Made Thing

Users Are Tossing Their Landlines Overboard

Still have a landline? You’re showing your age. The young, hip, cool people have cellphones only, and that is bad news for traditional phone providers.

It’s also bad news for anyone who wants telephone polling to be accurate.

And the opening includes an excellent introductory explanation of the role SIM cards play in authenticating individual phones onto a particular carrier’s network.

Citizen_Engineer on Vimeo.

Things To Consider When Using WordPress as a CMS:

The real issues present themselves when you’ve chosen WordPress as the CMS for your client project. That’s when you’ll have to think a bit outside the box, or not really, but at least peek over the blog focus edge at least.

I take a picture of myself using my iPhone to take a picture of my friend Ashley using her iPhone.

An extensive article on the dirty tricks that infatuation plays on the brain. Said tricks include spiking levels of dopamine (the hormone triggered by most illegal drugs), lowering serotonin to levels that mimic obsessive-compulsive disorder, shutting off the fear-producing amygdala, and generally stirring the limbic system with a big old crazy stick.

It was only in 2000 that two London scientists selected 70 people, all in the early sizzle of love, and rolled them into the giant cylinder of a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, or fMRI. The images they got are thought to be science’s first pictures of the brain in love.

The pictures were a revelation, and others have followed, showing that romantic love is a lot like addiction to alcohol or drugs. The brain is playing a trick, necessary for evolution, by associating something that just happened with pleasure and attributing the feeling to that magnificent specimen right before your eyes.

But my favorite nugget is in the sidebar. According to one psychologist, the key to a lasting marriage isn’t love or common interests. It’s the lack of attractive alternatives.

The best predictor of divorce, Aron says, has little to do with love, even less to do with initial attraction. It has to do with the availability of other options. If people are happy, other options are less appealing and they’re more likely to stay married. If they’re unhappy but can’t imagine an alternative that isn’t even worse, again, they’ll stay married. (This is the probable reason many abused women stay in their relationships.)

It’s not the first research to suggest that too much choice can be problematic.

Jonathan Rauch on the care and feeding of introverts:

Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts. Also, it is probably due to our lack of small talk, a lack that extroverts often mistake for disdain. We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours.

The archived copy of Neal Stephenson’s famous explanation for why he is a bad correspondent. The short answer: he’d rather be a good novelist. 

Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.

The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words. This accounts for why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking engagements. If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly. What replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time, and that will, with luck, be read by many people, there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons, and a few speeches given at various conferences.

More in this vein (including similar quotes from other authors) on the archived copy of his homepage.

via 43folders

Brian Oberkirch on Frank O’Hara’s lifelong habit of drafting poems during lunch or any random scrap of unoccupied time:

I’m pretty sure that one of my favorites of his (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!) was drafted during a ferry ride en route to read with Robert Lowell. That is balls. And it’s also a better lesson than maybe any one of O’Hara’s works: your creative life is part of your life. When making things is just another open window, you’ve won.

If not for all the construction, it’d be easy to forget that Northwest Arkansas is one big boomtown. It’s the only place in the state where you’ll ever see luxury condominiums going up in an otherwise modest university town next door to a restaurant that sells dollar tacos on Tuesdays. (Pictured is a set of condos under construction on the side of Dickson St. in Fayetteville.)

Photo shot with the iPhone. Entry posted from WordPress for iPhone.

Malwebolence - The World of Web Trolling - NYTimes.com.

Horror aside, there are a dozen plots for screenplays and novels in this exploration of the culture and real-world consequences of trolling. Post title is from the photo caption.

Dan Barry writes a stirring, lyrical report on wind farms in Nebraska.

One of the men featured is a retired soldier who fought in the Iraq war but now works to maintain the turbines and their 8.5-ton blades. Barry’s trying too hard for the lyricism throughout the opening graphs, I think, but he earns it with the parallel at the end.

From Monocle, a video report on Bildschöne Bücher, a small bookshop in Berlin that features only 25 titles at a time.

Lately my inboxes have been hit with spam messages that attempt to tease a click-through by describing an act of violence in the subject line. A sampling:

Boy blinded after perfume bottle explodes
Russian serial killer on the loose
Man killed by flying cocktail glass
High school teacher rapes cheerleader
Horse kicks Ralph Lauren in stomach
Police open fire on elderly in Iowa
Heidi Fleiss found murdered today
US Soldiers blown up by militants
Cats attack schoolkids in town.

