Just for fun

Check out the Sartorialist, a blog published by a guy shooting random people with some taste in what they wear in the streets of NYC and other locations around the world. Fashion is nothing, style everything.

Your feelings?

Wefeelfine is sort of an emotional search engine. The site was launched in August 2005 and is a continuously expanding statistic of human emotion around the globe. Its system searches the web for blog posts and fishes out the words associated with the phrases 'I feel' and 'I am feeling.' The statistics are browsable through 6 different categories: the feeling (such as happy, guilty, alone; they have around 5000 of them indexed), gender, age, weather, location, and date. The interface of this webpage is a constantly self-re-organising system of particles, where each particles represents an individual and his or her feeling. I have to say, it looks really nice and is fun to fiddle with. The database expands by about 20 000 new feeling per day and thus creates a pool of information that allows everyone to investigate human perceptions around the globe. You try to find answers to questions about which locations are most depressing, how weather affects us all, and such. So how do you feel today?

Another catch today

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/

The saga continues...

My friend Mark just posted a link about another move by Apple, this time to shut down the famous Fake Steve Jobs blog!

Apple is now intimidating Fake Steve Jobs (Dan Lyons, Forbes journo), who I think can look after himself.

http://tinyurl.com/2276ko

I really wonder if this is true or whether it's yet another move by Fake Steve to stir up more drama in the Apple buzz world as Scoble and a crowd of others claim it is?

Is Apple becoming evil?

Okay, so we all love at least something about Apple. It seems to be one of if not the most successful company at creating customer loyalty that brings big-spending clients back into its stores on a consistent basis. How consistent? So consistent that a good percentage of customers are ready to disregard Apple's electronics' flaws or past failures.

Have you tried Apple customer service if you've not purchased extra servicing time? Not a good idea. The ubiquity of white headphones is startling, especially when going through the metros of Western cities. We've backed away from radio, watching news, and other things - now all you have to do is carry an iPod - a personalized collection of just about anything you may want to hear or watch right in your pocket. Having sold over 90 million of these babies, they've made it a standard device to have if you're into music or just about any other form of cultural entertainment. From blogs to webpages and review sites you can read about how these fry time and again, about battery life expectancy issues, and other tricks they play, yet people just keep buying them. Just to give you some of my personal moan history: my first iPod fried after 2 years, my last iBook's combo drive passed out and the screen ended up having a red line running across the screen. I know two people who've had to send back their batteries and one who's hard drive died.

The iPhone - do we really want to talk about the iPhone again? With only selected network carriers and incredible prices, people still have more than hots for these. My flatmate is still thinking of somehow buying an iPhone in France (as they seem to have a policy again sim-locking) and then bringing it over to the UK. Some more to read here if you like...


Now, I don't really mean to go on ranting. I'm writing this off a Mac myself and can't say I'm not one of the people who spread the word. Despite being a little evil, it's still probably the best thing out there. We can moan all we want - like we did with Google, but the truth is that there isn't much to replace it with. Just to give you some more media coverage on Apple's part in the lawsuit against Think Secret...

Apple Forces Rumors Site To Shut Down

http://www.buzzya.com/2007/12/20/apple-forces-rumors-site-to-shut-down/

For a few years now, there's been a legal battle going on between Apple and Think Secret, a very popular Apple rumors site for publishing certain rumors. The lawsuit had many people up in arms, as they pointed out that Think Secret should be protected in the same way a newspaper is protected (and noting that Apple would never sue the WSJ the way it sued Think Secret). It made sense to go after whoever leaked the info to ThinkSecret, but going after the publication was ridiculous. While the case has dragged on, unfortunately, Apple won some of the legal battles. Now, as sent in by Jon, comes the news that Apple and Think Secret have "settled," but that settlement means that Think Secret needs to cease publishing entirely. The guy behind Think Secret notes that he never gave up the source, and calls this settlement amicable -- but it sets a horrible precedent for plenty of sites, and may create quite the chilling effect on reporters and bloggers alike. It's really a shame that Apple even decided to pursue this vendetta, and the fact that it ends with Think Secret being shut down completely is a travesty.

More just appeared in Wired...

Our mouths go buzz buzz buzz...

So what is everyone talking about these days? For once it's actually hard to tell, since new buzzwords seem to be introduced every time we go online. Everyone is expected to be highly involved in the online life of blogs, facebook, and such. We've come to a time where our online lives more and more often converge with our real realms of life, including work, friends, political movements, art trends we follow, you name it. We all use the new words, even if we're not entirely sure what they mean, which leads not only to language change, but to a constant re-definition of these terms as people continue to use them.

