Mindsmerizing.. Gin, Television and the social surplus. Basically:

“The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. […] It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.
[…]
If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. […] For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time. And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV. […] And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis.
[…]
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year.

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Ads from I believe in advertising
Bic Shave
Centraal Beheer Insurance
Adidas with a big project.

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“Yo Yo Ma and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra will soon submit to a robotic overlord in the form of Honda’s Asimo, which will pick up a baton to conduct the orchestra.

The irony of a Japanese automaker trotting out an advanced robot in the Motor City will likely be lost on most of the attendees…”

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Color changing fabric depending of the heat of the body: AZFN

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Tanya Devereaux: “I will make love with every virgin who defends the Internet.”

“This is not the first time that Ms Devereaux has offered up her orifices for a good cause. Last year she put 40,000 blowjobs on the negotiating table when she ran for a seat in the Belgian senate, as a protest against other politicians’ claims that they would create 400,000 jobs.”

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Earth as art, from the NASA

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Artist of the day: Heiruspecs

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