A profile of Google’s search quality group from the NYT. There’s still not much technical detail, but then Google has become almost as secretive as Apple lately.

Interesting New York Times magazine issue on ecologically friendly architecture. I particularly like the profile of architect Shigeru Ban and the piece on what Al Gore’s been up to lately

A talk by Charles Stross (The author of Accelerando) on his predictions for the future. I’m inherently distrustful of futurism, but Stross talks about a lot of interesting ideas and seems to have a healthy amount of humility. (via Justin Blanton)

The latest issue of Wired has a very interesting article on the Chinese city of Dongtan, which is being built from scratch by a British architecture firm to be environmentally sustainable. Not only are there lots of interesting urban design issues, but the article spends some time discussing the benefits of starting from scratch. I found this interesting in light of the recent discussion of scrapping the Internet. It seems that in a lot of cases we are being held back not by technology, but by the cost of modifying current infrastructure.