Except for the obvious ones, you can check out the ones infiltrating the business spheres these days...




The online social networks and these new linguistic phenomena have an immense breadth of influence on our lives. The language does not only seep through from user to user on FB and blogs, but also gets picked up by a more and more seductive industry of businesses, which thrive on being able to convince you they are more than just that. More and more brands try to create an experience for their customers, appeal to higher values, try to be eco-friendly, privacy-friendly, whatever it takes. Customer loyalty building and networking have become one of the most visible trends when you navigate the web.

Evolution all over again

Just thought I'd link this article to my blog...

http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/04/david-brooks-age-of-darwin.html

DAVID BROOKS: The Age of Darwin

Jerusalem

Standing on a hill in East Jerusalem, amid the clash of religious and political orthodoxies, stands a musty old museum devoted to human progress. When you walk into the Rockefeller Museum with its old-fashioned display cases crowded with ancient pottery shards and oil lamps, you can begin by looking at the stone tools of early man. Then you proceed room by room through the invention of agriculture and cities, winding up finally with the statues and reliquaries of the medieval era.

What you’re really looking at is a philosophy of history. The museum was set up in 1938, when scholars still spoke confidently of mankind’s upward march from primitive culture to higher civilization. History is portrayed here as a great, unified story, with crucial pivot moments when humanity leapt forward — when people first buried their dead, when they moved from animistic faiths to polytheism, when they learned to cultivate reason and philosophy.

These days, historians hate those kinds of unifying grand narratives, and the idea that history is a march of progress upward to the present. Yet I have to confess, I loved the Rockefeller Museum. Though it’s dense and dry, it rekindled the University of Chicago flame that lingers in every graduate’s soul and got me thinking all sorts of Big Thoughts. I also had the sensation — which I used to get during those sweeping old Western Civ courses — of seeing my own time from the outside, from the vantage point of some ancient spot.

And it occurred to me that while we postmoderns say we detest all-explaining narratives, in fact a newish grand narrative has crept upon us willy-nilly and is now all around. Once the Bible shaped all conversation, then Marx, then Freud, but today Darwin is everywhere.

Scarcely a month goes by when Time or Newsweek doesn’t have a cover article on how our genes shape everything from our exercise habits to our moods. Science sections are filled with articles on how brain structure influences things like lust and learning. Neuroscientists debate the existence of God on the best-seller lists, while evolutionary theory reshapes psychology, dieting and literary criticism. Confident and exhilarated, evolutionary theorists believe they have a universal framework to explain human behavior.

Creationists reject the whole business, but they’re like the Greeks who still worshiped Athena while Plato and Aristotle practiced philosophy. The people who set the cultural tone today have coalesced around a shared understanding of humanity and its history that would have astonished people in earlier epochs.

According to this view, human beings, like all other creatures, are machines for passing along genetic code. We are driven primarily by a desire to perpetuate ourselves and our species.

The logic of evolution explains why people vie for status, form groups, fall in love and cherish their young. It holds that most everything that exists does so for a purpose. If some trait, like emotion, can cause big problems, then it must also provide bigger benefits, because nature will not expend energy on things that don’t enhance the chance of survival.

Human beings, in our current understanding, are jerry-built creatures, in which new, sophisticated faculties are piled on top of primitive earlier ones. Our genes were formed during the vast stretches when people were hunters and gatherers, and we are now only semi-adapted to the age of nuclear weapons and fast food. Furthermore, reason is not separate from emotion and the soul cannot be detached from the electrical and chemical pulses of the body. There isn’t even a single seat of authority in the brain. The mind emerges (somehow) from a complex light show of neural firings without a center or executive. We are tools of mental processes we are not even aware of.

The cosmologies of the societies represented in the Rockefeller Museum looked up toward the transcendent. Their descendants still fight over sacred spots like the Holy of Holies a short walk away. But the evolutionary society is built low to the ground. God may exist and may have set the process in motion, but he’s not active. Evolution doesn’t really lead to anything outside itself. Individuals are predisposed not by innate sinfulness or virtue, but by the epigenetic rules encoded in their cells.

Looking at contemporary America from here in Jerusalem and from the ancient past, it’s clear we’re not a postmodern society anymore. We have a grand narrative that explains behavior and gives shape to history. We have a central cosmology to embrace, argue with or unconsciously submit to.