Stacking the Bricks: How the Blog Broke the Web
I first got online in 1993, back when the Web had a capital letter — three, in fact — and long before irony stretched its legs and unbuttoned its flannel shirt. Back when you could really say you were surfing the net.
Take a Photo Here – The New York Times
Images from Instagram: The stairwell at the New Museum in New York.We carry the cameras built into our phones around all the time, and the resulting flood of images says something about what people, in the aggregate, like to photograph.
Reversed Aging, Pig Organs, and the Future of Humankind
For a man playing God, George Church certainly looks the part. Over the past 45 years, the Harvard geneticist and his bushy white beard have published hundreds of papers and earned dozens of patents expanding our ability to read, write, and edit DNA, the code of life. He was among the first to apply the gene editing tool CRISPR to mammalian cells (he tied with his former postdoc). Church and his eclectic lab have pushed bioengineering in multiple directions, showing how it can be used to resurrect mammoths, eradicate malaria-carrying mosquitos, produce atmosphere-cleansing bacteria, and even detect bits of dark matter pelting us from space. He once stored 70 billion copies of his book, Regenesis, in a drop of DNA the size of a period after translating it into the As, Ts, Cs, and Gs of DNA’s double helix. But we wanted to talk with Church about the future of humanity, and to that end, he mused on pig organs, dating apps, brains in a dish, and artificial intelligence.
“For people who want to make sure the Web serves humanity, we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it,” Tim Berners-Lee told me one morning in downtown Washington, D.C., about a half-mile from the White House.
At 10 p.m. on the final Wednesday of May, shrouded in the darkness of our basement, my wife and I did something we used to do quite often, but now—in the 23rd year of our marriage—we do only rarely. We sat on our couch and watched a television show at the time it aired.
This year’s report contains signs of hope for the news industry following the green shoots that emerged 12 months ago. Change is in the air with many media companies shifting models towards higher quality content and more emphasis on reader payment.
The moment I put the Apple AirPods in my ears, I feel like I’ve already dropped them in the toilet. They are so small and slippery. The mere act of removing these precious, wireless ear buds from their lozenge-shaped case makes them feel like a futuristic cure to unknown ills.
The California Coastal Records Project was founded in 2002. The purpose was to document the California coastline with photography. So they flew the entire length of California in a helicopter, taking 10 photographs every mile – 12,000 pictures in all.
Once, Mad Men ruled advertising. They’ve now been eclipsed by Math Men—the engineers and data scientists whose province is machines, algorithms, pureed data, and artificial intelligence.
