It is not always easy to discern digital and analog experiences. A lot of seemingly analog devices have digital technology built in without us realizing it (tape decks, ovens, cars), and, as you might have noticed, more and more digital devices try to look and feel like analog tools.

But once you enter the digital realm, analogies with our body break down. Instead, digital tools are analogies of analogies. Text editors are an analogy of type writers, type writers are an analogy of writing with pen and paper, writing with pen and paper is, initially, a substitute for our memory. In general the computer now works as an extension for our head controlling those tools.

Blind abstraction, a lack of real-world analogies, the feeling that the workings are a black box, and the experience of multiple fast-paced, fragmented processes — this is more or less what we mean when we use the words “digital” to describe a device.

Documents, images, videos, and audio tracks on the web are not more or less real than in any other medium. But they feel unreal and less credible on a computer, because digital media snippets reach us like fragments of a dream: unprepared, out of context, and lacking orientation, causality and continuity.

If you compare the overall information architecture of a website to a book, you will notice that the difficulty in reading a digital text is not just a matter of all the synchronous processes, or the typographic design of digital text. Think about the number of frames of reference that you need to enter, the number of levels that you need to climb down — and the mindset that this climbing requires — until you reach a digital text. How much more complexity do you need once you reach the ultimate text layer? Why is it that once we reach the text, we hardly stay there for more than a couple of minutes?

In books the transitions between the different levels or frames are clearly separated with empty pages. They act like airlocks. You know when you enter a new level, and when you leave it.

It is astonishing that, with all the high pitched projects around reading in the last few years, nobody has developed an alternative navigational model for reading digital text. The main interaction models for digital reading are still flipping or scrolling. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and both kind of suck on a tablet.

Whether we call something “digital” or “analog” depends more on the way we perceive, understand and use a device than the ghost in its shell.

So the titanic showdown between Facebook and Google might not be the News Feed vs. Google+ after all. It might be Facebook Camera vs. Project Glass.

It might, in fact, be pictures vs. vision.

Google is getting good, really good, at building things that see the world around them and actually understand what they’re seeing.

Unfortunately, instead of the Security Council logo, viewers were shown the badge of the United Nations Space Command, the military agency depicted in popular interstellar war game Halo.

The Globe created what it calls the Globe Lab, a space where employees are encouraged come up with ways to breathe life back into the newspaper industry.

“A piece of ivory, made perfectly round, has several conical holes worked into it, so that their several apices meet at the centre of the globular mass. The workman then commences to detach the innermost sphere of all. This is done by inserting a tool into each hole, with a point bent and very sharp. That instrument is so arranged as to cut away or scrape the ivory through each hole, at equi-distances from the surface. The implement works away at the bottom of each conical hole successively, until the incisions meet. In this way, the innermost ball is separated; and to smooth, carve and ornament it, its various faces are, one after the other, brought opposite one of the largest holes. The other balls, larger as they near the outer surface, are each cut, wrought and polished precisely in the same manner. The outermost ball of course is done last of all.”

The user doesn’t come out of nowhere. We don’t land on your page and then head happily to those social networks to promote you, just because you have a button on your site. We find content through Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest etc., not the other way around.

If you provide excellent content, social media users will take the time to read and talk about it in their networks. That’s what you really want. You don’t want a cheap thumbs up, you want your readers to talk about your content with their own voice.

Social media buttons are not a social media strategy, even though they’re often sold that way. Excellent content, serious networking and constant human engagement is the way to build your profile. Adding those sleazy buttons won’t achieve anything. Social media is not easy — there is no simple trick.

To cut a long story short – what I want to say is, that there are many more important setscrews that have to be concerted and that determine good typography and optimal readability than just the stroke weight of a typeface. The text column has to look harmonious, with legible letterforms and good spacing, achieved by a rhythmical pattern of black strokes and the white space inbetween, with evenly rendered stems, well attuned word spaces and line spacing.

