Sarah Millstein on the lack of women speakers at conferences. “Because some of you aren’t like me in your choices, there are profitable conferences with speaker rosters that look like roll call for the signers of the Constitution. But conferences that want to be taken seriously by people who take other kinds of people seriously need more diversity among the speakers to thrive. And conference organizers, whose goals often include highlighting new ideas, cannot simply recycle the same short list of well-known speakers from show to show.”

“I am too lazy to expand my world view to include the possibility that I may have unconsciously treated women and minorities unfairly my entire life, and it wears me out that you’re trying to get me to understand this.”

FOMO is ‘Fear of Missing Out’ and it’s a major problem on the internet. “There is a company that sells radar equipment to the police as well as radar detectors to the public. Clorox is one of the world’s worst polluters of water, and also sells Brita filters to get the bad stuff out of the water again. Lawyers create mazes that you have to hire a lawyer to escape. Similarly social software both creates and cures FOMO. If you didn’t know that party was going on, you’d be home contentedly reading your latest New Yorker. But since you do, you hungrily watch each new tweet.”

“RSS is dead. Blogs are dead. The web is dead. Good. Dead means that they are no longer interesting to the drive-by technorati. Dead means that the curiousity factor has been satisfied, that people have gotten the joke.”

“Technology is not an abstract entity. Technology, like art or literature or music or mathematics, is a human endeavor. It is made by people and, as such, is imbued with their values, hopes, foibles, and passions.”

“Co-hosts Burt Lum and Ryan Ozawa take a look at the latest tech news and happenings. Then they talk about HTML 5 with Dan Leuck and Matt McVickar.” I was on Ryan and Burt's weekly show for my involvement with Ocupop's redesign of the HTML5 logo. It was my first time on live radio. Fun!

“The flip side of responsibly held secrets, however, is trust. A perfectly open world, without secrets, would be a world without the need for trust, and therefore a world without trust. What a sad sterile place that would be: A perfect world for machines.”

Former White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer weighs in, urging Egypt’s Minister of IT to help the people of Egypt and to not ruin his legacy with a human rights violation that will overshadow all of his accomplishments.

“I set myself a half-day project to write music specifically for shuffle mode — making use of randomness to try and make something more than the sum of its parts. Over an hour or so, I wrote a series of short, interlocking phrases (each formatted as an individual MP3) that can be played in any order and still (sort of) make musical sense.” The reference points here to electronic music (glitch and dubstep, obviously) are interesting, as are his integration of skipping noises as percussive elements and how the skip itself can be used as a musical device. Hat-tips to and reminders to look further into the work of pioneers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Brian Eno, and John Cage.

“We forget that what we have is more than what we need. Obscenely more. I know it may sound perverse, but here in the future people often feel like they need more than they have.”

On the history of autism and the dramatic increase of diagnoses in Silicon Valley.

"Commercial concerns are both implicit and invisible in the consumption of content."

The world and the technology by which we take it in is becoming more and more "addictive" and what can we do about it? A concerted effort to stick to basics and saying no, says Paul Graham.

"Let me think about that." In other words: with a glut of information, we're trying to form opinions and take action on it all just as fast as it's coming in, and we're suffering for it.

This guy seems to have some family issues that his addiction to incoming data via screens is severely aggravating. I experience, on a smaller scale, some of the problems outlined in this article, and, though none of this is particularly new to me, it's frightening to see these habits taken down the slippery slope. Should all of us, and especially people like Kord, make a concerted effort to make screens less a part of our lives, lest we lose our humanity? Or is trying to avoid technology's increasing integration with our every second just being traditionally biased and counter-progressive? I think there is a middle ground where one can be hooked in and focused on doing work while still not ignoring ones' children. Food for thought.

What's really happening here? BP bit off more than they could chew, and there was a catastrophe that they weren't fully prepared for. That's stupid and irresponsible. But it doesn't seem equally foolhardy or naive, as this article seems to suggest, to assume that technology will solve our problems like cancer and hunger — of course it absolutely *will* solve them eventually. (Or it won't because we won't invent that technology, and we'll destroy ourselves.) There's a difference between hoping your existing technology will be adequate and hoping that people will continue to develop ingenious applications of science to solve problems. Because that's what technology is. The screwdriver is technology, "top-kill" mud seals are technology. Whether the first incarnation of something works isn't a sure thing, but blaming the non-entity "technology" as something we shouldn't trust because it isn't ready sometimes doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Think more on this.

Joe Clark on why those complaining about the closedness of the iPad are complaining about a non-problem. "Open source has nothing to teach literature or indeed any artistic creation, since talent doesn’t scale as you give more and more developers check-in access to the version-control system set up for your novel."

Plain and simple: software patents don't work because there's too much software and not enough people who know about it.

How mobile phone usage differs geographically, and how the difference is lessening.

"I had this vision of the future — a ruined empire, run by number crunchers, squalid and stupid and puffed up with phony patriotism, settling for a long slow decline."

This is beautiful. "Mutsugoto is an intimate communication device intended for a bedroom environment. Mutsugoto allows distant partners to communicate through the language of touch as expressed on the canvas of the human body. A custom computer vision and projection system allows users to draw on each other's bodies while lying in bed. Drawings are transmitted 'live' between the two beds, enabling a different kind of synchronous communication that leverages the emotional quality of physical gesture." Thanks for the link, Ara.

Basically: Publishing solves a problem that no longer exists, and we don't need newspapers; we need journalism. Amen.

I want to read this collection of articles someday, but I doubt I will.

What will call these new forms, these non-books, these "texts"? Hmm, that could work.

"Adaptable, minimalist interfaces." Oh. My. God.

"My wifesd*porcupine hot pix for u."

Stressing the importance of actively engaging everything that you take in and the way that you take it in, so you can synthesize and maximize and!

Is this it? "Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. Daniel G. Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT, has developed a simple method to split water molecules and produce oxygen gas, a discovery that paves the way for large-scale use of solar power." "The new catalyst works at room temperature, in neutral pH water, and it's easy to set up."

On the "cognitive surplus" we're going through, and how interesting and valuable all this new engagement and experimentation with technology is.

On the price of software.