Magic School Bus

Couldn’t be prouder of our work at NYPL Labs. Designed and...

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:00:08 -0500

Couldn’t be prouder of our work at NYPL Labs. Designed and built by the brilliant Mauricio Giraldo

The Library has just launched Stereogranimator, a site that lets users turn our historic collection of stereographs into animated images like the one above. Read all about it in the Times and then go play! It’s the latest way we’re using technology to bring our collections to the public, following our What’s on the Menu, Biblion iPad app and map warping projects.

Caturday will never be the same …

A Tribute to Limewire

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:15:27 -0500

okonokos:

Sum_41_-_Scotty_doesnt_know.mp3

nirvana_-_here_we_are_now_entertain_us.wma

gorillaz_-_sunshine_in_a_bag.exe.mp3

system_of_a_down_-_legend_of_zelda.wav

blur_-_woohoo.wma

beetles_-_all_the_lonely_people.mp3

stairway-ledzepplin.mp3

The_who_-_teenage_wasteland.ogg

bob_marley_-_dont_worry_be_happy.wma

dbz_linkinpark_crawling_amv.wma

i_get_knocked_down.mp3

pinkfloyd_-_we_dont_need_no_educations.mp3

Thank you.

Jonathan "JZ" Zittrain on the legal machinery of SOPA

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 10:59:34 -0500

Jonathan "JZ" Zittrain on the legal machinery of SOPA

"If you look at it from a historical perspective, the American book publishing industry as a whole..."

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 09:13:02 -0500

“If you look at it from a historical perspective, the American book publishing industry as a whole began with piracy; there are lots of documents of Charles Dickens and the like taking a stand against these American pirates who were stealing their work. But America went on to become the largest publishing and copyright market in the world. Once the market matures, the pirates go away. They always do. Legitimate markets work better than pirate markets.”

- Tim O’Reilly: Why I’m fighting SOPA

Austerity For Dummies: A 3-Minute Guide To A Very Bad (And Very Powerful) Idea

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 07:28:50 -0500

Austerity For Dummies: A 3-Minute Guide To A Very Bad (And Very Powerful) Idea:

Richard RJ Eskow, crooksandliars.com

“I feel stupid,” someone said the other day. “I consider myself well-informed, but I have no idea what the term ‘austerity economics’ really means.”
Actually it’s not that complicated, and most of the lesson plan can be found in…

Austerity: a simple guide to a terrible idea

zachlinder: NYT: Serendipity as Urban Curator For years I’ve...

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 15:24:12 -0500

zachlinder:

NYT: Serendipity as Urban Curator

For years I’ve ridden the N or Q train into Times Square from Brooklyn, across the Manhattan Bridge, which provides one of the greatest cheap visual feasts in America. For the price of a ride you’re suspended 300 feet above the city, looking out the windows to the southwest across the mouth of the East River toward the choiring strings of the Brooklyn Bridge and, far beyond, the brilliant oxidized green of the Statue of Liberty. In an illusion created by the perspective of the moving subway car, she appears to be gliding along the deck of the bridge — the world’s most famous hunk of French neo-Classicism, disco skating backward into Manhattan.

caro: (via Condescending Literary Pun Dog)

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 13:33:54 -0500

caro:

(via Condescending Literary Pun Dog)

What Were They Thinking? by Elizabeth Drew | The New York Review of Books

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 11:38:11 -0500

What Were They Thinking? by Elizabeth Drew | The New York Review of Books:

As we play the government shutdown game again, it’s helpful to see from whence we came. (No not from Newt Gingrich’s 1995 government shutdown because he got a bad seat on Clinton’s Air Force One.) No, I mean the first real government shutdown threat this year (what are we up to now, three, four?). The personal politics at play with the failure of The Supercommitte were near preordained from the start. Even with the ideal legislative conditions for compromise, they won’t act in everyone’s favor unless the pressure is really on, which can only come from a genuine US bond crisis. That’s the only thing that got Italy to get its act together. It’s part of what got the world’s greatest legislative body to get its act together. Sadly that’s perhaps the last resort for Congress.

Meanwhile with the seemingfailure of SOPA I can only echo the sentiment of VC Chris Sacca:

I hope the outrage over SOPA might finally inspire the Internet’s billionaires to buy us all a better Congress.

The Economist has been among Silvio Berlusconi’s best...

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 09:07:17 -0500

July 2001

April 2003

April 2006

April 2008

June 2011

This week, November 12th, 2011

The Economist has been among Silvio Berlusconi’s best chronicler throughout his times in office. All this motivates me to do is go back through their archives.

theeconomist:

The Economist first put Silvio Berlusconi on the cover in 2001, when we ran an investigative story looking at his business dealings. Ten years and several libel suits later, he is standing down. Our slideshow remembers this long relationship.

"Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google don’t recognize any borders; they feel no qualms about..."

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 12:46:06 -0400

“Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google don’t recognize any borders; they feel no qualms about marching beyond the walls of tech into retailing, advertising, publishing, movies, TV, communications, and even finance. Across the economy, these four companies are increasingly setting the agenda. Bezos, Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Page look at the business world and justifiably imagine all of it funneling through their servers. Why not go for everything? And in their competition, each combatant is getting stronger, separating the quartet further from the rest of the pack.”

- The Great Tech War Of 2012 fast company’s primer on how the four tech giants are remaking the economy and what will be left in their wake

I don’t think I’ve laughed this hard in a long time....

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 21:30:29 -0400

I don’t think I’ve laughed this hard in a long time. No regrets.

robhuebel:

Click this for more “Scared Bros at Haunted Houses”.

You won’t regret it.

(thanks @JonDaly)

Malcolm Gladwell on Bruce Ratner and the Barclays Center

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 20:15:20 -0400

Malcolm Gladwell on Bruce Ratner and the Barclays Center:

An absolute must-read on real estate, eminent domain, taxes, oh and basketball

"By 2014, Reed had calculated, a city of a million people, the 10th-largest city in the United..."

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 08:25:18 -0400

“By 2014, Reed had calculated, a city of a million people, the 10th-largest city in the United States, would be serviced by 1,600 public workers. “There is no way to run a city with that level of staffing,” he said. “You start to ask: What is a city? Why do we bother to live together? But that’s just the start.” The problem was going to grow worse until, as he put it, “you get to one.” A single employee to service the entire city, presumably with a focus on paying pensions. “I don’t know how far out you have to go until you get to one,” said Reed, “but it isn’t all that far.” At that point, if not before, the city would be nothing more than a vehicle to pay the retirement costs of its former workers.”

- Michael Lewis - California and Bust http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/11/michael-lewis-201111.print

"How many tons of coal are burnt to support laziness or a lack of optimization in my software? What..."

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 09:27:25 -0400

“How many tons of coal are burnt to support laziness or a lack of optimization in my software? What is the coal cost of choosing to write a program in a less efficient, but easier to write, higher-level programming languages like Python or Ruby instead of writing a more efficient version in C?”

- Cost of Computing in Coal

"Whatever the results of the government’s actions against Swartz—and whether or not those actions are..."

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 20:03:06 -0400

“Whatever the results of the government’s actions against Swartz—and whether or not those actions are ultimately motivated by an instinct toward intellectual property protectionism of the kind demonstrated by the RIAA and others in the U.S.—there can be little doubt that the motives of people like Lawrence Lessig and Aaron Swartz spring from a desire to serve the public good. To that extent we are in their debt, rather than the reverse.”

- Was Aaron Swartz Stealing? | The Awl

"Here’s what the newspaper business sounds like: the modestly talented son of the founder can..."

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 09:47:24 -0400

“

Here’s what the newspaper business sounds like: the modestly talented son of the founder can generate double-digit margins based on little more than the happy accident that there are people who like football and buy cars living within 30 miles of his house.

That’s the newspaper business, or at least it was until recently. The average US paper runs more soft than hard news, uses more third-party content than anything created by their own staff, and reaches more people who care about local teams than local zoning. Telling the publishers of those papers to create a digital product so extraordinary that readers will pay full freight is a tacit admission that they do not know how to make such a product today.

”

- Why We Need the New News Environment to be Chaotic « Clay Shirky

nickdouglas: Org chart for A Visit From the Goon...

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:14:01 -0400

nickdouglas:

Org chart for A Visit From the Goon Squad

(SPOILERS)

This is a fiction book with org charts and PowerPoint and yet it’s excellent fiction, not written for consultants!

"Washington’s informal arrangement with Japan and China had institutionalized the decline of American..."

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 22:05:28 -0400

“Washington’s informal arrangement with Japan and China had institutionalized the decline of American industry, and, particularly, of American manufacturing, which found itself priced out of many foreign markets. American firms could only have competed effectively if Washington had abandoned this arrangement. That would have meant, however, recasting the world monetary system and potentially losing some of the advantages of the dollar as a world currency, including the ability to run deficits and to finance military operations abroad without substantial tax increases. It might have also upset America’s post-cold-war strategy in Asia by provoking Japan and China.”

- Stop Blaming Wall Street

dpstyles: IT’S A GIRL!!! Congrats to my brother...

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 22:12:19 -0400

dpstyles:

IT’S A GIRL!!! Congrats to my brother @JonathanCrowley & sis-in-law @JaclynRC! Meet @MaddieCrow (Taken with Instagram at NYU Langone Medical Center)

Congrats to J on the latest member of the Crowley clan.

Taken with instagram

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 20:53:47 -0400

Taken with instagram