Possible minor differences in font weight from one device to another don’t matter much to me, as long as the thing in a whole can be read comfortably. But maybe us print designers, who had to deal with different papers, printing methods and dot gains all our lives, have just idly learned to come to terms with it. Colour and the contrast of the screen are much more crucial. All the finetuned optimization are at risk to get screwed up by a user who has his crisp retina display set to full brightness. And that cannot be responded to.

This year, I have taken Typekit font releases in a new direction. Instead of simply making nice blog post images and listing fonts’ technical specs, I am using blog post announcements as a way to teach (and learn).

Complicated systems have many parts, or take many steps, or have many rules; complex systems are complicated systems connected to and interdependent with other systems (likely also complex).

The associated complexity of a seemingly simple resolution generally shows up in unintended or unexpected consequences; complicated interconnections cannot be cut without repercussions.

The only way to reduce and resolve the complexity of a given situation is to reduce its level of interconnection with other systems; doing so, however, can undermine the value or power of the given system, and will alter the systems to which it was once connected.

In other words, the opposite of "complex" is not "simple," the opposite of "complex" is "isolated."

There's a solution in computer engineering known as loosely-coupled systems. Basically, the notion is that each subsystem should have the minimum number of connections to other systems. This probably somehow applies to the future somehow.

The studio’s new identity, created by New York studio Project Projects, is an interesting mix of two dimensional monogram and three dimensional axis, a smart reference to the bespoke and structural nature of the products and the combined design experience of its three founding partners.

This is a really smart visual identity that confidently resolves the fundamental and symbiotic relationship between RBW’s partners and modernistic design principles. Built around three converging strokes and a very simple geometric typographic solution the mark carefully balances a classic monogrammatic representation of personal quality and craft with a contemporary understanding of space, layout, design and construction. It also offers a smart duality in its top down plan-like visualisation of two dimensional space and an architectural, three dimensional axis representing length, width, and depth. For me this is a great distillation of a pragmatic approach.

In most cases, a designer would begin to work in Illustrator to create vector icons, but we chose Photoshop as our start place. From the outset we knew we wanted to design icons for specific sizes, so optimizing for those pre-defined pixels was paramount. With the recent release of Photoshop CS6, Photoshop has become a fairly powerful vector tool for pixel projects.

Design is in the details. With all our icons designed, it was time for us to create our font. We decided we needed two sizes of each icon. One size, 16px, would be optimized for its exact size. At 16px the details are limited so every pixel was important. Since the icons were designed for such a small space, they don't really scale well. To take care of that our second size, 32px, would be designed with more detail so that it could be scaled up for many purposes.

After finishing Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief, I think I finally understand how it must have felt to read Neuromancer 28 years ago. Several times during the book, when I finally grasped the impact of one of the many pieces of outlandish technology that populate Rajaniemi’s far-future solar system, I lowered my screen and just sat there, awestruck. In The Quantum Thief, post-human gods—networked entities comprising trillions of copies of their own mind—have taken over space with a mission to upload all human consciousness. An entire society is built around a “privacy sense” organ that can share memories or erase them. A clan descended from MMORPG players is a major military force, and they go on real-life raids in fantasy armor.

"Project Icebreaker" was, based on a recent filing from the upcoming trial, an ongoing Activision initiative to uncover information regarding West and Zampella by accessing their work email, computer, and phones. It was rolled out just months before the launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

Thomas Fenady was director of IT at Activision. He left in December 2009, and now works at Warner Bros. Fenady testified that in the summer of 2009, then Activision chief legal officer (now chief public policy officer) George Rose instructed him to “dig up dirt on Jason and Vince” because “we just want to get rid of them.” Rose said the decision came from Activision CEO Bobby Kotick.

That's why I can say with confidence that rich people don't create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is a "circle of life" like feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring. In this sense, an ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than a capitalist like me.

So when businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it's a little like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it's the other way around.

Your Google search experience is about to change.

