Steve Jobs:

We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, "What is the purpose of a sofa?"

Malcolm Gladwell's latest piece promptly fulfills its modest purpose as a teaser for Walter Isaacson's new book, summing it up as "enthralling" even before the end of the first paragraph, thus laying the groundwork for Isaacson to join Larry Ellison and Eric Schmidt at the next New Yorker Festival for a friendly round of what-does-it-all-mean metareporting.

By the time we've arrived at Act Two, Gladwell has begun to resemble his subject. With a flourish that is simultaneously the sort of thing at which Jobs himself excelled and which he found so frustrating from others, Gladwell tweaks an old idea and presents it to you as fresh, new, more perfect:

One of the great puzzles of the industrial revolution is why it began in England. Why not France, or Germany? Many reasons have been offered. Britain had plentiful supplies of coal, for instance. It had a good patent system in place. It had relatively high labor costs, which encouraged the search for labor-saving innovations. In an article published earlier this year, however, the economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr focus on a different explanation: the role of Britain's human-capital advantage -- in particular, on a group they call "tweakers." They believe that Britain dominated the industrial revolution because it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them -- refined and perfected them, and made them work.

Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts? In the eulogies that followed Jobs's death, last month, he was repeatedly referred to as a large-scale visionary and inventor. But Isaacson's biography suggests that he was much more of a tweaker.

In case you've forgotten your classic Stephenson, here's a refresher:

Hackworth was a forger, Dr. X was a honer. The distinction was at least as old as the digital computer. Forgers created a new technology and then forged on to the next project, having explored only the outlines of its potential. Honers got less respect because they appeared to sit still technologically, playing around with systems that were no longer start, hacking them for all they were worth, getting them to do things the forgers had never envisioned.

Compare with Gladwell:

The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution.

At this point the Gladwell Method is tried and true, but surely there is still room for a tweak or two.

The Tweaker

Worf:

There is the theory of the Mobius ... a twist in the fabric of space, where time becomes a loop ...

Ben Hammersley:

The freeing of public data over the past ten years has been driven by geeks, it's true, but their arguments were merely foreshadowing a general shift in the mindset of the population at large.

The you-show-me-yours-I'm-already-showing-you-mine deal is the next big movement. Nevermind government league tables: we want everything.

We expect everything. And we expect it on our own terms.

David Remnick:

Ten years after the attacks, we are still faced with questions about ourselves -- questions about the balance of liberty and security, about the urge to make common cause with liberation movements abroad, and about the countervailing limits. Only absolutists answer these questions absolutely.

Paul Ford:

Why so many people in real estate? Because ... locked away inside the brick walls and ballustrades there is a trillion dollars ... And when a number has that many zeros, people look to fill them.

We too wanted our cut, our large box of air and our sunset, and the comfort of 30 years of obligation to a huge and terrible bank. To fill in the zeros for ourselves. So it was with glad hearts that one afternoon at a strange legal office deep in Brooklyn, in a windowless room at the back, we pushed checks across a table. They handed us the keys, and then everyone -- including my wife and I -- went home.

Katharine Mieszkowski:

Geeks talking amongst themselves on Usenet about how Usenet should best be run, while having fun with homonyms: Almost 20 years later, has anything really changed?

Lapham's Quarterly:

Thirty to sixty million -- the estimate of buffalo in the United States in the early 1800s. 1,200 -- the estimate some ninety years later.

100 years of East London style in 100 seconds.

Adam Gopnik:

If you and I had the self-discipline to plan our meals and lay out our ingredients thoughtfully, we could soon be making electric eel powder with goat-... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

Al Jarnow:

We are going to take a trip. Not in space, but in time. Faster and faster, until we've moved one BILLION years into the future.

Michiru Hoshino:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Freeman Dyson:

The truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won't come to pass.

Al Jarnow's Cosmic Clock

Rivka Galchen:

The main way you move forward in science is by finding out you were wrong about what you thought you already knew.

