Oh, NTK!

OED WoTD, ‘pleniloquence’ —

"Google has a variety of products that while not explicitly "social networks" could easily be thought of as places that help people "share," a la Facebook's mantra. Just think about them all: Reader. Picasa. Scholar. Earth. Books. Blogger. … Google has tended to ignore or piss off its passionate social fans. … It doesn't seem like Google groks how to create the smaller, self-organized networks of people who become the main driving force behind the larger thing. How many thousands of Twitter users power the whole service? How many thousands of Reddit users drive the whole news system? It I'm sure Google's executives understand the 90-9-1 rule intellectually, which says that 1 percent of users tend to contribute the most to social networks. But they don't get how to identify those key users. … Google should concentrate on fostering the nascent but largely invisible communities it already has. Build them the tools they what they want to help them share. Don't mess up the networks they put in place. Watch what they're doing and double down on helping other people find it. Does that sound harder than just building one set of social tools that span the Google universe and waiting for the people to show up? Yes, yes it does. But it's an illusion that it's easy to build any social network."

@blech @benterrett Mine came thru serendipity (), well below real value. It really is beautiful. No doubt you'd love it.

OED WoTD, ‘biochar’ —

Passing slowly over the Ufton Nervet crossing after yesterday’s death.

via Ian (Twitter)

"He goes on: "And there have been times when we've been working on a program and when we are at a very mature stage and we do have solutions and you have that sinking feeling because you're trying to articulate the values to yourself and to others just a little bit too loudly. And you have that sinking feeling that the fact that you are having to articulate the value and persuade other people is probably indicative of the fact that actually it's not good enough. On a number of occasions we've actually all been honest with ourselves and said 'you know, this isn't good enough, we need to stop'. And that's very difficult.""

"I never though that cyborgs and virtual worlds were particularly utopian, so I’ve never been disappointed. The world is always more interesting than some futurist’s vision. If you think it’s not, you’re not really looking. … The Singularity has always sounded to me like a secular version of the Rapture. It seems to fit very neatly into that same God-shaped hole. We’re been there before. I like us better when we aren’t. … Who we are is largely who we meet. Cities are machines that randomize contact. The Internet is a meta-city, meta-randomizing contact. I now “know” more people than I would ever have imagined possible, because of that. It changes who I am and what I can do."

"The default politics of TED, then, are an amalgam of Clintonian neoliberalism and techno-utopianism (the likes of which Evgeny Morozov has ably critiqued), with a philanthro-capitalist approach to social issues (an approach brilliantly taken apart in Alix Rule’s “Good As Money,” which ran in Dissent a few years back). The New Inquiry recently published a longer critique of TED, which featured a fine tweet by Mike Bulajewski: “TED’s ‘revolutionary ideas’ mask capitalism as usual, giving it a narrative of progress and change.”" via Anne (Twitter)

via Chris (Twitter)

