"The last thing fans of these programmes want is to be confronted with the cruel reality of what life was like in late Victorian and Edwardian England..."
"I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant." heh, Umberto Eco weighed in on the Mac vs. PC war in 1994 by comparing the organization of operating systems with the organization of religions.
"The green children of Woolpit reportedly appeared in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England, some time in the 12th century..." [via Best of Wikipedia]
"Are we are evolving our contract with society through our increasing interactions with digital platforms, and in particular, through what we've come to call the web?"
"As the user switches from their laptop to iPad, the website should automatically switch to accommodate for resolution, image size and scripting abilities." Great hypothesis. Hard in practice.
Devastating critique of the damage Yahoo! has done to Web culture. "All I can say, looking back, is that when history takes a look at the lives of Jerry Yang and David Filo, this is what it will probably say: 'Two graduate students, intrigued by a growing wealth of material on the Internet, built a huge fucking lobster trap, absorbed as much of human history and creativity as they could, and destroyed all of it.' Great work, guys."
"...a new project available in Google Labs today - Books Ngram Viewer - highlights some of the other benefits of digitizing texts beyond better reading and storage."
Interesting thinking about the current state of weblogs. Will all blog-like activity be consumed by Facebook, or will new tools emerge to help with privacy? And how do private blogs mix with public tools like Newsreaders? Complicated questions to answer.
"Whatever restrictions we eventually end up enacting, we need to keep Wikileaks alive today, while we work through the process democracies always go through to react to change. If it’s OK for a democracy to just decide to run someone off the internet for doing something they wouldn’t prosecute a newspaper for doing, the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere will have taken a mortal blow."
"If you host your content on a commercial provider or on a social network, there are different points at which you can be cut off." The Wikileaks case is pointing out a weakness in the completely libertarian web ideal.
"A naval officer told the present writer that he had often, when on deck, been both amused and surprised at the accuracy with which some of these girls used this form of signalling out of pure fun." People have always found ways to communicate over distances.
This is a great industrial film by Jam Handy for Hamilton Watch Company in 1949. It explains the mechanics of a wind-up watch. If they were making it today they might call it F*cking Watches, How Do They Work? [via Hodinkee]