Day: August 26, 2010

That was Thursday

Except that it didn’t rain, today was largely indistinguishable from the rest of the week. The Long Island Railroad is still slowly recovering from the switching station fire they had on Monday, leading to canceled or delayed trains, and every day this week an evening train for me that’s been packed like sardines. Tonight, we had not a bit of cool air, except when the doors opened at each station and passengers piled out. Luckily tomorrow’s a half day, and I’m hoping that by next week they’ll have finally put things back to normal.

Thursday various

  • I like Doctor Who. I’m not sure I like it enough to have a A Doctor Who-themed wedding, though.
  • Thomas Pynchon on plagiarism:

    Writers are naturally drawn, chimpanzee-like, to the color and the music of this English idiom we are blessed to have inherited. When given the choice we will usually try to use the more vivid and tuneful among its words.

  • A visual diary documenting a flight from New York to Berlin (with a layover in London). [via]
  • You know, it is kind of funny that programs like Word still use a disk as the save icon when lots of computer users these days don’t even know what a disk is.
  • And finally, even qwerty keyboards are falling by the wayside:

    Like the “Enter” key that becomes a “Search” key, the self-leveling card deck may at first seem trivial. But it’s also a sly way that digital technology that uses real-world iconography destabilizes experience. What, after all, is a more recognizable symbol of the capriciousness of life than a deck of cards, out of which your fate is randomly dealt? And yet here the deck icon is only superficial. At heart it’s not a random-card generator but the opposite: a highly wrought program with a memory, an algorithm and a mandate to keep children in the game. An app posing as a spatiotemporal object.

    As a populous commercial precinct, the Web now changes in response to our individual histories with it. Like a party that subtly reconfigures with each new guest, the Web now changes its ads, interfaces and greetings for almost every user. Some people find this eerie. But it’s nowhere near as shiver-worthy as the discovery that digital “things” — apps carefully dressed as objects — change as we use them, too. And it’s weird enough when those things are being solicitous and cooperative. What if the keyboards and decks of cards all turn on us? Let’s not think about that, not yet. [via]