Feedstuffs for Monday 2/9
Random shit from my feeds this morning:
SciAm: Rapid Thinking Makes People Happy – key here is fast and varied thinking; fast and repetitive tends to lead to anxiety. (This one courtesy of Mark Seifert).
NYT: Kindle Books in Snack Sizes – firm called FT Press is producing shorter digital-only works for $2.99 or less, mostly professional information. Be interesting to see if the shorter format for digital stuff takes hold.
New Scientist has a fucking fantastic article titled Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge.
In 2008, for instance, it emerged that the US had “forgotten” how to make a secret ingredient of some nuclear warheads, dubbed Fogbank. Adequate records had not been kept and all the key personnel had retired or left the agency responsible. The fiasco ended up adding $69 million to the cost of a warhead refurbishment programme.
What’s in a name? Look at Fogbank.
Also thinking: one of the points made is that the more copies there are of something, the more likely it is to survive global catastrophe. This, my friends, is the argument I’m going to use to justify torrenting for now and evermore (or until a better argument comes along). I’m just helping prepare for an infopocalypse!