Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
The meteoric rise of smartphones. "In 1982 there were 4.6 billion people in the world, and not a single mobile-phone subscriber. Today, there are seven billion people in the world—and six billion mobile cellular-phone subscriptions"
"For a decade now the company has seemed more like a tawdry reality show than one of the world's great enterprises. It is in the midst of an existential crisis." Can Meg Whitman, HP's third CEO in seven years, put it right?
"A massive ball of fire was rushing towards him at high speed. Within seconds, he would be engulfed by the flames." Short, gripping account of how 14 year old Werner Franz managed to escape most spectacular air disaster in history
"Leonardo da Vinci sketched out tanks, helicopters, and mechanical calculators centuries before the first examples were built. Now another of his flights of imagination has finally been realized." Light-field photography has arrived
What can the history of the telephone teach us about effects of technology on society? To find out Vanderbilt takes us back to a time when the “talking telegraph” was a novelty, and all telephone receivers had "trumpets"
"Asking whether Google makes us stupid, as some cultural critics recently have, is the wrong question. It assumes sharp distinctions between humans and technology that are no longer, if they ever were, tenable." Here's why
On language, information, technological change. The Internet may be a marvellous machine, but it scans everything and hears nothing, as tone-deaf as the filtering devices of the Pentagon (Starts after seven-paragraph introduction)
In the 19C: Machinery. In the 20C: Mass production. In the 21C: Mass customisation, making even the most complicated components and objects by 3D printing. No more outsourcing to China. Good for America's balance of payments
The innovator's perpetual question: What next? Decades ago it was the Internet. Followed by the world wide web, the social network, the mobile web. But now we're stuck in a rut. It's time to think big again. What next?
Revisiting Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America provides starting-point for essay questioning the historical effect of America’s “ideology of technology” on its politics and economy
Why archivists love and hate floppy discs. They preserve information that would otherwise have vanished. But they're a complete pain to work with. "A box of unidentified disks is about as human-understandable as a box of rocks"
Essay. Ten trends have defined our economic, social, and political lives for the past 100 years. The dominant one has been rising demand for individual rights. Will those trends, or different ones, shape the coming century? (PDF)
Image by national museum of american history on Flickr
25 years ago, the first GIF was created. Here's the story of their first quarter century, and a look at how modern artists are using the moving image format in novel ways
"Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new"