No, don't worry, it's not another social integration. The latest update has nothing to do with Facebook and everything to do with Google's core strengths of organizing information so that you can find it faster.

Now, when you search certain things, say, Tom Cruise, a box will pop up in the right column of your search with structured data about the topic. Google can identify 500 million people, places, and things and can serve up a custom selection of data based on the nature of the noun.

Text takes time. It takes time to read, it takes time to write, and it takes time to reproduce. Throughout the history of text production, people have been searching for ways to distribute the costs of producing text—financial, temporal—more evenly across a system. This search led a former goldsmith, Johannes Gutenberg, to develop and refine his system moveable type by the 1450s, which eliminated the laborious book-copying process used previously by monastic scribes. And with Gutenberg’s system in place, Venetian publisher Aldus Manutius was able to quickly popularize printed books by the late 1400s.

But the e-book age has accelerated the metabolism of book publishing. Authors are now pulling the literary equivalent of a double shift, churning out short stories, novellas or even an extra full-length book each year.

Publishers also believe that Salinger-like reclusiveness, which once created an aura of intrigue around an author, is not a viable option in the age of interconnectivity. “Particularly now with social media, authors are constantly in contact with their fans in a way that they never were before,” said Liate Stehlik, the publisher of William Morrow, Avon and Voyager, imprints of HarperCollins. “Now it seems to make more sense to have your author out in the media consciousness as much as you can.”

Once you’ve mastered a particular language, you’ve also mastered a means of thinking. You understand how to decompose a problem into knowable units, and you learn how to intertwine those units into pleasant and functional flow. Perhaps you’ve figured out how to get that flow to perform at Herculean scale. There is no doubt in my mind that this is an essential and valuable skill for anyone to learn and master.

I'm a journalist because I'm really, really into demystifying the "others" in our world: Other people. Other experiences. Other truths.

The "non-article" isn't about re-inventing the article and it sure as hell isn't about replacing it.

We have an opportunity to invent new ways of telling stories and new ways of connecting people through those stories.

If you are old school and hearing "journalism" and "storytelling" together makes your blood boil, that's a problem for your cardiologist.

Digital Humanities: Using tools from the 1990s to answer questions from the 1960s about 19th century America.

Back in class one, we identified a very key question that you should continually ask yourself: what important truth do very few people agree with you on? To a first approximation, the correct answer is going to be a secret. Secrets are unpopular or unconventional truths. So if you come up with a good answer, that’s your secret.

Discovery is the process of exposing secrets. The secrets are dis- covered; the cover is removed from the secret. Triangle math was hard for Pythagoras to discover. There were various Pythagorean mystery cults where the initiated learned about crazy new things like irrational numbers. But then it all became convention.

The power law secret operates similarly. In one sense it’s a secret about finance. Startup outcomes are not evenly distributed; the follow a power law distribution. But in another sense it’s a very human secret. People are uncomfortable talking about inequality, so they either ignore it or rationalize it away. It is psychologically difficult for investors to admit that their best investment is worth more than the rest of their portfolio companies combined. So they ignore or hide that fact, and it becomes a secret.

Four primary things have been driving people’s disbelief in secrets. First is the pervasive incrementalism in our society. People seem to think that the right way to go about doing things is to proceed one very small step at a time. Any secrets that we’re incentivized to discover are microsecrets. Don’t try anything too hard in the classroom; just do what’s asked of you a bit better than the others and you’ll get an A. This dynamic exists all the way up through pre-tenure. Academics are incented by volume, not importance. The goal is to publish lots of papers, each of which is, in practice at least, new only in some small incremental way.

Political dissent requires secrets too. Any sort of extreme criticism of the government is necessarily based on some secret truth that things are very wrong. Some of these secrets are probably right. Many others are not. But disbelieving in secrets generally is equivalent to saying that it’s not possible for any political dissident to be right, ever. This plays out in interesting ways. Since no one believes in secret truths anymore, the political tactic that people use is to try to discredit the other side by associating them with conspiracy theorists. If you are a Democrat, you rage about Tea Party activists and their secret beliefs. If you’re Republican, you profile Occupy Wall Street people and talk about their wild theories. All conspiracy theories are crazy and wrong. There are never any secrets.

