Tell Me Something (New).

Bonafide Brandiac

Imagine you’re on a train and almost immediately after it’s departure, you feel a gradual brake until you’re at a complete standstill. Right on cue, the conductor’s booming voice comes onto the P.A. system, and informs the passengers the reason for the delay. There’s momentary grief yet simultaneous relief, and the passengers continue in their activities.
The conductor’s voice reappears on the P.A. system; the passengers are aglow hoping for some new news: instead they’re greeted with the same message as before—without change in inflection or wording. The passengers, noticeably disappointed, eventually become agitated after the same stale message is repeated two more times shortly thereafter.
I experienced the aforementioned development on a Sunday afternoon train ride to a family dinner, and realized that the passengers’ gradual annoyance was substantiated: they were hoping for a new message, and were left disappointed when their expectations were not met. The solution? Keep…

View original post 462 more words

retronauthq:

1933: Jean Harlow with boxer Primo Carnera

Source

This gallery contains 4 photos.

the-winter-s0ldier: I can’t with those… Whoever made those is a genius

Maya Angelou: A Poet and Hero to Remember

Poetic Parfait

Rest well, Maya Angelou. Photo Source: By Talbot Troy (originally posted to Flickr as Maya Angelou) [CC-BY-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons It was difficult to read the headline this morning of the passing of American poet Maya Angelou. She has been a personal literary hero for many years now, as part of a select group of authors I look up to. She truly spoke words that made me stop and ponder about life, as well as helping me to realize that female poets can achieve so much.

Poems of Maya Angelou

While she may be best known for her book “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” I can’t say enough how much her poetry has resonated with me. Here two of my favorite poems from her:

My top pick for her poems is Awakening in New York. It captures the city of New York so well and the line…

View original post 243 more words

Report: Apple planning iOS-controlled smart home automation platform for WWDC unveiling

This gallery contains 2 photos.

Giants behaving badly: Google, Facebook and Amazon show us the downside of monopolies and black-box algorithms

Gigaom

The internet is a wondrous thing — a limitless universe of content and products and information, all of which can be summoned up from the comfort of a chair or the palm of the hand, like some sort of science-fiction dream from centuries ago. Unfortunately, the reality is that massive quasi-monopolies control a large part of that universe, and their self-interested choices and black-box algorithms shape and in some cases define what we see, what we can search for and what we can buy.

This week has brought lessons in all of those areas from Google (s goog), Amazon (s amzn) and Facebook (s fb), each one a cautionary tale about the sci-fi future we live in. So here’s a roundup of the latest bad behavior by the platforms we use (or are used by) as we go about our increasingly digital lives. If we’re missing any other good examples…

View original post 1,033 more words

The Internet Is Burning

TechCrunch

Online security is a horrifying nightmare. Heartbleed. Target. Apple. Linux. Microsoft. Yahoo. eBay. X.509. Whatever security cataclysm erupts next, probably in weeks or even days. We seem to be trapped in a vicious cycle of cascading security disasters that just keep getting worse.

Why? Well — “Computers have gotten incredibly complex, while people have remained the same gray mud with pretensions of godhood … Because of all this, security is terrible … People, as well, are broken … Everyone fails to use software correctly,” writes the great Quinn Norton in a bleak piece in Medium. “We are building the most important technologies for the global economy on shockingly underfunded infrastructure. We are truly living through Code in the Age of Cholera,” concurs security legend Dan Kaminsky.

Most of which is objectively true. And it’s probably also true, as Norton states and…

View original post 806 more words