Posts from — June 2011

Mapnificient is a very good implementation of an interactive tool that I’ve wanted to have for a long time. Basically, you can choose a point in a city and map out where you can get to from there in a certain amount of time by walking or using public transportation.

For example, here’s where I can get to from my apartment in 15 minutes:

This is definitely a useful tool for apartment hunters. If you go to the settings, you can also configure it to allow the use of a bike or to generate a heat map of the transport times.

From an interesting yet grisly article in The Economist about The Battle of Towton:

The soldier now known as Towton 25 had survived battle before. A healed skull fracture points to previous engagements. He was old enough—somewhere between 36 and 45 when he died—to have gained plenty of experience of fighting. But on March 29th 1461, his luck ran out.

Towton 25 suffered eight wounds to his head that day. The precise order can be worked out from the direction of fractures on his skull: when bone breaks, the cracks veer towards existing areas of weakness. The first five blows were delivered by a bladed weapon to the left-hand side of his head, presumably by a right-handed opponent standing in front of him. None is likely to have been lethal.

It’s amazing how much detail they can recover from these centuries-old skeletons.

From Bill Keller’s NY Times op-ed The Twitter Trap:

Basically, we are outsourcing our brains to the cloud. The upside is that this frees a lot of gray matter for important pursuits like FarmVille and “Real Housewives.” But my inner worrywart wonders whether the new technologies overtaking us may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, genuine empathy, a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity.

The most obvious drawback of social media is that they are aggressive distractions. Unlike the virtual fireplace or that nesting pair of red-tailed hawks we have been live-streaming on nytimes.com, Twitter is not just an ambient presence. It demands attention and response. It is the enemy of contemplation. [...]

I’m not even sure these new instruments are genuinely “social.” There is something decidedly faux about the camaraderie of Facebook, something illusory about the connectedness of Twitter. Eavesdrop on a conversation as it surges through the digital crowd, and more often than not it is reductive and redundant.

I’m inclined to agree with the central thesis of Keller’s column, but at the same time my (dramatically reduced) usage of apps like Twitter still yield real benefits. For example, were it not for Twitter, I would not have known that my friend Humberto happened to be in NYC at the same time as me last month.

This sort of criticism applies to many technologies, but I wonder if there are technologies that could work in the opposite direction and make contemplation easier. Something like interruption filtering could do this. I find that single-purpose devices are easier to concentrate on, too. For example, it’s easier for me to concentrate on my kindle than it is with an iPad. Books are tough to beat in that regard, though.

Maybe this question is nonsense, I’m not sure, but it’s a bit depressing to think that the technologies that we adopt will inexorably lead us down this path of fleeting superficial interactions.

(and to those of you who have recommended that I read “The Shallows”- it’s on my list, but I haven’t got around to it yet)

“Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.”
- Joshua Foer
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

(I’m reading that book right now.. it’s pretty good)