What Machines Can’t Do

David Brooks in an Op-Ed in The New York Times: 

In the 1950s, the bureaucracy was the computer. People were organized into technocratic systems in order to perform routinized information processing. But now the computer is the computer. The role of the human is not to be dispassionate, depersonalized or neutral. It is precisely the emotive traits that are rewarded: the voracious lust for understanding, the enthusiasm for work, the ability to grasp the gist, the empathetic sensitivity to what will attract attention and linger in the mind.

Unable to compete when it comes to calculation, the best workers will come with heart in hand.

Is There Such A Thing As TMI?

In the age of social media, when cell phones come with camera lenses optimized for selfies, that last question gets asked regularly. So I am going to answer it, once and for all: No. There is no such thing as TMI on the Internet. We are living in a post-TMI age, and everyone needs to deal with it. Preferably by using the “unfollow” button.

There is such a thing as too much information for you. There is such a thing as information the speaker will later regret. But if an audience is willingly and pleasurably consuming the information, then by definition, that is the right amount of information for them. Assuming the information in question is yours to share — your life, your ideas, your stories, your pictures, your theories about elf genealogy in Lord of the Rings — you cannot share too much of it. There are no captive audiences on the Internet. Whereas discussing your sex life at the Thanksgiving dinner table may be TMI for Grandma, discussing your sex life online does not necessitate Grandma’s participation. If you follow someone on Twitter and you find that her tweets are too much for you, then you may unfollow her. If you continually recoil at TMI, it's because you lack the willpower to stop consuming (or foresight to avoid) the information in question. That’s your fault.

Wholeheartedly agree with Maureen O'Connor in NY Magazine's The Cut. This applies to many things beyond "social media," entertainment, politics and even people IRL. 

Holiday Travel, In China

Kevin Kelly shares this amazing fact in a Google+ post: 

The largest human migration these days takes place every year around this time: Chinese Lunar New Year. Hundreds of millions of humans take every possible avenue to return to their home villages from the cities they now live in. In a space of about one week to 10 days, 3.6 billion passenger miles will be clocked on trains, buses, and cars. The Chinese search engine company Baidu (Google equivalent) created a heat map of these trips gathered from the locations provided by the smartphones of their 200 million subscribers. The three densest nexus you see here are Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong/Shenzhen.

A brief introduction to 4D printing

Skylar Tibbits and his team at MIT's Self Assembly Lab are working on programmable materials to create 4-D printing. What exactly is 4-D printing? The Self Assembly Lab works to create physical objects that can self-construct from stored memory inside their materials, adding what is commonly referred to as the 4th dimension — time — to 3-D printing. It may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but Skylar was inspired by similar self-producing, self-constructing organisms in nature.

"Die Fledermaus" as seen and heard from the conductor's Google Glass

Daniel Sánchez Velasco, Director of the "Orquesta Clásica de Asturias," wearing Glass during a rehearsal of Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss II.