90WPM

The memes we choose to elevate to Internet fame are the product of the purest form of democracy ever invented. And this why memes are so important: they are what the Internet sees when it holds a mirror up to itself. These are our messages. They speak to all of us, and they are rooted in authenticity. No amount of money in the world can buy a double rainbow.

In which I manage to fit a historical discussion of the Pentecostal church, rage-face comics, and a talk by Douglas Adams into a single post.

Economists would describe hostage negotiation as a bilateral monopoly price negotiation that is structurally just a special case of chicken. That is, unlike a barrel of oil or a freight car full of soybeans which can trade on an extremely liquid market with innumerable buyers and sellers, a hostage has exactly one seller (the kidnappers) and exactly one buyer (the employer and/or family of the hostage).

Fascinating look at hostage situations and irrational price negotiation.

If you had a huge pile of data about websites and services that might pose a competitive threat and billions of dollars in cash at hand, what would you do? Right: You’d buy Instagram. And you’d be able to make a very informed decision without consulting anyone, because, well, math.

Paul Ford nails it.

Web technology is great for many things. Replicating a native app experience is not one of them.

If you’re thinking of going with HTML5 for your company’s app, read this and think again. Great arguments from someone who seems to know their ass from a hole in the ground.

Pop quiz: Your hiking guide is suddenly mistaken for an afternoon snack by a bloodthirsty grizzly bear, leaving you stuck in the middle of the woods somewhere far from civilization. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that you somehow manage to escape the bear. You have 38% battery left on your iPhone, and luckily you use Verizon, so you actually have a signal and can use the Maps app.

How will you make sure your battery lasts long enough that you don’t get lost and die of exposure or dehydration before you make it to the nearest town?

This piece on battery life went out last week to the Wired HOWTO Wiki. I learned way, way more than I ever wanted to know about lithium ion batteries while working on it.

The Shape of Design is a book about solving problems by making connections, and about refining those solutions through persistence. It is not a practical manual. There are no tips, no tricks, no tutorials. Rather than focusing on the How of design, Chimero tackles the questions of What, Who, Where, When, and the most difficult of all: Why.

My review of Frank Chimero’s The Shape of Design is up at The Atlantic. It’s an excellent read, and I’m extremely happy for Frank; he is both extremely smart and a super-nice guy. Buy the book here (or just the digital bundle if you prefer).

To put that 800Gbps figure into perspective, the internet only handles around half an exabyte of traffic every day, which equates to around 50Tbps — in other words, a single porn site accounts for almost 2% of the internet’s total traffic. There are dozens of porn sites on the scale of YouPorn, and hundreds that are the size of ExtremeTech or your favorite news site. It’s probably not unrealistic to say that porn makes up 30% of the total data transferred across the internet.

Talk about perspective. I didn’t even know what an exabyte was before reading this.

David Simon, I meant this, not that. But yeah, I meant it.

Excellent analysis of the media discussion surrounding the shooting of Trayvon Martin.

As the number of things I might miss out on — and the ways I can find out about them — increase, I find myself wondering how we’ll deal with this in five or ten years. Will we be tempted to livestream our friends’ headcams from the couch while they stumble drunkenly through Coachella 2022? How big can my Netflix queue get before I give up and just wipe it clean to stem the ever-present feeling of guilt? And how long before literally every person I know is simultaneously Kickstarting something?

My first article for BuzzFeed hit today. It’s about FOMO, the Fear of Missing Out, which (judging from the reactions) resonates with many, many people. While writing this, I was surprised by how many people I spoke to who I normally think of as super-wired had never heard the term. Everyone, however, knew exactly what I was describing when I spelled it out.

This is one of my favorites. Looking forward to contributing more stuff to the FWD section.