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- Last week's weblog compared Google with a brain and pondered artificial intelligence. Vernor Vinge's 1993 essay The Singularity, an influential treatise on computers and artificial intelligence, is an interesting read on its tenth anniversary.
- Friedman's column on Google
- Google and ethics: making moral judgments in search listings, from Wired
- The politics of Google's Page Rank, from Salon
- A watchdog of Google's methods: Google-watch.org
The Internet is an instrument of isolation, reducing real interaction among people and spreading solitude. But the way television tells it, the Internet makes everyone hold hands and sing. It can even pinch hit for a romantic lover. Two recent spots spread the myth of Internet intimacy. In one, for Yahoo's new DSL service, a man sits at his computer and installs his new DSL software. As the technology serves up sports highlights and movie trailers, he starts to fall in love with it. Literally: the Righteous Brothers' "Unchained Melody" starts to play, the lights dim, a fire flares up in the fireplace behind him. If I saw right, he actually caresses the top of the monitor. Whether the man would be better off going about this routine with a woman rather than a plastic box is left unexplored. In a spot for eBay called "Traffic Jam," which rips off Frank Sinatra's "I did it my way" (now it's "Do it Ebay"), a woman rejoices over selling something online. She bursts out of her RV, which is stranded in traffic on the freeway, and is suddenly surrounded by backup dancers from other cars. In truth, if we spent less time on the Internet and freeways, we would have more time and opportunity for actual human contact, for romance and public gathering (not to deny that e-mail can foster some connections, as Andrew Sullivan describes below). Instead, TV says, these two marks of "progress" chase away our loneliness rather than making it worse.
- Play the Ebay ad (ninth item here)
- Related from B&C: Loneliness on the frontier
- Previous Spot Check: Commericializing the counterculture
From the New York Times:
HOUSTON — Developers here are tearing down perfectly good buildings or acquiring empty lots to make room for what look like century-old factories. Inside are loft-style apartments that try to mimic the faded mystique of Manhattan neighborhoods like SoHo or TriBeCa. The trend is taking root in several cities without much of a loft tradition, including Las Vegas, Atlanta and Washington. But its most active and creative proponents are here in Houston … The lofts in the Manhattan building have their own evocative names, like the Met, Brooklyn and Times Square. … They come with features like terraces and whirlpool tubs and have buildingwide amenities like a concierge, resort-style pool and wine cellar. Summary*
The Titanic, assailed by rust as well as by hundreds of explorers and moviemakers, salvors and tourists …. is rapidly falling apart. The world's most famous shipwreck … has the weakest of legal protections to fend off humans who are loving it to death, and no protections at all against rust, corrosive salts and microbes on the hulk. Divers who have visited the Titanic in the past decade report that its disintegration is accelerating. The crow's nest, where a lookout warned, "Iceberg right ahead!" has vanished. The forward mast has crumpled. The captain's cabin, where he was resting when the ship struck the iceberg, has collapsed, as has the poop deck where passengers gathered as the liner sank. Summary*
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