When you’re holding a Kindle, all you can do is read. When I read on an iPad, I always want to go check my email. And my feeds. And Tumblr. And Twitter. Just for a minute.
30
Jul 10
The Kindle update
20
Jul 10
Dude, I’m Totally Wasted on the Internet
If i-dosing means putting on your headphones and being alone in your head for a few minutes at a time, then it sounds more like a cure than a disease. The participating kids think they are getting high, but they’re really feeling the sensation of turning off their social network and reducing multiple incoming feeds to one monotonous signal. And it makes perfect sense that, after being surrounded by incoming data from every angle, kids would look for a “high” by closing their eyes and covering their ears.
Tweetage Wasteland : Dude, I’m Totally Wasted on the Internet
17
Jul 10
The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains
The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind’s filing system. When facts and experiences enter our long-term memory, we are able to weave them into the complex ideas that give richness to our thought. But the passage from working memory to long-term memory also forms a bottleneck in our brain. Whereas long-term memory has an almost unlimited capacity, working memory can hold only a relatively small amount of information at a time. And that short-term storage is fragile: A break in our attention can sweep its contents from our mind.
The penalty is amplified by what brain scientists call switching costs. Every time we shift our attention, the brain has to reorient itself, further taxing our mental resources. Many studies have shown that switching between just two tasks can add substantially to our cognitive load, impeding our thinking and increasing the likelihood that we’ll overlook or misinterpret important information. On the Internet, where we generally juggle several tasks, the switching costs pile ever higher.
11
Jul 10
Review: Educational Reductionism
Half marks are given for fragments of work; also for wrong answers arrived at via correct methods: “A kid who answers that a 2-foot-long skateboard is 48 inches long gets half-credit for adding 24 and 24 instead of the correct 12 plus 12 …”
The notion of “giftedness” is blurred and diluted down to nothing (current official ed-theory doctrine is that all students are gifted – I have not made that up) while heroic efforts, and boxcar-loads of cash, are devoted to instilling bookishness in the un-bookish. Often the bookish and the un-bookish are taught together, with malign results for both: the smart kids slumber in slowed-down lessons, while dim ones are academically overwhelmed.
06
Jul 10
Great since day one
Neither Google nor the current Android device manufacturers embody the part of Apple’s culture that allows them to release a great product on day one. They have a different pattern: It’s always getting better. We’re always supposedly one or two releases from it being really great.
Much like desktop Linux.
23
Jun 10
How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet
Douglas Adams on the rise of the Internet, in 1999:
I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.
It brings to mind the current dichotomy between iPad fans and its detractors.
On new technology in general:
Another problem with the net is that it’s still “technology”, and “technology”, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is “stuff that doesn’t work yet.” We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often “crash” when we tried to use them.
21
Jun 10
Superhero Quandaries
Some things that bother me about our favorite caped crusaders:
Spider-Man swings all around the city on thick, sticky ropes of web. Who cleans it up? How many people arrive to work in the morning, only to find their windows covered with it?
Batman uses a lot of high-tech top-secret tools. He has a handheld gun that can fire a rope into a beam and lift him to the rafters of a warehouse, or the top of a skyscraper. He has batarangs that he throws all over the place, and never seems to retrieve. Is there a black market in found bat-items?
Superman, Spider-Man and other superheroes wear their costume under their street clothes, and at a moment’s notice they slip into a phone booth or a dark alley and transform in order to save the day. Don’t Peter Parker and Clark Kent carry a wallet with a driver’s license, credit cards and the like? Yet they have not been identified based on the contents of the pockets of their frequently abandoned clothes. How often do they have to buy new clothes?
How does Superman keep his hair so perfectly styled when he flies “faster than a speeding bullet”?
If Iceman is made of ice, how exactly does he move his limbs?
What is Destro’s head supposed to be made out of? If it’s metal, how does he make facial expressions and move his lips?
What are the odds that G.I. Joe and Cobra each recruited no more than and no less than one ninja? And that those two ninja happen to have a history?
Will the new line of Batman films ever introduce Robin? Let me go on record as saying I hope not.
What do you suppose Steve Jobs’ secret identity is?
12
Jun 10
Mea Culpa
Programming is an embarrassment compared to other fields of engineering and design. Our mainstream culture is one of adolescent self-indulgence. It is like something from Gulliver’s Travels, with the curly-bracketeers vs. the indentationites vs. the parenthesesophiles. The only thing that everyone seems to agree upon is how stupid all the other programmers are.
17
Jun 10
No Comment
Joe Wilcox challenged John Gruber to allow comments on Daring Fireball. Gruber explained why comments aren’t enabled. Wilcox responded by turning off comments on his site for two weeks (an experiment).
I recently disabled comments on this site. It’s not widely read, and what readers I have don’t often comment. The level of attempted spam finally decided it. Readers can still remark using my contact form. The ones who know me personally know how to find me using Twitter, Facebook, or email.
But the truth is that spam isn’t the only reason I turned off comments; that was just the catalyst.
Of the many blogs I read, two do not have commenting systems: Daring Fireball and Marco.org. I have a certain sense of relief when I read those sites, and it feels like a different level of quality. Is it entirely due to the content, or is part of it that the cacophony of the unwashed masses isn’t waiting below to spoil the experience?
These two blogs are not like most blogs I read. They are platforms, or to borrow Gruber’s term, soapboxes. Somehow it feels better to read them.
My theory is that when you write for a site with a commenting system, everything you write is tainted by the expectation that there will be a response, and that the response will be attached. Like letting random strangers add footnotes to your thoughts. As I write these words, I feel a certain level of freedom, not caring what anybody might say or think about it. Sure, people can email me. There’s a slight possibility that someone will write a response on another site. But what I write here will stand as published, its message not driven in other directions by outside forces.
Blogs are often hailed as a participatory medium, where readers and authors can engage in a conversation. On a carefully managed site, I suppose that might be possible. But anyone who has managed a blog in recent history can tell you that a non-curated site will quickly become a link farm, peppered with flamewars. On popular sites, especially those with a technical or political bent, comment threads devolve rapidly.
Don’t even get me started on the “First!” idiots.
What is a comment, really? In rare cases, perhaps a thoughtful contribution to the initial statement or question. More commonly, it’s ego-stroking; people pick up their megaphone and shout into the darkness, simply because they can.
Sorry, but I’ll skip it. When I wear my writer’s hat, I’ll say what I want to say, and none of you out there get to slap a post-it note on the side with your brilliant observations. If you want a voice, get your own soapbox.