Dictator Botox
Good botox = objectionable and authoritarian, yes, but ultimately does the right thing
Mickey Rourke botox = holy shit this isn’t going to end well
Good Links
Back from LA. Sigh.
- ArchDaily presents its Buildings of the Year.
- Pepsi proves doing good can also mean Doing Good.
- If you read this without tearing up, you’re not a human being, or at least not one from Boston who grew up steeped in Camelot.
Heading to Los Angeles this afternoon…
I love this video, of then California Governor Ronald Reagan debating a bunch of raggedy Yale liberals in their frat house, complete with casual pool playing in the background, cigarette smoking and a glam Nancy Reagan wearing sunglasses inside. Hard to imagine this scene unfolding today.
Good Links
- NSE friend and NY Mag Daily Intel editor Chris Rovzar hopes the New York Times’ discovery of New York City Borough Brooklyn is somehow a self-aware nod to Brian Williams’s hilarious skewering of the paper of record’s habit of delayed trend-spotting. Doubtful.
- Perhaps not as late to a trend that’s sure to send shivers down the spines of Brooklyn’s indie booksellers, the Times Book Review lists e-book bestsellers for the first time this week.
- President Obama gives Robert Gibbs a pretty touching gift to hang in his new office. Those two have been through a lot in six years.
Who Wants to be a Millionaire and the Future of the Internet
Reading this terrific interview of Wolfram Alpha founder, and one-time intern-employer of young Sergey Brin, Stephen Wolfram, it occurred to me that Who Wants to be a Millionaire’s options for answering questions perfectly encapsulate the competing models of getting information online.
You want to know the “best” Vietnamese restaurant in Philadelpia. You can google it, which is the very rough equivalent of eliminating two of the four possible answers on WWTBM (or more accurately, the very rough equivalent of reducing an unknown and unworkably large number of possible answers down to a more manageable set).
You can also go to a respected expert, say the Philadelphia Inquirer’s restaurant critic. This would be calling a friend.
Or you can crowdsource the answer, either generally on a social network, or in a more targeted way on the expert-heavy Quora, for example. This is asking the audience.
An interesting recent trend is the decline of trust people have in their friends and associates on social networks, see here. Maybe this is because as our social networks grow ever larger and more anonymous, they seem more like the google result universe, i.e. unwieldy and unreliable. For questions seeking opinions, like the restaurant one, this might mean “asking the audience” increasingly means asking experts or curators instead of that guy you went to Kindergarten with 27 years ago.
Of course, the analogy to WWTBM isn’t perfect. For one thing, opinions are different than objectively correct answers (though many foodies seem to think otherwise!). Here is where Wolfram sees an opening — for getting correct answers to all sorts of questions, it provides the same service as Quora does for offering expert opinions.
One thing seems clear. Whoever provides the best alternative to Google’s eliminating possibilities option—who moves us away from “searching” to “asking”— is going to be a billionaire.
Good Links
An Afghan man leads camels across the desert (Boston Globe Big Picture)
- The most interesting ideas I’ve considered in a long time on any subject: these touch on social movements in a socially-networked age, Egypt, and the author’s identification of a new sociological type, the “Graduate with no future,” among many, many others.
- George Lakoff on the basics of cognitive linguistics and why journalists should stop pretending that “objectivity” is achieved when, for example, the make-believe of Creationism is “balanced” against the hard science of evolution.
The Indignities of Being Sane and Running for the Republican Presidential Nomination
Doing press for his book tour, the eminently reasonable Mitt Romney was forced, as every serious Republican candidate eventually is, to fawn about what a great President Sarah Palin would make. No Democrat ever had to say Dennis Kucinich would make a great President. This can only be good for Obama.
