The mapmaker in our neurons favours the category over actual proximity.

via readability.com

Still, Mr. Holt scored a minor triumph for the often-castigated political class. “I think more of Congress just hearing about it,” said Tom M. Mitchell, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and an artificial intelligence expert.

via bits.blogs.nytimes.com

I have a suspicion – and hear me out, because this is a rough one – that the definition of “crazy” in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.

via readability.com

What we need is some guy willing to say “everyone gimme five bucks and I’ll get lots of beer and it’ll all work out for everyone.” That guy is Readability.

via blog.readability.com

And yet anonymous comments — all of them, even the written equivalent of high-speed drive-by shootings — serve a useful function. They show us what the species is really like: the full spectrum of human behavior, not just the part that we find reassuring and enlightening.

It’s impossible for anyone who reads unmoderated comments threads on large websites to argue that racism, sexism or anti-Semitism are no longer problems in America, or that the educational system is not as bad as people say or that deep down most people are good at heart. Unmoderated comments threads are X-rays of the reptilian brain — indicators of the dark stuff that rattles around in the id and that would get blurted out in the home or workplace routinely if the superego didn’t intervene. Mel Gibson’s rants are no more ugly than sentiments that get expressed thousands of times a day all over the Internet.

When a person comments anonymously, we’re told, they’re putting a mask on. But the more time I spend online the more I’m convinced that this analogy gets it backward.

The self that we show in anonymous comments, the fantasy self, the self we see in the mirror when we fantasize about being tough and strong and feared, the face we would present to the world if there were no such thing as consequences: That’s the real us.

The civil self is the mask.

via salon.com

BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ

• Joho the Blog » Standing with the Net
• Schneier on Security: WikiLeaks
  (tags: security internet politics government data)
• Not in isolation / from a working library

• In Defense of Security Theater (Sorta) – Anil Dash
• Global science: Climbing Mount Publishable | The Economist
  (tags: research science world)

Come to think of it, the last time that a woman was featured on your cover, because she was being featured in the magazine for an actual accomplishment, was way back in 1996

via tech.cindyroyal.net

…stony Mesoamerican features, and the placid, grandmotherly eyes common to giant mammals everywhere.

via theatlantic.com