BBC - Future - Health - Why your body jerks before you fall asleep [Anonymoused]
As we give up our bodies to sleep, sudden twitches escape our brains, causing our arms and legs to jerk. Some people are startled by them, others are embarrassed. Me, I am fascinated by these twitches, known as hypnic jerks. Nobody knows for sure what causes them, but to me they represent the side effects of a hidden battle for control in the brain that happens each night on the cusp between wakefulness and dreams.
Normally we are paralysed while we sleep. Even during the most vivid dreams our muscles stay relaxed and still, showing little sign of our internal excitement. Events in the outside world usually get ignored: not that I’d recommend doing this but experiments have shown that even if you sleep with your eyes taped open and someone flashes a light at you it is unlikely that it will affect your dreams.
But the door between the dreamer and the outside world is not completely closed. Two kinds of movements escape the dreaming brain, and they each have a different story to tell.
Brain battle
The most common movements we make while asleep are rapid eye-movements. When we dream, our eyes move according to what we are dreaming about. If, for example, we dream we are watching a game of tennis our eyes will move from left to right with each volley. These movements generated in the dream world escape from normal sleep paralysis and leak into the real world. Seeing a sleeping persons' eyes move is the strongest sign that they are dreaming.
Hypnic jerks aren't like this. They are most common in children, when our dreams are most simple and they do not reflect what is happening in the dream world - if you dream of riding a bike you do not move your legs in circles. Instead, hypnic jerks seem to be a sign that the motor system can still exert some control over the body as sleep paralysis begins to take over. Rather than having a single “sleep-wake” switch in the brain for controlling our sleep (i.e. ON at night, OFF during the day), we have two opposing systems balanced against each other that go through a daily dance, where each has to wrest control from the other.
Deep in the brain, below the cortex (the most evolved part of the human brain) lies one of them: a network of nerve cells called the reticular activating system. This is nestled among the parts of the brain that govern basic physiological processes, such as breathing. When the reticular activating system is in full force we feel alert and restless - that is, we are awake.
Opposing this system is the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus: 'ventrolateral' means it is on the underside and towards the edge in the brain, 'preoptic' means it is just before the point where the nerves from the eyes cross. We call it the VLPO. The VLPO drives sleepiness, and its location near the optic nerve is presumably so that it can collect information about the beginning and end of daylight hours, and so influence our sleep cycles.
As the mind gives in to its normal task of interpreting the external world, and starts to generate its own entertainment, the struggle between the reticular activating system and VLPO tilts in favour of the latter. Sleep paralysis sets in. What happens next is not fully clear, but it seems that part of the story is that the struggle for control of the motor system is not quite over yet. Few battles are won completely in a single moment. As sleep paralysis sets in remaining daytime energy kindles and bursts out in seemingly random movements. In other words, hypnic jerks are the last gasps of normal daytime motor control.
Some people report that hypnic jerks happen as they dream they are falling or tripping up. This is an example of the rare phenomenon known as dream incorporation, where something external, such as an alarm clock, is built into your dreams. When this does happen, it illustrates our mind's amazing capacity to generate plausible stories. In dreams, the planning and foresight areas of the brain are suppressed, allowing the mind to react creatively to wherever it wanders - much like a jazz improviser responds to fellow musicians to inspire what they play.
As hypnic jerks escape during the struggle between wake and sleep, the mind is undergoing its own transition. In the waking world we must make sense of external events. In dreams the mind tries to make sense of its own activity, resulting in dreams. Whilst a veil is drawn over most of the external world as we fall asleep, hypnic jerks are obviously close enough to home - being movements of our own bodies - to attract the attention of sleeping consciousness. Along with the hallucinated night-time world they get incorporated into our dreams.
So there is a pleasing symmetry between the two kinds of movements we make when asleep. Rapid eye movements are the traces of dreams that can be seen in the waking world. Hypnic jerks seem to be the traces of waking life that intrude on the dream world.

"What’s a Readlist? A group of web pages—articles, recipes, course materials, anything—bundled into an e-book you can send to your Kindle, iPad, or iPhone."

"Between 11:49 and 11:54, something extraordinary happened. For about 300 seconds, the computers took over. The stock, which had dropped four points in the five minutes prior, froze in an incredibly narrow five-cent range while two sets of computers put in thousands upon thousands of bids against one another. On one side, the underwriters' computers were offering to buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stock to keep it from dipping below the crucial $38 level; on the other, high frequency traders were making veerrryyy slightly higher bids at just above $38 — $38.01, $38.02 — which they would sell, literally seconds later. … For a few minutes, the most-watched stock in the world behaved like a malfunctioning computer program. The stock that convinced untold thousands of regular people with E-Trade accounts to get back into investing behaved according to rules that literally none of them understood, traded at volumes that none of them could conceive of and effectively followed contradictory orders from two sets of screaming robots. This is what future shock feels like." via Chris (Twitter)

OED WoTD, ‘zaatar, n.’ —

"This kind of simplicity is only possible from startups that begin and end with the smartphone or tablet. The online world of websites and PCs is so last generation to them. The generational shift from the PC to mobile devices in accessing the Web is the kind of rapid change that can mark the downfall of companies as powerful as Google and Facebook in as little as five years, Eric Jackson, founder and managing member of Ironfire Capital, recently argued in Forbes. In roughly 20 years, the world has seen three Internet generations starting with the Web portals (Yahoo, AOL, Amazon, eBay and Google), then the social media companies (Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon), and now mobile. Each new generation brings changes that the older generation can't quite adapt to fast enough, Jackson argues. Yes, the seniors can try to buy their way in, such as Facebook paying $1 billion for Instagram, but they are still left with trying to bolt the new platform onto the older platform, which is still driving profits. While older companies struggle to reinvent their legacies, Viddy, SocialCam and other startups remain focused on the technology people are quickly moving to today - in this case, mobile devices. This razor-sharp focus has led to Viddy and SocialCam amassing more than 60 million users. Meanwhile, the previous generation is reaching for the oxygen mask to try to keep up."

