The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
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Party Animals: Early Human Culture Thrived in Crowds | LiveScience
Article reports on research (noted & bookmarked earlier: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-06/ucl-hpd060109.php) arguing the benefits of density (in early urban settings), which accelerated intellectual and cultural development.
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Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, extract
I like this last bit (the prior sections are somewhat artificial, imo, but this works):
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We are the victims of these two momentous and strangely optimistic ideas. There is immense unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled within the assurance that everyone can discover happiness through work and love. It isn’t that these two entities are invariably incapable of delivering fulfilment, only that they almost never do so. And when an exception is misrepresented as a rule, our individual misfortunes, instead of seeming to us quasi-inevitable aspects of life, will weigh down on us like particular curses. In denying the natural place reserved for longing and incompleteness in the human lot, the modern world denies us the possibility of consolation for our fractious marriages and our unexploited ambitions, and condemns us instead to solitary feelings of shame for having stubbornly failed to make more of our lives.
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Technology Review: Computer Clusters That Heat Houses
IBM has developed an “on-chip water-cooling system” that allows high-performance computer clusters to heat buildings and provide hot water. The technology also addresses data center energy use (currently very high) because it cools the computers themselves, while providing energy for other uses. Looks like a perfect win-win.
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Technology Review: Simpler Data Visualization
Brief article with several useful links on advances in data visualization. Includes discussion of IBM’s Many Eyes (complex) and Protovis’s tools (easier).
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.