I noticed these only three or four weeks ago. Previously, the subject lines on the junk messages I received were straightforward pitches for sexual enhancements or mortgages — with a third, less frequent number of nonsense messages, junk text aimed at poisoning the Bayesian well. Those messages quickly fell victim to my spam filter. These new messages, though, have been annoyingly effective at slipping past. Content-wise, the new ones are shorter — they contain, at most, a single follow-up sentence and link. The link is completely unrelated to the subject, of course — it points to the same boner pills and junk loans as the older messages.

I wonder if the economy and our collective malaise has something to do with the darker tease. When things go badly, are people more interested in violence than Viagra?

Big Contrarian is powered by WordPress.

I assumed Jack was using Tumblr or another tumblelog engine because of the way his design distinguishes between link posts and longer, titled entries, but a little URL-prodding reveals WordPress hiding behind the curtain. The implementation is beautiful. I’d love to get a look at his templates.

CMS aside, Big Contrarian is one of the best new weblogs I’ve seen this year.

The news of Randy Pausch’s death has been widely reported, but I’m posting it here so I don’t forget about the YouTube video or pdf transcript of his last lecture, which he delivered at Carnegie Mellon after being diagnosed with terminal cancer at the age of 47.

You know, I wasted two hours yesterday fretting and complaining about a relatively minor financial blunder. It was a lovely afternoon. I could have taken my family to the park. I could have taken a walk around the lake. I could have done anything.

I can’t help but wonder what Pausch would have done with another two hours.

Here’s an idea.

Given the apparent gender balance among readers of Warren Ellis’s blog, and the propensity with which said readers send photographs of themselves for Warren’s publication and approval, the only reasonable thing for Warren to do is start a televised dating service. I’m talking about a weekly reality TV show where Warren picks two lucky readers from the photo pile, using only his cruel and depraved sense of humor as a matchmaking guide, and then designs a romantic evening out for the two of them.

Warren, of course, will have to go along as a kind of deranged chaperone, hurling death threats at the male half of the couple while feeding psychotropic drugs and endless flattery to the female half. It would be a lot like that show Millionaire Matchmaker, only without any rich people, and with Warren putting out his cigarettes on the contestants when they say something stupid. Because the experience would surely scar the participants so deeply they’d never seek human contact again, thus destroying their chances of ever reproducing, and because Warren, given his boundless energy, could eventually work his way through most of the world in this manner, the show would be called Warren Ellis: Population Zero.

I’d happily pay $2 per episode, the standard fee for a la carte shows on iTunes. I don’t know how many people read Warren’s blog, but even if, say, 10,000 of them were willing to subscribe, that’s a working budget of at least $10,000 per episode, setting aside the other half for distribution and legal fees. Red Bull would be a natural corporate sponsor, since the company is more or less responsible for keeping Warren animate, but I’ll leave those details to the producers.

This, by the way, started out as an entry about my plans to purchase Crooked Little Vein now that it’s out in paperback. I’m not sure what happened.

This stuff was everywhere where I grew up. It twisted up both sides of the quarter-mile dirt road that led to my family’s house, weaving in and out of the rotting cleft fence like a drunk driving home in the dark. We kids ate it in the summer. We’d twist the spiked blossom from the vine (only the yellow, ripened, never the white), pinch the green tip of the stem, and drag the translucent pistil down the ovule until a single drop of nectar swelled and drooped onto a waiting tongue. The smell was thicker than any ordinary flower — headstrong, musky, like sweat off a woman, and on the hottest, most humid days it saturated the air, impossible to resist. Boys weren’t the only creatures who found it so. Every so often someone thrust his hand deep into a vine only to holler and pull back — snakebit.

Honeysuckle weaves its way through the landscape of my current manuscript, too, but until today I never knew that it’s also called woodbine, a word that sat me straight up in my chair when Google led me to it. Some words are not discovered so much as revealed, and woodbine, for me, is one of them. Seeing it triggered a memory: The first time I saw a racy pair of women’s shoes — the heeled kind that sends straps curling up the ankle and calf — I thought of honeysuckle gripping a fence post. The connection felt silly, even embarrassing at the time (I was 12, I think, and watching television), but today it’s clear. Bine is archaic for bind, my dictionary tells me. Woodbine. Honeysuckle. Weird.

The July/August issue of the Technology Review looks inside Twitter’s offices with a photo essay shot by Justin Fantl. Interestingly, the main work area is one long, unpartitioned table. The lack of cubicles keeps the office quiet — people leave the room when they need to make a phone call.

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This time-lapse video provides a neat look at the trial and error that goes into page layout.

YouTube - Page design.

Via Miss West.