What I'm reading →
bit.ly
This week at Almighty, we’ve been exploring what members of our team are reading. Today was, it seems, my turn.
March 2012
6 posts
“We look at utilities like water as a service - and there’s a regulated market that’s constructed to provide equally to all consumers within that market. Housing has never been in such a category in America. The American real estate system looks at houses as investments. […] So I can understand the benefit of thinking about housing as if it were conceived of as a service, but it’s hard to imagine the system that we live in undergoing such a transformation.”
—Architect Carol Burns on Buckminster Fuller’s notion of housing as a service, as quoted in Bruce Mau’s Massive Change. I wonder changes in perception about the idea of home as investment since the housing crash in 2008, along with events like Bank of America’s entry into the rental market, might effect some level of the transformation to which Burns refers.
Jitter →
snarkmarket.com
I really like the thinking of Robin Sloan’s post here - essentially taking an idea gleaned from a dry, technical explanation of the manner in which YouTube manages content caching and extrapolating it to other mediums. There’s lots of food for thought in this concept of (manufactured) randomness.
Play
Awkward Keystrokes →
nearfuturelaboratory.com
I’ve been doing a good bit of reading lately on issues relating to path dependence - this weekend, in particular, related to the economic perils of this dependence as outlined by Nassim Taleb. This made it all the more interesting that Nicolas Nova would post yesterday on the Dvorak Keyboard as a brilliant illustration of the concept.