"“I see the elimination of gatekeepers everywhere,” said Bezos. Thanks to cloud computing for the masses, anyone anywhere can for a tiny hourly fee now rent the most powerful computing and storage facilities on Amazon’s “cloud” to test any algorithm or start any company or publish any book. Start-ups can even send all their inventory to Amazon, and it will do all the fulfillment and delivery — and even gift wrap your invention before shipping it to your customers. This is leading to an explosion of new firms and voices. “Sixteen of the top 100 best sellers on Kindle today were self-published,” said Bezos. That means no agent, no publisher, no paper — just an author, who gets most of the royalties, and Amazon and the reader. It is why, Bezos adds, the job of the company leader now is changing fast: “You have to think of yourself not as a designer but as a gardener” — seeding, nurturing, inspiring, cultivating the ideas coming from below, and then making sure people execute them."

OED WoTD, ‘Lucy, n.2’, ‘nickname of: a well-known partial skeleton of a fossil hominid’, about 3.2 million years old —

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

"Pick + Mix is a virtual gallery that allows users to dynamically browse the London Transport Museum’s vast and iconic collection." via Paul

*You can't Instagram a shot nowadays without somebody in the frame Instagramming a shot. #Italy #terremoto

"Up till now, in the hierarchy of genres pictures with humans were valued most. The more humans, even the better: the history painting was top-notch, followed by portrait painting, and third came genre painting which showed scenes of everyday life (still with humans), while animals and finally still life were last in the ranking. Such being the case, the rise of the human-less picture (or massive return of the still life, however you want to name this) is astonishing. … the new still lives also negate the human form: there is no narrative, and in most pictures nothing happens. There is no event, apart from the physical exclusion of the human which in this massive appearance becomes an event in itself. So what does this tell us about us?"

"we need to keep hearing the all-but-silent argument for the Net and its protocols. Because without those we wouldn’t have the rest."

via Anne (Twitter)

@mildlydiverting — loved the ‘I must be doing it wrong’!

This is the very first time I've seen Red Bull in the light of day. I thought it was pink!

""While desire focuses on the other, always in a somewhat fetishist[ic] manner, on particular objects, like breasts, buttocks and cock," writes Badiou, "love focuses on the very being of the other, on the other as it has erupted, fully armed with its being, into my life that is consequently disrupted and re-fashioned." In other words love is, in many respects, the opposite of sex. Love, for Badiou, is what follows a deranging chance eruption in one's life. He puts it philosophically: "The absolute contingency of the encounter takes on the appearance of destiny. The declaration of love marks the transition from chance to destiny and that's why it is so perilous and so burdened with a kind of horrifying stage fright." Love's work consists in conquering that fright. Badiou cites Mallarmé, who saw poetry as "chance defeated word by word". A loving relationship is similar. "In love, fidelity signifies this extended victory: the randomness of an encounter defeated day after day through the invention of what will endure," writes Badiou."

"As you'd imagine, the etymology of the English word "play" is one of my favorites. Here's what it says at Bartleby.com: ENTRY: dlegh- DEFINITION: To engage oneself. European root found in Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, and possibly Latin. 1a. play, from Old English plegian, to exercise oneself, play; b. pledge; frankpledge, replevin, from Late Latin plevium (> Old French plevir, to pledge), pledge, guarantee; c. plight2, from Old English pliht, danger, peril, from Germanic derivative noun *plehti-. a–c from Germanic *plegan, probably altered (by dissimilation) from *tlegan. 2. Zero-grade form *dgh-. indulge, from Latin indulgre, to indulge, explained by some as from prefixed and suffixed stative form *en-dgh-- (*en-, in; see en). (Pokorny dhgh- 271.)" Could the ambiguity of the ludic be better captured - play meaning both engagement and indulgence, duty and danger?"

OED WoTD, ‘earthman, n.’ —

When Jack Schofield says, ‘perhaps we should all start using VPNs all the time’, you feel something’s changing —

Oh God #OnlyInABiologyLesson @ St Paul's School

"Jeff Dachis of Dachis Group, which uses data to help clients get the best return on their social networking campaigns, said Facebook’s power lies in engagement with brands, not generating sales through display advertising, meaning the GM decision isn’t a death knell for Facebook. Dachis said Facebook advertisers need to look at the platform as helping to build long-term brand loyalty. “Although many will latch onto this news in the next few days as a reason for the skepticism around Facebook’s advertising model to continue, we believe that this proves that Facebook’s power lies in engagement, not display advertising. According to the WSJ report, GM is still spending approximately $30 million on Facebook. They’re not abandoning ship,” Dachis said.  “Engaged users on Facebook - whether they’re on mobile or the browser - will monetize better than throwing mobile or display ads at them.”"