In James Howard Kunstler’s view, public spaces should be inspired centers of civic life and the physical manifestation of the common good. Instead, he argues, what we have in America is a nation of places not worth caring about.
Doug Stanhope delivers a superb rant about fear mongering in America on Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe.
Siftables are sets of cookie-sized computers with motion sensing, neighbour detection, graphical display, and wireless communication. Siftables act in concert to form a single interface: users physically manipulate them—piling, grouping, sorting—to interact with digital information and media.
David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi originally created Siftables at the MIT Media Lab, and are joined by Brent Fitzgerald to form the Sifteo founding team.
Watch the video over at TED.
Today’s Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. Enter your question or calculation and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and a growing collection of data to compute the answer. Based on a new kind of knowledge-based computing… Read more here.
If Wikipedia’s success is anything to go by, Wolfram|Alpha should be a site worth watching in the quest for immediate, uninhibited knowledge. It doesn’t have the same ability of delivering massive amounts of information on one particular subject as online encyclopedias, but instead is very useful for getting quick data returns on specific queries.
The site has a list of things to try such as a date (june 23, 1988), a city (New York) and stocks (IBM Apple). Each returns a long list of information which is useful when you need instant access to quick facts.
Discover what your personal colour is and what it means for you… I’m not convinced but it’s good to have a go.
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