In late 1994, Blythe Masters, a member of the J. P. Morgan swaps team, pitched the idea of selling the credit risk to the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. … The deal was so new that it didn’t even have a name: eventually, the one settled on was ‘credit-default swap.’”
Scientist Awed by Size, Density of Undersea Oil Plume in Gulf
NYTimes.com: “Lubchenco said the test confirms the presence of subsurface oil, which she said federal scientists suspected was present.”
Battle of the Transformers starts even before the opening credits
Washington Post: “explosions and pyrotechnics at locations along Pennsylvania and Independence avenues” – I particularly like the claim that now tourists will want to go to the National Mall.
Tuesday, 8 June 2010
Mash Up! Earth and Moon Created from Collision between two Gigantic Planets
The Daily Galaxy: “… the Earth and the Moon must have been formed much later than previously thought - that is to say not 30 million years after the formation of the solar system 4,567 million years ago but perhaps up to 150 million years after the formation of the solar system.”
Monday, 7 June 2010
Could Jupiter’s Gravity Throw the Solar System Into Chaos?
The Daily Galaxy: “So, yes it’s possible though unlikely that Mercury will one day give Earth another moon or so annihilating all life in the process, but it certainly won’t happen anytime soon. Plus, on the slightly bright side, if we’re around as a species to get demolished by Mercury—that’s fantastic news!”
Sunday, 6 June 2010
Your Brain on Computers - Attached to Technology and Paying a Price
NYTimes.com: “In 2008, people consumed three times as much information each day as they did in 1960.”
Saturday, 5 June 2010
Ecological Catastrophe and the Uneasy Evangelical Conscience
Russell D. Moore: “As I pass that sign on Highway 90 telling me I’m leaving Biloxi, I can look out behind the water’s horizon and know there’s a Pale Horse there.”
Thursday, 3 June 2010
My WWDC tips, after only having gone once, especially for iPhone developers
Marco: “This isn’t SXSW.”