Posts by Dann Berg | Dann Berg - Part 6

Lose Lose

The Economist: Then they offered [Aaron Swartz] a deal familiar to criminal defendants everywhere: plead guilty, and get off relatively easily—in his case, six months in a “low security setting”—or take your chances at trial, and face a harsher sentence if you lose. For Mr Swartz, that could have meant a sentence of decades in […]

Building Humans in the Cloud

Via the Huffington Post: If we understand the brain well enough, [Ray Kurzweil] says, we would be better equipped to fix its problems, like mental and neurological illnesses. He imagines a search engine capable of accessing a database of your thoughts, stored in the Cloud. It would anticipate what people are seeking before they even know. […]

My Best of 2012

Here are the best things I’ve discovered, learned, read, wrote, made, and accomplished in 2012. There’s no particular order and not everything on the list was conceived this year, even if they were a part of my life this year. Inspired by Fogus. My favorite blog posts Learnable Programming by Bret Victor – A fantastic look at […]

On the Internet, People Only Rally Once

If I was a successful corporation or government entity and I wanted the general public to accept a policy that was good for me but bad for them1, I might do something like the following: Create a Terms and Conditions page that’s sure to create a bunch of link-bating headlines that would be shared all […]

Flawless Cap of White Hair

Lev Grossman, writing about Tim Cook, runner-up for Time Magazine’s Person of the Year: Cook’s flawless cap of white hair could have been designed by Jony Ive and fabricated in China out of brushed aluminum. Too far?

Naming Stuff is Hard

Don Melton, describing the brainstorming meeting when trying to name the browser now known as Safari: As I remember, Steve just started saying some names out loud…I don’t recall all the names, but one that stands out is “Freedom.” Steve spent some time trying that one out on all of us. He may have liked […]