Designing in the browser was great for evolutionary, iterative improvements. For a project this small, with such a short turn around time, this approach worked well. I stuck to a tried-and-true two-column layout above 768px, and simply polished it as best I could while keeping with responsive design principles. I imagine in a bigger, more extensive project, I would want to experiment with more radical variations. I am not sure those variations would be as quick to do in the browser as it would be through a graphic program.

Today's required reading.

“Absolute cleanliness is Godliness!” it starts. And if this maze of rhetoric about Spaceship Earth, the Moral ABCs, lessons, quotes, and creation myths reads like it was written by an escaped mental patient, it’s because it was.

Just as bewildering as the rhetoric on Dr. Bronner’s packaging is its typography. Due to the sheer volume of text involved (the 32 oz peppermint bottle carries over 2,500 words), many compromises are introduced. Line lengths of 250 characters or more are wrapped all the way around the bottle, forcing readers to turn it as they read each line, then return to search for the beginning of the next line.

The Oulipo is a collective of writers and scientists founded in Paris in 1960 to explore the possibilities of using mathematical and linguistic structures to generate literature. Since its inception, it has yielded such noodle-scratching experiments as the first choose-your-own-adventure fiction in history; a mystery novel written without the letter E; a romance novel in which the respective genders of the lovers are never specified; a children’s story featuring a code that took readers over twenty-five years to decipher; a book of poems made from anagrams of the names of Parisian métro stations; and a set of ten identically rhyming sonnets printed on flaps that can be combinatorially manipulated by the enterprising reader to create, at least in theory, one hundred trillion distinct poems.

Similar thing on the design side — the web and I kind of grew up together, and a huge part of my brain has been taken over by this internalized, instinctive sense of How Things Should Work. I’ve had to struggle a bit to wrap my head around how mobile is different. I went through several stages: indifference (“It’s not that big of a deal”), hubris (“Everything I know now is equally applicable”), fear (“My skills are useless and I will never adapt and will wind up offering to make wireframes for food.”). Today, I’m super excited about mobile, but there’s a lot of desktop baggage I wish I could unlearn.

Best career advice I ever received was from JP Maheu when he was the CEO of Razorfish and I was running the UX team there. He gave me a performance review one year where he told me to figure out what I really loved about my job, and to make sure that I got to do it. Find a way to do the part of your job that you love, every month, every quarter, every year.

Eh. You make mistakes. It sucks. You don’t die. You try not to make those mistakes again. It frees you up to make new and stupider mistakes.

If you can work well in a group of people, especially people of varying skills and different mindsets, that’s half the battle. If you can hone your presentation skills, that’s like career rocket fuel.

Though the larger wheel was useful to see the big picture, it was a bit overwhelming to really draw conclusions on a single topic. The breakouts by category helped reinforce the regional variation and to look at the complexity of each category. The same data was also shown in the the larger circle, but the regional multiples gave a moment of pause for interpretation without being overwhelmed.

Designed by Travis Kochel, FF Chartwell is a fantastic typeface for creating simple graphs. Driven by the frustration of creating graphs within design applications and inspired by typefaces such as FF Beowolf and ­­FF PicLig, Travis saw an opportunity to take advantage of OpenType technology to simplify the process.

Using OpenType features, simple strings of numbers are automatically transformed into charts. The visualized data remains editable, allowing for hassle-free updates and styling.

That’s the beginning of the cool and the simplest part of the game. As you progress through the increasingly complex puzzles, Portal does something even cooler. It teaches you the game, it teaches you how to improvise solutions to the puzzles, and it eventually makes you a master of the Portal gun and its associated physics — without a single page of documentation. You learn about the Portal universe intimately, but you don’t notice the learning because you’re too busy playing.

