The Pirates Who Print Shoes – Modern Nerd
Mick Cernis of Modernerd ponders about the future of 3D printing and is not too stoked about it.
If you’ve used a 3D printer, you’ll know why printable shoes aren’t exciting. Not yet.
If you’re new to 3D printing, allow me to describe the experience in two words:
Wax. Candles.
The people behind the Malcolm Gladwell illustrated collection set talk about the process of coming up with ideas on a Design Matters episode.
*My birthday is on May 18.
via Curiosity Counts
How I Test Ideas (Or: Discerning Good From Great) — Shawn Blanc
Shawn Blanc on how he goes through the process of testing an idea.
I suspect many of you can relate to the dilemma of having more ideas than time. Which means that, in addition to endurance, we also need discernment to know what ideas are worth pursuing and what ideas we should let go of.
Here is some required reading to get a clearer picture.
Why SOPA and PIPA must Die – Andy Baio
SOPA and PIPA – Khan Academy (That’s the video that’s embedded above.)
Lana & Me: Our Dark, Abusive, Co-Dependent Relationship on the Content Farm | HIPSTER RUNOFF
Hipster Runoff on Lana Del Ray, music writing and criticism, the indie music writing blogosphere, content farms, Gawker, and tons existentialist buzzwaves.
Cultural criticism on the internet is dying because we finally realized that the voices behind blogs, twitter feeds, and authentic writing outlets are as fat, bored, uninspired, and jealous as the fat, bored, uninspired, and jealous voices that we thought we had escaped from.
I am not a writer. I am not a blogger. I am a content farmer. These words mean more to the Google robot than they do 2 u. There is nothing exciting about writing, tweeting, or sharing opinions. I do not want to inspire any one to follow me into this dark prison, surrounded by a pile of memes, while I must sort thru them and spin them as ‘meaningful’, ‘interesting’, or whatever else will generate a pageview.
Must read.
Herpderpedia is a Front Row Seat to Wikipedia Blackout Confusion | Geekosystem
this new internet ban bullshit is going to shut down wikipedia and craigslist WTF??!!!! FUCK YOU OBAMA!!!!!!!
Of course there are people out there that have no idea about the PIPA/SOPA blackouts. Some people will go to these sites and find that they’re down. A lot will be frustrated, angry even at the fact that they won’t be able to finish their homework. But that’s kind of the point. So, naturally, someone has created a Twitter account called @herpderpedia that collects and retoots the hilarious, but serious first reactions.
Douglas Rushkoff – Blog – CNN: Why I am learning to code and you should, too
Douglas Rushkoff on why everyone should learn to code.
…[W]e now live in a world with apps, networks, and stock market trading algorithms that we use, even though desperately few of us understand how they work. And while learning to code may have once been an arduous or expensive process, the college dropouts who developed Codecademy have democratized coding as surely as Gutenberg democratized text. Anyone can go to Codecademy and start learning and creating code through their simple, fun, interactive window, for free.
I’m on the second week taking the Code Year courses and I’m loving every minute of it.
(Via AZspot)
Some days ago I read a blog post from The Story’s Story that inferred that one of the reasons the 99 per centers are 99 per centers is because they watch too much Television. I thought that to be an interesting premise and wondered how much truth there was to it. I did what every well meaning net citizen would do: I asked the internet about it.
I first thought about the Q and A website Quora since I’ve seen many great questions and answers there. It was the first question I have asked there, and perhaps that’s the reason, but I only got one answer and it was to tell me that there wasn’t any info on the General Society Survey website that linked the two things. I did search for a bit and found that the average amount watched was 2 to 3 hours. That survey though was up to 2006. The Nielsen numbers are more current, which is an average of 4 to 5 hours.
Since on Quora the question didn’t gain any traction, I went to Ask MetaFilter. Now that’s a rich Q and A community. I received a total of 11 answers and they were all useful and insightful. A lot of them pointed me to surveys and studies. Actual PDF documents like the American Time Use Survey and the Annenberg study.
Of note was the finding that low income families are more likely to have a Tv in their children’s bedroom than higher income families and that higher income people are more likely to go out to dinner and do more outdoor activities in their leisure time.
Of course, as a MetaFilter commenter pointed out, if we’re just talking about the US and not globally, it will be a completely different picture. There are places in the world were people can’t afford a Tv and there’s simply no infrastructure to transmit broadcast signals.
The reason this whole topic has resonated with me is because I’m struggling with it. I’ve been trying to cut down not just my Television viewing but all my media consumption. The motivation was by reading The Information Diet book, which is a book I highly recommend.
Correlation is not causation, and I mentioned this first as a warning, and because perhaps subconsciously I was wishing it to be a causation. People don’t get rich because they watch less Tv. They watch less Tv because they’re rich. The poor, (poorer than the upperclass) aren’t poor because they watch a lot of Tv. They just watch a lot Tv because they’re poor.
So what did I learn? It’s easy to infer that there is a strong correlation by looking at other studies, but until a study is done that links the two data points, we can only infer. Reason and logic will bring you to that conclusion. If you spend most of your time on some passive activity that distracts you from other activities you could be doing, you’re not going to accomplish many things in life. And you’re definitely not going to make any money while sitting on the couch flipping channels. You might be entertained, culturally enlightened by watching Mad Men, and even theoretically learning something by watching PBS, but you will still be not doing something. To reference and paraphrase Clay Shirky in a different context, the problem with Television is that it doesn’t have a mouse or a keyboard.
What if the Pixar film Up was made in 1965 by Disney.
The 10 Most Hated Companies in America – 24/7 Wall St.
Guess who made it to number one:
Facebook currently has more than 800 million users. Any company of this size is sure to have some detractors. Compared to other leading social media sites, however, Facebook has the lowest customer satisfaction score from the American Customer Satisfaction Index.
It’s eerie to me how Facebook users are considered customers. Best Buy unsurprisingly is number six.