Book TV:

Charles Mann, author of 1491, revisits the Americas a year after Christopher Columbus' arrival. The author reports on the European voyages that followed and the transportation of flora and fauna that reached portions of the globe it had never reached before, deemed the "Columbian Exchange." Mr. Mann recounts the economic and ecological impact of the Exchange. Charles Mann discusses his book with author Richard Rodriguez from the Los Angeles Public Library.

Charles C. Mann:

I felt alone and small, but in a way that was curiously like feeling exalted.

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

David Kushner:

How do you engineer something for the very distant future and get people to care about it today?

Stewart Brand:

We are trying to get people to think long-term, because civilization's shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems.

Jeff Bezos:

Symbols are important.

Danny Hillis:

The more we highlight and blend in with the most spectacular features of the mountain, the more memorable a Clock visit will be for the time pilgrims.

Freeman Dyson:

It's very important that we adapt to the world on the long-time scale as well as the short-time scale.

If you want to see humanity move gracefully into space, you have to accept it's going to take a while.

Engineering the 10 000-Year Clock - IEEE Spectrum

Patrick McKenzie:

Add revenue. Reduce costs. Those are your only goals.

Robin Sloan:

The sight of the stark new Google Reader ... made me feel, for a moment, utterly alone.

Matt Taibbi:

If America is now circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain.

Kevin Fox:

I believe this has happened because Google Reader was held to a mandate of refreshing Google products under a common style guide, but from what I've been told it had no full-time user experience resource to apply that guide in a way that made sense for the nuances and needs of that particular product.

This product is important to me, and for many it fulfills the need for a source-centric news consumption product that has been overshadowed by the overwhelming push of 'social stream' products such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. While those products are important, they don't meet the same needs that Google Reader was designed to, and Reader should not fall by the wayside, a victim to fashion.

Brian Shih:

Google released the previously announced set of changes around G+ integration and UI updates today, and boy is it a disaster.

It's almost as if Google wants to demonstrate that, yes, they don't really get platforms.

Tyler Cowen:

Google, why did you wreck it so?

Lisa Agustin:

From an information design perspective, I'd think making the design cleaner would mean maximizing space for original content. Rather it seems they did the opposite, with a thicker/more spacious header bar that pushes content further down the page.

Steve Yegge:

I hate ... plussing, or whatever it's called ...

Occupy Google Reader:

If I wanted Facebook I'd use it.

Christina Hendricks:

No man should be on Facebook.

Jim Collins:

Thousands of people could have done the same thing that Mr. Gates did, at the same time. But they didn't.

Lauren Clark:

It's good to have a plan, but if something extraordinary comes your way, you should go for it.

Seth Godin:

Saying no to loud people gives you the resources to say yes to important opportunities.

Patrick Haggard:

We feel we choose, but we don't.

Arnab Gupta:

We don't look for data, we look for signal.

Christopher Beam:

If you have an idea for an app, do it now. Throw it up online. Find an audience. Worry about quality later.

Frank Rieger, a spokesman for the Chaos Computer Club, on R2D2:

We were surprised by how bad the quality of the code was.

Ray Ozzie:

I love being around people who just don't believe things can't be done, or don't know that they can't be done, and just build whatever the concept requires.

Eddie Schwartz, chief information security officer at RSA:

Stop whining and get busy.

Steve Yegge:

Monitoring and QA are the same thing.

Ginia Bellafante:

In 1969, there were 78,000 auto thefts in New York City, which amounts to 215 a day.

Erin Nealy Cox, a former U.S. federal computer crimes prosecutor:

It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.

Nick Bilton:

It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.

Herb Sutter:

C is a poster child for why it's essential to keep those people who know a thing can't be done from bothering the people who are doing it.

Paul Ford:

When I tell people what we are doing, they want to hear about the room where you produce. I tell them that there is a lot of paperwork. That they take your picture and look at your license. Then they walk you back to the room. You are handed a list of instructions and some stickers and a plastic cup. The cup has a forest-green lid.