The discovery of these rules is paired and reinforced with increasingly complex puzzles that continue to teach the player about the increasingly foreign physics inside of Portal. What happens when I enter a portal that’s on the floor, but exits on the ceiling? Which way is up? Success is not measured with points, timers, or headcrabs. Success is measured by the satisfaction you receive when you use the mechanics you’ve incrementally learned to solve the puzzle and exit the chamber in a not-dead state.

See, while you were busily having fun you had no idea that you were becoming an expert in the ways of the Portal universe. You now have experience using each of the individual tools and their behaviors to be able to combine them to handle the unexpected. The result: you are now able to effectively deal with novel and unknown situations.

“We too find you beautiful, and scary, and we feel longing and desire and gaze from the sidelines and wish, and wish.”

Jesus Christ. I am a female, XX choromsones, etc., with two legs and two arms and one head, no major deformities, relatively sane, etc., and even in my salad days I went home alone more times than I could count. You think women don't pine and suffer and feel desire for unattainable men? Have you checked out Live Journal recently? This fantasy of female power to which so many men in this thread subscribe says a great deal about the inability to see women as human beings, and how powerless some men-- and not all, believe me-- feel in the face of desire. (And how angry and hostile it makes them.) It says nothing about the reality of women's lives. We yearn, too. We too find you beautiful, and scary, and we feel longing and desire and gaze from the sidelines and wish, and wish. It's not all that different.

"Those two lines are essential. 'I'll never be 10' touches me deeply but I won't pretend that I know exactly what it means," says Sendak. "When I thought of it, I was so happy I thought of it. It came to me, which is what the creative act is all about. Things come to you without you necessarily knowing what they mean. ... It comes at a time when I am getting ripe, getting old — and I want to do work that resonates."

This felt like a huge leap. Somehow, making rudimentary computer graphics in tools like Logo or Processing had never captured my imagination – perhaps because I felt I ought to be able to do that. Working in a medium I was very unfamiliar with as a developer (but saw every day in my life) and producing output felt strangely empowering.

There is value in just doing something, but there is also real value in finishing it. That doesn’t mean selling it, or productizing it, or anything as over-the-top like that. Just get it into a stage where somebody else might recognize it for a thing.

It is strange to say “remarkably, everything worked” so much, but hardware is so strange and fincikity I always expect it not to. Also: I was aware throughout how out of my depth I was, and yet I always bobbed back to the surface.

The project taught me the value of thingness: of completing something so that it’s an artefact other people can recognise and identify. The box-with-a-lid is a huge part of that. It stops it being a bunch of wires, something I explain as “an Arduino doing X”, and it becomes an Intervalometer. It becomes a thing.

Perhaps most importantly, though, it reminded me of the huge value of making something you saw in your head. It’s vastly rewarding to make an idea that you originated; to solve a problem that you yourself had. I’ve always found that I learn new things better when I have a reason to. Every programming language I’ve tried to learn without something I myself wanted to build with it – I got nowhere. The second I have an itch I need to scratch, I’ll bat through tutorials and understand them, not to mention start trying to implement that thing as soon as I can.

This, I think, is hugely important. It’s why I think an important part of learning to code – for kids, or for adults – is achieving something you wanted – or needed – to do. It’s vital to understand that making, in software, hardware, or materials, is something you do unprompted, to solve problems, and not always knowing where the journey will take you. You don’t just implement rote linked lists, or bubble sorts, or debounce circuits; learning from examples is important, and often all one can do to begin with, but it’s not what the work is about. To learn to make things, you have to Make your own Things. You have to travel a complete path. It doesn’t just make the end more rewarding: it makes the whole journey more rewarding.

But publishers are complicators, and for the most part have never understood the Net or the Web. Nor have they fully embraced its inherent simplicities, with the remarkable exception of RSS (which Dave made into Really Simple Syndication — a purpose that could not possibly be misunderstood by publishers, and which now brings up 4,270,000,000 results on Google).

