19th December 2014
1) Reading in the Age of Amazon.
‘Today Borders has been liquidated, the location I used to visit replaced by an electronics store. Between the web and social media, I read more than I ever have – and yet I read fewer books than ever’.
2) How Headlines Change The Way We Think. From NYT.
‘By now, everyone knows that a headline determines how many people will read a piece, particularly in this era of social media. But, more interesting, a headline changes the way people read an article and the way they remember it. The headline frames the rest of the experience. A headline can tell you what kind of article you’re about to read-news, opinion, research… and it sets the tone for what follows’.
3) The Tate Modern, in Minecraft.
4) Kids’ Movies Are Full of Death.
‘To conduct the study, the researchers compared the top grossing animated children’s movies from 1937 to 2013 with the two top grossing films for adults from those years. They looked at 45 top-grossing animated children’s films and 90 dramatic films for adults, finding that two-thirds of children’s movies depicted the death of an important character while only half of films for adults did. They also found that the main cartoon characters in children’s films were two-and-a-half times more likely to die, and three times as likely to be murdered, when compared with their counterparts in films for adults’.
5) Karl Marx’s Life and Legacy – In a Comic.
6) Whatever happened to Graphene? From The New Yorker.
“People said, ‘Wow! We’ve got this silver from clay, and now it’s really cheap and we can use it for anything,’ ” Robert Friedel, a historian of technology at the University of Maryland, told me. But the enthusiasm soon cooled: “They couldn’t figure out what to use it for…….”
7) Great Stuff – WikiGalaxy : Wikipedia as a Galaxy of Stars –
A Visualization of Wikipedia Rabbit Holes.
8) The Irresistible rise of Augmented Reality outfit Magic Leap
Magic Leap’s … current projects are shrouded in secrecy, but Gizmodo’s Sean Hollister dug into its previous work and has suggested that it’s working on a fiber optic projector that could manipulate vision to make digital images seem to blend into reality.
9) Future Shock: Orson Welles Narrates a 1972 Film About the Perils of Technological Change. All at once hugely dated but at the same time remarkably prescient.
10) Rather endearing ( and pretty funny ) Mother calls an American News Channel to yell at her pundit sons.
To keep you going here are extra some Christmas reads…..
Putin is named Russia’s Man of the Year. For the 15th time running….
Here are the 30 most popular Vine stars in the world.
An airplane and a jet pack flying in formation.
The power of ( reverse ) sports psychology. Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck has an entirely novel way of responding to players who beat him up on the field.