Kieran Healy joins the fun (or is it nervous laughter) of discussing the way our identities are being forced to collapse into a singularity. But this is obvious, and I don’t think I’ve heard it called out clearly before: “In a very deep sense, you don’t have a self unless you have a secret, and we [...]
Nice posting, rant?, about names. Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names And let me also draw your attention to this extremely interesting talk on “Face Blindness,” or the inability to recognize faces. A more serious case, suffered by 3% of the population, lack that ability to recognize themselves in a mirror! It was unclear how many [...]
In the best scenario all Facebook is doing with their new service that allows 3rd party sites access to your Facebook identity along with a bit of what they know about your is a slightly more transparent version of what, say, Google’s Doubleclick can does. They are selling a service to their partners that identifies [...]
I dropped a friend off at the suburban train station in the intense nor-easter that dumped 10 inches of rain on us recently. My friend has taken to wearing a very handsome bowler hat, of which I am slightly jealous. The wind plucked his hat off and sent it rolling around the parking lot in [...]
Quite a few years ago now I spent many months thinking and working on the Internet Identity standardization. At the time we spent a lot of energy on what we called “account linking.” We blocked out lots of scenarios; for example linking the account at your stylist to your account at the tailor so your [...]
Living as I have for decades right off the information super highway I was already aware of the seedy underworld of pick up artists. Or, if your the kind of geek who likes a mnemonic: PUAs. Some commodities suffer from an imbalance, high demand and low quality of supply. The skill of how to get [...]
I’m writing this because Microsoft recently granted a limited license for some awesome intellectual property they acquired two years ago. I want to temper the press accounts that are tending suggest they granted a generous license. Almost immediately upon the wide spread adoption of patents industries fell into gridlock. In a classic game of [...]
Friday, February 19, 2010
I’m reluctant to write this up. I feel I’m wandering onto really fresh turf here. Because this is really about style and design; and the various audiences that craft addresses. Something I don’t really know anything about. One thing that caught my fancy in the book “Buying In” was the idea that products are [...]
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
It is frustrating that there is no chance I’ll ever know the real story here. This article says that they, you know they, are disabling 25 million cell phones in India. These are generally cheap phones and what they have in common is they lack a unique id number, what’s known as the IMEI. [...]
Wow! This a wonderfully counter intuitive bit of social science! Imagine that you would like to be sword swallower. In service of achieving that goal you set out to accumulate assorted accouterments: a sword, some books on sword swallowing, you study your vocabulary, you watch some videos, you take a course. Each of these moves [...]
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