“You will encounter people who never have to pay in full,” he says. “They get to wreck the room and never have to clean it. They can get all the way through high school and never understand where a dollar comes from, because they just get it given to them.”

Parsing large numbers (esp. when talking money) seems like a kind of literacy. This post on game budgets does it well:

A week’s worth of labour is enough for a tiny prototype with a single game mechanic, like the ones I’ve been posting here. With the simplest concept and the smallest scope, you can still create something delightful. Petri Purho created the Crayon Physics prototype in under a week.

Everyone has heard the proverb that the last 20% of a project takes 80% of the time. If you’re looking to achieve commercial-quality polish, that may actually be an underestimate. On Flick Kick Football*, getting a fun prototype with mostly final controls and some rudimentary obstacles to kick around was only the first 10% of my work on the project. The other 90% was spent addressing the multitude of details that kept that basic prototype from fulfilling its full potential. Menu systems, tutorials, title music, animated flourishes to draw the eye, leaderboard integration and so forth.

OK, so we’ve accounted for the 10-fold increase that comes from polish. What if the game isn’t a simple single-mechanic game? What if there’s an element of exploration? There’s a gulf between games that take place in a few reusable arenas, and games where the player progresses through a game world. With the latter, you need to develop tools like level editors, and you need to build environments with them. You develop more variations on the core gameplay to keep the player occupied throughout their journey.

Projects in the millions can spend more on technology, building/buying rendering, physics, sound and scripting engines, tackling tricky features like network multiplayer and streaming levels. Art teams start to benefit from specialisation into modellers, animators, texture and concept artists.

If you’re making a blockbuster console game for the core gamers, you’ll be spending tens of millions.

I use Tombow brush pens to ink with. They have a nice soft feel and you can do thick and thin lines with them. I keep them organized by color families. Grays in one rubbermaid container, reds, magentas, browns and yellows (hot colors) in another, blues, greens and violets in another. I always keep a rubber squeak toy handy to give me comfort.

Nelson and Bush seem to get pretty hung up on technical (or even mechanical) hurdles rather than conceptual ones. There’s a lot of fussing about, in Bush’s case, how to shuffle microfilm around quickly, or in Nelson’s case, complicated server configurations. It reminds me of how characters in sci-fi movies park their hovercars to go use a payphone. These inventors are willing to imagine radically different worlds but can’t let go of the most banal limitations. And the things they lamented not having are no longer pipe dreams! Reading their texts in 2012, there appears to be no reason why a Memex or Xanadu can’t exist, other than that they just don’t.

You can do everything in the sketches above with a text-editor: collecting, typing, dragging and dropping to reorder, merging and splitting sentences. But a different interface would encourage a different mindset. Different relationships. Different ways of describing what you’re doing, like maybe: growing a text instead of writing it. They key actions being: arranging things on a 2D canvas for consideration, and combining related things.

It’s almost an architectural conceit: altering the way you can move through a certain space, and trusting that one’s environment has a huge impact on everything you do. It’s not a question of allowing you to do something magical that didn’t exist before, so much as knocking down a few walls and building a swimming pool, to make one’s environment feel more conducive to thinking.

Sunday I changed my avatar, which is silly but always feels like a big deal. I’ve stepped out of the shadows to reveal longer hair and different glasses. Less smiley, more judgey. Felt like I was living a lie.

I’d look up their titles in a magazine called Factsheet Five and choose the ones that most appealed to – or more likely, appalled – my polite Southern Baptist sensibilities. Then I’d send a handwritten letter and a couple of bucks to each fanzine’s author. Zines began arriving in the mail, and the whole thing was magical. My favorite was Artaud-Mania, an entire collated Xerox of hiss and spit, all stapled together, written by a college art student called Johanna Fateman.

These were no monetary transactions; they were social ones. The world, I soon discovered, is so small.

