“Since society abandoned walking en masse for riding in upholstered comfort atop a metal box harnessed to a series of small explosions, we hardly pay attention to how we walk. But … researchers are increasingly convinced that how we walk can identify us as unique individuals, much like a fingerprint or retina scan.”
Tag: 01.18.13
Remembering The Day Wikipedia Went Dark (And The Internet Rose In Protest)
“Ten million people signed online petitions against SOPA. Eight million looked up their Congressional representatives’ contact information on Wikipedia’s directory and then went to the representatives’ Web pages, inadvertently causing them to crash from all the traffic. Three million people emailed and one hundred thousand called their members of Congress to express their opposition to SOPA.”
In The Age Of Big Data We Need Critics More Than Ever
“Are we on the cusp of aggregating utilitarianism into new tyrannies of scale? Is there a threshold where Big Pushpin is incontrovertibly better than small poetry, because the numbers are so big, they leave interpretation behind and acquire their own agency.”
Maryland Court Equates Ticketmaster Fees To “Scalping”
“The state’s highest court ruled Friday that service fees charged by Ticketmaster amount to scalping — setting up the possibility that people who attended some events might ultimately be eligible for refunds.”
Review Of Getty Antiquities To Turn Up Ownership Problems
“The review is likely to reveal that problems in the Getty’s collection go far deeper than the nearly 50 looted objects returned since 2007, according to Getty records and interviews with antiquity dealers and former museum officials.”
What Is An iPad Doing On A Pedestal In A Chinese Art Museum?
Performance artist Li Liao “got an assembly-line job making iPads, and forty-five days later he used his wages to buy one. As an exhibit, he put the iPad on a pedestal, tacked up his uniform and badges, and framed his contract. The effect, on a white gallery wall, is a strangely addictive ready-made tableau about the intersection of money, aspiration, and technology.”
Paul Krugman Vs. Estonia’s President: The Opera
“A Twitter feud in June between the Estonian president and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman who questioned the impact of Estonia’s austerity measures, is being turned into an opera, [said] US composer Eugene Birman.”
British Writers Who Get Pubs Wrong Deserve The Opprobrium They Get
“Any false note in a pub scene (pints of bitter served in the wrong kind of glass, the publican calling time an hour too soon) may be fatally damaging to the reader’s suspension of disbelief.”
Reactions to Matisse in 1913: Fainting, Burning, And Dying
“What hovered behind the outrage, what angered the critics and the students, was how Matisse used the canvas. As much as this trial was about modernist aesthetics it was also about a question that has lurked at the edges of modern art for decades: What makes a canvas a painting? “
What Happens When We Build Things For Free?
“The idea that unless you create scarcity around intellectual property, creators will stop creating, is just crazy.”