Yesterday was OK’s 173rd birthday. Allan Metcalf, author of OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word, leads the celebration:
OK deserves more recognition than it gets. It’s so familiar that we overlook its greatness. In fact, it’s America’s greatest linguistic invention and the world’s greatest word.
This is how the Guardian would cover the story of the Three Little Pigs in the age of social media:
My favorite blog has a new design. As always, it’s great. Click the image to have a look.
This blog owes a lot to the old version of Kottke.org.
This interview was very interesting. A sampling:
Wired: You write about “digital organisms.” Is this what you mean?
Dyson: Digital organisms, while not necessarily any more alive than a phone book, are strings of code that replicate and evolve over time. Digital codes are strings of binary digits—bits. A Pixar movie is just a very large number, sitting idle on a disc, while Microsoft Windows is an even larger number, replicated across hundreds of millions of computers and constantly in use. Google is a fantastically large number, so large it is almost beyond comprehension, distributed and replicated across all kinds of hosts. When you click on a link, you are replicating the string of code that it links to. Replication of code sequences isn’t life, any more than replication of nucleotide sequences is, but we know that it sometimes leads to life.
Q&A: Hacker Historian George Dyson Sits Down With Wired’s Kevin Kelly | Wired Magazine | Wired.com
I like this new trend (if that’s what it is*) in which magazines share the covers that were killed.
Fiddling With the Irish Cover | NYTimes.com
By the standard lazy journalistic definition of “trend” (in which three makes a trend), this would qualify… I’ve seen other killed covers recently from Bloomberg and Newsweek.
(thx Logan)
