Christoph Steinlehner recommended Sexualität: Vom Himmel auf Erden | Wissen | ZEIT ONLINE from zeit.de:

Sex ist die intimste Form von Kommunikation, die uns Menschen zur Verfügung steht. Unsere Möglichkeit, Liebe leiblich zu erleben. Das fängt weit vor genitaler Interaktion an. Es beginnt damit, dass wir uns auf eine Art berühren, die uns etwas bedeutet.

Christoph Steinlehner recommended Bruce Sterling: Startup-Gründer sind "Gehirn und Nervensystem des Finanzdrachens" from heise.de:

Sterling ließ keinen Zweifel daran, dass die Geschichte die "Startup-Kultur" derart einschätzen werde. Sie könne beschrieben werden als eine unheilige Allianz aus "Hackerspace-Favelas" und dem Offshore-Kapital in Steuer-vermeidenden Geldwäscheregionen. Letztlich lebten die Gründer so wie die Kolonialstaaten unter der Kontrolle eines großen Imperiums. "So lange, wie ihr die reichen Typen reicher macht, seid ihr Teil des Problems", erläuterte Sterling. Die Gründer, die ständig auf der Suche nach alte Geschäftsmodelle zerstörenden Ideen und Techniken seien, würden so zumindest das glo[…]

Christoph Steinlehner recommended How I became a password cracker from arstechnica.com:

At the beginning of a sunny Monday morning earlier this month, I had never cracked a password. By the end of the day, I had cracked 8,000. Even though I knew password cracking was easy, I didn't know it was ridiculously easy—well, ridiculously easy once I overcame the urge to bash my laptop with a sledgehammer and finally figured out what I was doing.

Christoph Steinlehner recommended The myth of the eight-hour sleep from bbc.co.uk:

So the next time you wake up in the middle of the night, think of your pre-industrial ancestors and relax. Lying awake could be good for you.

Christoph Steinlehner recommended The Influence of Typography from sachagreif.com:

So while realism is a purely visual style, skeuomorphism affects a design at a much deeper level. But there's nothing wrong with either technique in themselves.

Christoph Steinlehner recommended The Uncanny Valley of News from blog.echovar.com:

In the era of so-called ‘Big Data’ even your Network identity is a pattern. You aren’t you, you’re someone ‘like’ you.

Christoph Steinlehner recommended The psychology of Tetris from bbc.com:

Many human games are basically ritualised tidying up. Snooker, or pool if you are non-British, is a good example. The first person makes a mess (the break) and then the players take turns in potting the balls into the pockets, in a vary particular order. Tetris adds a computer-powered engine to this basic scenario – not only must the player tidy up, but the computer keeps throwing extra blocks from the sky to add to the mess. It looks like a perfect example of a pointless exercise – a game that doesn't teach us anything useful, has no wider social or physical purpose, but which weirdly kee[…]

Christoph Steinlehner recommended Randomized Consumerism from randomshopper.tumblr.com:

So I built Amazon Random Shopper. Every time I run it, I give it a set budget, say $50. It grabs a random word from the Wordnik API, then runs an Amazon search based on that word. It then looks for every paperback book, CD, and DVD in the results list, and buys the first thing that’s under budget. If it found a CD for $10, then the new budget is $40, and it does another random word search and starts all over, continuing until it runs out of money, or it searches a set number of times.

Christoph Steinlehner recommended Why 2013 will be the year of the Internet of Things from thenextweb.com:

Case also outlined the idea of the invisible button. Using the analogy of a mobile phone which originally had push-buttons and now has a touch screen where a button could ultimately be anything from a pictogram to a photo, she extrapolated from physical buttons, through liquid digital buttons to buttons in the air – that is, things that are triggered by your location or that of your mobile device.

Christoph Steinlehner recommended The importance of being axonometric from domusweb.it:

The idea behind system graphics is not to make things more concrete but to make them more abstract. So by transforming photographs of surgery or forensic entomology into a graphic, you make them consumable.

Christoph Steinlehner recommended Deconstructing the map from quod.lib.umich.edu:

Consider, for example, the fact that the ordinary road atlas is among the best selling paperback books in the United States [84] and then try to gauge how this may have affected ordinary Americans' perception of their country. What sort of an image of America do these atlases promote?

Christoph Steinlehner recommended Wolfgang Tillmans – Der Fotograf über HD-Welten, Digitalfotografie und Berliner Touristen from de-bug.de:

Es ist schon irre, wie jeder, der gerade vier Wochen in Berlin ist, sich schon über die Touristen beklagt. Ganz amüsant finde ich in diesem Zusammenhang die Aufkleber “Touristen fisten”, die man hier in Kreuzberg vielfach sehen kann. Die Drohung geht fehl, denn viele Touristen kommen ja genau deswegen hierher.

Christoph Steinlehner recommended Offen from seite2.wordpress.com:

Nach einigen Sätzen merken wir, dass sich unser Kommunikationsverhalten ähnelt: Abwegiges erzählen, aber so trocken, dass Fremde nicht den Wahrheitsgehalt abschätzen können. Alles Übertreiben, bis ins Zynische. Nach einer Stunde verabschiedete ich mich. Offiziell wegen Kopfschmerzen, inoffiziell wegen Hoffnungslosigkeit. In Zeiten, in denen selbst Plakatwerbung ironisch ist, ist so etwas kein sexy Geplänkel mehr. Es ist eine Barriere.

Christoph Steinlehner recommended 37signals Earns Millions Each Year. Its CEO’s Model? His Cleaning Lady from fastcompany.com:

She’s on her own, she cleans people’s homes, she’s incredibly nice. She brings flowers every time she cleans, and she’s just respectful and nice and awesome. Why can’t more people be like that? She’s been doing it some twenty-odd years, and that’s just an incredible success story.

Christoph Steinlehner recommended towards theorizing an augmented reality from thesocietypages.org:

No longer can we think of a “real” world opposed to being “online”. Instead, we need to think with a paradigm that centers on the implosion of the worlds of bits and atoms into the augmented reality that has seemingly become ascendant.