Match.com – Computing Love

“With the number of paying subscribers using Match approaching 1.8 million, the ­company has had to develop ever more ­sophisticated programs to manage, sort and pair the world’s singles. Central to this effort has been the development, over the past two years, of an improved matchmaking algorithm.”

Native American Design As Imagined By White People: The Strange History Of The Indian Blanket

The Pendleton woolen mill in Oregon, founded in 1893, “played a huge role – perhaps more than any one Indian tribe – in creating these distinctive patterns. Pendleton’s early designers were instrumental in shaping modern conceptions of what Native American designs look like.” (And Pendleton blankets were hugely popular among Native Americans themselves.)

The Future And Technology In Uneven Alignment

“The physics of the twentieth century, with its Alice in Wonderland landscape of black holes and quantum cats, would have seemed impossible, even ludicrous, from the orderly standpoint of the nineteenth. This squishy, fuzzy post-Newtonian physics, in turn, has given birth to technologies and consumer products that would have seemed like rank impossibilities to the likes of Verne and Maxwell.”

Academic Journal Articles Want To Be Free

Matthew Yglesias: “Right now in academic publishing, what you have is basically a lot of donor- and government-financed nonprofit organizations taking outputs with near-zero distribution costs (electronic journal archives) and selling them to each other.” This may make sense for hard-copy journals, but on the Web, “it’s a mix of pointless and pernicious.”