David Pogue:

Things don't replace things; they just splinter.

We want it easy.

Everybody reads with a lens.

The trick is to accept your gadget's obsolescence at the time you buy it.

Michael Becker of the Mobile Marketing Association:

In the world of mobile, there is no anonymity.

Julia Angwin And Jennifer Valentino-Devries:

Advertisers no longer want to just buy ads. They want to buy access to specific people.

Ann Blair:

A new technology does not act alone, after all, but in concert with our ambitions for it. Overload has long been fueled by our own enthusiasm -- the enthusiasm for accumulating and sharing knowledge and information, and also for experimenting with new forms of organizing and presenting it.

Early modern compilers were driven by this enthusiasm, even beyond their hopes for acquiring reputation or financial gain. Today, we see the same impulse in the proliferation of cooperative information sharing on the Internet, such as the many designers and programmers sharing new ways to visualize and efficiently use huge quantities of data. In democratizing our ability to contribute to a universal encyclopedia of experience and information, the Internet has shown just how widespread that long-running ambition remains today.

An exchange with Tom Scocca and Eliza:

TS: My primitive little heart is troubled, Eliza.

Eliza: Why do you say your primitive little heart is troubled eliza?

TS: I have been reading Twitter.

Eliza: Can you elaborate on that?

TS: On Twitter, I am having a hard time telling the bots from the humans.

Eliza: How long have you been having a hard time telling the bots from the humans?

TS: Weeks and weeks now.

Eliza: Please go on.

TS: It is not because the bots are fluent or facile.

Jeffrey Rosen:

Facebook has more power in determining who can speak and who can be heard around the globe than any Supreme Court justice, any king or any president.

Steve Steklow and Paul Sonne:

"If I come online and I'm in work mode, I will show up as a very different character than when I go online Saturday morning and I'm in recreation mode," says Mike Gassewitz. The targeted ads would reflect which "character" is online.

Ask yourself:

Will using the prefix "cyber" make me look like an idiot?

Michael German, a former FBI agent who now leads the American Civil Liberties Union's campaign on national security and privacy matters:

How do we know there are enough controls?

Miguel Bustillo And Ann Zimmerman:

Accenture this year found that 73% of mobile-powered shoppers preferred peering into their phones for basic assistance over talking to a retail clerk.

Robert Lane Greene:

It wants to be with you everywhere.

Jesse Walker:

How will those big institutions react to this leaky new era? One theory says they'll keep fewer secrets and behave with greater care. Forced into the sunshine, they'll revise their behavior; if they're more likely to be caught misbehaving, then they'll be less likely to misbehave. A rival theory says they'll just try harder not to be caught.

Christopher Hitchens:

The people who really curl my lip are the ones who willingly accept such supporters for the sake of a Republican victory, and then try to write them off as not all that important, or not all that extreme, or not all that insane in wanting to repeal several amendments to a Constitution that they also think is unalterable because it's divine! It may be true that the Tea Party's role in November's vote was less than some people feared, and it's certainly true that several of the movement's elected representatives will very soon learn the arts of compromise and the pork barrel. But then what happens at the next downturn? A large, volatile constituency has been created that believes darkly in betrayal and conspiracy.

Paul Krugman:

Yes, politics is the art of the possible. We all understand the need to deal with one's political enemies. But it's one thing to make deals to advance your goals; it's another to open the door to zombie ideas. When you do that, the zombies end up eating your brain -- and quite possibly your economy too.

Janet Napolitano:

Report suspicious activity to your local police or sheriff. If you need help, ask a Walmart manager for assistance.

Dahlia Lithwick and Jeff Shesol:

It is one thing to fetishize states rights and the will of the people above all things. It's quite another to anchor that fetish in the Constitution itself -- which was drafted to be a bulwark against both.

David B. Hart:

Tragically -- tragically -- we can remove one politician only by replacing him or her with another. And then, of course, our choices are excruciatingly circumscribed, since the whole process is dominated by two large and self-interested political conglomerates that are far better at gaining power than at exercising it wisely.

And yet we must choose, one way or the other. Even the merry recreant who casts no vote at all, or flings a vote away onto the midden of some third party as a protest, is still making a choice with consequences, however small. And none of the other political systems on offer in the modern world are alternatives that any sane person would desire; so we cannot just eradicate our political class altogether and hope for the best (anyway, who would clean up afterward?).

Since our perpetual electoral cycle is now largely a matter of product recognition, advertising, and marketing strategies, we must be content often to vote for persons willing to lie to us with some regularity or, if not that, at least to speak to us evasively and insincerely. In a better, purer world--the world that cannot be--ambition would be an absolute disqualification for political authority.

One can be grateful of the liberties one enjoys, and use one's franchise to advance the work of trustworthier politicians (and perhaps there are more of those than I have granted to this point), and pursue the discrete moral causes in which one believes. But it is good also to imagine other, better, quite impossible worlds, so that one will be less inclined to mistake the process for the proper end of political life, or to become frantically consumed by what should be only a small part of life, or to fail to see the limits and defects of our systems of government. After all, one of the most... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Michelle Obama:

In the end, the greatest blessings of all are the ones that don't cost a thing -- the time that we spend with our loved ones, the freedoms we enjoy as Americans, and the joy we feel from reaching out to those in need.

