5 Intriguing Things
1. Joi Ito, the head of the MIT Media Lab, visits Shenzhen.
"We started in the section of the market where people were taking broken or trashed cellphones and stripping them down for all of the parts. Any phone part that conceivably retained functionality was stripped off and packaged for sale in big plastic bags. Another source of components seemed to be rejected parts from the factory lines that were then repaired, or sheets of PCBs in which only one of the components had failed a test. iPhone home buttons, wifi chipsets, Samsung screens, Nokia motherboards, everything. bunnie pointed to a bag of chips that he said would have a street value of $50,000 in the US selling for about $500. These chips were sold, not individually, but by the pound. Who buys chips by the pound? Small factories that make all of the cellphones that we all buy 'new' will often be short on parts and they will run to the market to buy bags of that part so that they can keep the line running. It's very likely that the 'new' phone that you just bought from ATT has 'recycled' Shenzhen parts somewhere inside." (ito.com)
2. For power users, this is the shape of things to come on Twitter.
"It took me a few weeks of feeling quietly glum about losing Twitter before I remembered that I know a few things about streams, and ditches. And beyond that, that figuring out how to make better use of communication systems is kinda what I’ve been doing for a living for a decade or so. So I thought more formally about what I want and don’t want, and I worked out some practical ways of diverting and fussing with my various streams to get them to do what I want and need." (incisive.nu)
3. The long and continuing connection between robots and theology.
"For centuries, the Catholic Church was the main patron of automata—elaborate mechanisms, often driven by springs, that were the precursors to present-day robots. 'Not only did automata appear first and most commonly in churches and cathedrals, the idea as well as the technology of human-machinery was indigenously Catholic,' writes Stanford’s Jessica Riskin in her marvelous essay, 'Machines in the Garden.'" (salon.com)
+ If you are thinking, "This is the most 5IT story ever," I would agree with you.
4. Lithium, the wonder drug! (Maybe?)
"Although it seems strange that the microscopic amounts of lithium found in groundwater could have any substantial medical impact, the more scientists look for such effects, the more they seem to discover. Evidence is slowly accumulating that relatively tiny doses of lithium can have beneficial effects. They appear to decrease suicide rates significantly and may even promote brain health and improve mood." (nytimes.com)
"I’ve become a symbol. I don’t want to be a symbol, responsible for something huge that I don’t understand, that I don’t want to work on, that keeps coming back to me. I’m not an entrepreneur. I’m not a CEO. I’m a nerdy computer programmer who likes to have opinions on Twitter. As soon as this deal is finalized, I will leave Mojang and go back to doing Ludum Dares and small web experiments. If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I’ll probably abandon it immediately."
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
cog. The phrase cogged dic is due to a misunderstanding of the old to cog dice, which meant not to load them, but to cheat in throwing them; loaded should be used.
"Hey, where'd the books go?" I have been asked. They'll come back. It's just a little time-consuming to do on a daily basis, so I'm figuring out a better system.
But By The Pound