Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?
My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, Solve For Interesting, the author of Complete Web Monitoring, Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks and Lean Analytics), Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, LibriVox, iambik and co-author of Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see”.
Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another:
- Understand - a novelette by Ted Chiang. “A couple of friends sent me this link over the past few weeks. Flowers for Algernon depressed me immeasurably — to fly so close to brilliance and lose it. This is a suitably thought-provoking look at what it might be like to understand absolutely everything.” (Alistair for Hugh).
- HEBOCON: The Robot Contest for Dummies – The 18th Japan Media Arts Festival. “This is a contest for bad robots. That’s not entirely accurate — it’s Robot Wars, for those who can’t build robots in the first place. Funny? Sure. But it’s also strangely ingenious and heartwarming.” (Alistair for Mitch).
- The Birth of the Information Age: How Paul Otlet’s Vision for Cataloging and Connecting Humanity Shaped Our World – Brain Pickings. “Read about the mind-bending Belgian visionary, Paul Otlet, who conceived, in the earliest years of the 20th Century, an information ecosystem presaging the Web, and actually went about trying to catalog… everything there is. Thinking of what the future would look like, he wrote, in 1903: ‘Everything in the universe, and everything of man, would be registered at a distance as it was produced. In this way a moving image of the world will be established, a true mirror of [its] memory.'” (Hugh for Alistair).
- Steve Albini on the surprisingly sturdy state of the music industry – The Guardian. “An amazing talk on the state of the music industry, by producer and engineer Steve Albini.” (Hugh for Mitch).
- America should be more like Disneyland – Aljazeera America. “We live in a messed up world. The more connected we get, the more we realize just how messed up it truly is. We’re now able to see human atrocities taking place in parts of the world that we would have never heard from – unless there was some journalist or bureau embedded there (which was an expensive and dangerous business). So, we now have to figure out what kind of world we truly want? This is an interesting piece looking to build on the old immigrant notion that America was a place where the streets were paved with gold. Can we reclaim that? This writer makes the claim that, ‘the country needs Walt Disney‘s optimism and investment in infrastructure and human happiness,’ to recapture that sense of hope for a better future.” (Mitch for Alistair).
- How Will Technology Change the Novel? – PSFK. “I am quite certain, that Hugh will laugh after reading this article’s title. Well, it turns out that the world has come a long way since 2009, when Hugh and I (with the help of many) pulled together the first BookCamp in North America (in Toronto) to discuss these exact questions. Check out these ideas from the two-day Innovative and Immersive Literature Symposium at the New School’s School of Writing.” (Mitch for Hugh).
Feel free to share these links and add your picks on Twitter, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.