Dana Priest and William Arkin:

Memphis Police Department Director Larry Godwin has produced record numbers of arrests using all this new analysis and technology. "Some of them we can talk about. Some of them we can't."

The vast majority of fusion centers across the country have transformed themselves into analytical hubs for all crimes and are using federal grants, handed out in the name of homeland security, to combat everyday offenses.

Richard Blumenthal:

I am disappointed by Google's failure to comply with my information demands.

Robert Lane Greene:

Google doesn't want to sell you your exobrain. It wants the contents.

Scott Thurm:

Smartphone users are all but powerless to limit the tracking.

James Gleick:

It infiltrates us; we are not its masters.

Ian Ayres:

In the laboratory, you don't let the rats design the experiments.

Laura Carstensen, professor of psychology at Stanford University:

Young people will go to cocktail parties because they might meet somebody who will be useful to them in the future, even though nobody I know actually likes going to cocktail parties.

Andrew Exum:

Military officers are familiar with the concept of the "SPENDEX," where all ammunition not used in the course of the year is fired -- sometimes wildly -- at the end of a fiscal year, so ammunition allotted for the next year is not cut. The same principle applies to aid -- but instead of wasting bullets, the organizations waste dollars. Rather than face the prospect of reduced development funds in the future, development and military officers are under pressure to spend every penny they are given. But doing so simply feeds the Afghanistan's distorted economy, which only benefi... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Forensic Asia Limited:

There’s city after city full of empty streets and vast government buildings, some in the most inhospitable locations. It is the modern equivalent of building pyramids. With 20 new cities being built every year, we hope to be able to expand our list going forward.

From the archive:

Photoblogging Chernobyl

Universal surveillance is the solution to all urban ills.

Architecture matters a lot, and in subtle ways.

The Ghost Cities Of China

Marshall Miller:

Speedflying in the area of Mt. Superior, Utah.

From the archive:

Speedriding, speedflying and wingsuitflying in the area of Wengen, Switzerland.

Superior, Speed Fly on Vimeo

Following the first election since the Supreme Court has struck down limits on election-related advertising, a new poll finds that 9 in 10 voters said that in the 2010 election they encountered information they believed was misleading or false, with 56% saying this occurred frequently. Fifty-four percent said that it had been more frequent than usual, while just three percent said it was less frequent than usual, according to the poll conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org, based at the University of Maryland, and Knowledge Networks.

Equally significant, the poll found strong evidence that voters were substantially misinformed on many of the key issues of the campaign. Such misinformation was correlated with how people voted and their exposure to various news sources.

Wendy Kaminer:

I wish the issues were vetted ... but I think they're not, because voters don't have the time, or the energy, or the information.

Decius:

I said I'd do something about this, and I am.

Voters Say Election Full of Misleading and False Information

Kevin Bankston:

In a landmark decision issued in the criminal appeal of U.S. v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers. Closely tracking arguments made by EFF in its amicus brief, the court found that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored email as they do in their phone calls and postal mail.

Jeremy Pelofsky:

Officers will start random bag inspections on the sprawling Washington subway system, the Washington Metro Transit Police said on Thursday, a week after a man was arrested for making bomb threats to the rail system.

Metrorail police officers plan to randomly select bags before passengers enter subway stations and they will swab them or have an explosives-sniffing dog check the bags, according to the Metro police.

There is "no specific or credible threat to the system at this time," Metro said in a statement. Passengers who refuse to have their bags inspected will be denied entry into the subway system.

Decius:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

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.

Email Privacy Protected by Fourth Amendment | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Mitsuba is an extensible rendering framework written in portable C++. It implements unbiased as well as biased techniques and contains heavy optimizations targeted towards current CPU architectures.

The program currently runs on Linux, MacOS X and Microsoft Windows and makes use of SSE2 optimizations on x86 and x86_64 platforms. So far, its main use has been as a testbed for algorithm development in computer graphics, but there are many other interesting applications.

Mitsuba comes with a command-line interface as well as a graphical frontend to interactively explore scenes. While navigating, a rough preview is shown that becomes increasingly accurate as soon as all movements are stopped. Once a viewpoint has been chosen, a wide range of rendering techniques can be used to generate images, and their parameters can be tuned from within the program.

Mitsuba - physically based renderer

"Linotype: The Film" is a documentary about Ottmar Mergenthaler's amazing Linotype typecasting machine and the people who own and love these machines today.

See also:

The txtBOMBER is a one-hand-guerilla-tool - a machine not much bigger than a pressing iron - that generates political statements on the fly and immediately prints them on any flat surface.

From the archives:

Typography is not simply a frou-frou debate over aesthetics orchestrated by a hidden coterie of graphic-design nerds. You need only imagine a STOP sign that utilizes the heavy-metal typefaces favoured by bands Dokken or Krokus to realize that clear, clean and direct typography can save lives, or at the very least prevent drivers from prolonged bouts of confused squinting.

From the 2008 presidential campaign:

Consider typography to be the window into the soul of the candidate's campaign. The depth, the breadth, the good, the bad and the ugly is all there for us to witness and assess in one clear and telegraphic manner.

Also, recall:

Typography from the 1980s!

If you have time:

This video wasn't long enough, so we made it double-spaced.

Linotype: The Film