Anthropy’s real mission is only this: a more perfect world, one in which everyone can build a videogame. Maybe these games will be unedited and jejune and a little bit broken, as zines themselves often are, but that’s supposed to be the allure. The games will be authentic, these experiential snapshots, the works of diarists instead of artists and computer programmers.

Ought a videogame become the equivalent of a Livejournal entry? Can we really all be memoirists?

Anna Anthropy explains the game of Tetris:

These rules function in tandem to give the game a momentum and shape: the player makes errors that cause further errors, until eventually the player is overcome.

Also:

But the player places all the pieces herself. Every player will place the pieces differently, will play a different game, but experience a similar result. The same holds true for any system of rules, as simple as Tag or Tetris or as complicated as SimCity. Games have a lot of potential for examining the relationships between things – or, rather, for allowing the player to examine the relationships between things, because the player does not merely observe the interactions; she herself engages with the game’s systems.

This passage alone is beyond “high concept.” This is serious philosophy, wrapped up in comp lit and game theory and who knows what else. Add unto this the videogame’s near-boundless storytelling potential, and you might become as excited as Anthropy is.

But until Chapter Five, Anthropy hasn’t done any of the hard work for the reader. She hasn’t explained the ties connecting one thought to the next. It’s a constellation with no thoroughfares. Until now, the onus was on you, the “reader” or “player,” to take what meanings you could.

Chapter Six is the actual nitty-gritty of the book. But this is no textbook, no instruction manual. It isn’t advice. It’s a writing prompt. Anthropy is giving you some of her very best ideas, mostly for free.

You can singlehandedly change the world, probably.

Sometimes, when you are reading what she’s written, she sounds angry. No, I don’t mean to undermine her: she is angry. Certainly. There is a lot that ought to make Anna Anthropy angry. But she isn’t angry the way you think, maybe.

Alien3, which counts as David Fincher’s first film if you discount the fact that he walked out on it during the editing stage, is nevertheless cited by some as being under-appreciated. It is. (When first I became obsessed with the franchise I considered it the best of the bunch.) But the extent to which it is underrated pales in comparison to Resurrection. It speaks to the strength of the entire franchise that Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s attempt, which ranks fourth in quality among the four entries, is nevertheless more than worthwhile as a closing statement.

How does the The Daily Show with Jon Stewart production team search for the archived TV clips they use so effectively to expose hypocrisy, prejudice and just darn funny moments of unguarded honesty?

To what extent do they record and tag programming; use commercial archives; and search program closed captioning?

Simple investigative search combinations using TiVo or a similar tool (now we know it's Snapstream).
He also mentioned that they use LexisNexis and plain ol' Google extensively.

One of the biggest barriers to a wide supply of potential organs, after all, has been a pragmatic one: the difficulty involved in registering to become a potential donor. Registration in most states is done through the DMV: You check a box when you're applying for your drivers license. That's good in that it forces everyone who drives to make an explicit, yes-or-no decision about becoming a donor; it's terrible in that it forces everyone to consider that decision, generally, only once every ten years. The DMV-based norm means that if you have an experience that makes you want to become a donor -- if you have a relative who has benefitted from donation, if you have a friend who encourages you to do it -- it's incredibly difficult to follow up on that desire. Your impulse is impeded. The DMV norm stymies the productive power of peer pressure.

Online registries, combined with the added elements of publicity and virality that Facebook provides, could change all that. It's not just about telling people you're an organ donor; it's about, implicitly, encouraging others to become organ donors, too -- and about giving them an easy outlet for doing just that. The little "sign up here with the appropriate registry" link that Facebook includes in the Organ Donor field is, actually, huge. And while the registration option doesn't go so far as to make organ donation an opt-out thing, it takes a big step toward making opting in much, much easier. Facebook's approach, the economist Richard Thaler told me, is consistent with the model of "prompted choice" that he advocates. As Thaler has previously noted, "many Americans say they want to be organ donors, but they just don't get around to acting on their intentions."

Facebook, of course, provides nothing if not an easy way to act on intentions.