There’s an interesting article up at the New Yorker about the current state of Google’s Book Search. I think it’s exciting to see Google work on such an ambitious project, but I am somewhat concerned that our access to the world’s information is too dependent on the fate of one company.
Category Archives: Asides
What to Eat
Michael Pollan on “Unhappy Meals” and Nutritionism for the NYT Magazine. I am currently reading “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Pollan. More when I finish.
TextMate Interview
Rands in Response has a lengthy interview up with Allan Odgaard, the creator of the TextMate text editor for OS X. Among other things, Odgaard discusses the challenges of creating software by himself and his thoughts on open sourcing TextMate vs. making a company out of it.
Photons
Researchers store an entire image on a single photon. This is cool, but there seems to be an awful lot of storage technology that never makes it out of the lab (via Engadget).
Parallelism
Interesting article on the move towards parallelism in computer architecture. See also the Berkeley page on the subject. I think we are going to have to undergo a major programming paradigm shift or risk stagnation in program performance. (via Upper Bounds)