In the room is a VCR. No one sets a clock, but there is a sense of time passing. You get to work and try not to think about things.

James Collins, to Mark Zuckerberg:

In this so-called blind adoption, the adoptive parents believe the child is their own. It's complicated.

Paul Ford, on 21 September:

A few days ago we packed everything and went to the hospital. And a few hours after we arrived the clock -- our clock -- reset from 3.5 billion to zero.

Hello little girl. And two minutes later: Hello little boy.

Will Wilkinson:

As an undergrad I was an art major. Frankly, few of my fellow art majors were talented enough to make a living at it, even after four (or more!) years of training. Sure they loved art, but in the immortal words of Tina Turner, "What's love got to do with it?" "Find what you love and never settle for less" is an excellent recipe for frustration and poverty. "Reconcile yourself to the limits of your talent and temperament and find the most satisfactory compromise between what you love to do and what you need to do to feed your children" is rather less stirring, but it's much better advice.

Steve Jobs' gorgeous gadgets have no doubt helped some do what they love, and better. But mostly iStuff is so beloved because it offers such attractively pleasant diversion from the disappointment of having settled of necessity on lives we do not thoroughly love. To whom is watching Iron Man 2 on an iPad alone not settling?

Jonah Lehrer:

Curiosity is a fragile thing. It's the not knowing -- that tang of doubt and possibility -- that keeps us playing with the world, eager to figure out how it works.

Steven M. Johnson, on Steven M. Johnson, once described as "R. Crumb meets Buckminster Fuller":

Curious images have filled my mind during weekends and odd free moments. ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Jan Chipchase:

Three things I've learned:

Everyone has a story to tell, most people don't have someone to listen.

Never ask the question if you're not willing to listen to, and act upon the answer.

Avoid drunks with guns.

Roger Scruton:

Things become sacred when sacrifices on behalf of the community have been distilled in them ... And sacred things are invitations to sacrifice ... The decline of religion has deprived us of sacred things. But it has not deprived us of the need for them.

Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, on a world of ubiquitous drones:

Is this the world we want to live in? Because we're creating it.

Jad Abumrad, on radio:

The only way to really loosen the reins a little bit is to say to yourself, 'Let's do an experiment that makes me actually deeply nervous, because it could be bad.' I'm prepared to suck for awhile.

Neal Stephenson:

Space exploration has always had its detractors. To complain about its demise is to expose oneself to attack from those who have no sympathy that an affluent, middle-aged white American has not lived to see his boyhood fantasies fulfilled.

Still, I worry that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done.

A large technology company or lab might employ hundreds or thousands of persons, each of whom can address only a thin slice of the overall problem. Communication among them can become a mare's nest of email threads and Powerpoints.

Coordinating their efforts through a command-and-control management system is a little like trying to run a modern economy out of a Politburo.

Brian Eno:

The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you're apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times. It's the equivalent of the dream time, in your daily life, times when things get sorted out and reshuffled. If you're constantly awake work-wise you don't allow that to happen.

Michiru Hoshino:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Susan Landau:

How can we get communications security right?

Steve Bellovin et al:

Architecture matters a lot, and in subtle ways.

Cory Doctorow:

I am enough of a techno-pessimist to believe that baking surveillance, control and censorship into the very fabric of our networks, devices and laws is the absolute road to dictatorial hell.

Andy Greenberg:

The exploitation of lawful intercept is more than theoretical.

Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

Decius:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Chaos Computer Club:

The largest European hacker club, "Chaos Computer Club" (CCC), has reverse engineered and analyzed a "lawful interception" malware program used by German police forces. It has been found in the wild and submitted to the CCC anonymously. The malware can not only siphon away intimate data but also offers a remote control or backdoor functionality for uploading and executing arbitrary other programs. Significant design and implementation flaws make all of the functionality available to anyone on the internet.

Julia Angwin:

Anecdotal data suggest that digital searches are becoming common.

Noam Cohen's friend:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

CCC | Chaos Computer Club analyzes government malware