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Electronic Medical Records: A Way to Jack up Billings, Put Patients in...
Previously on this topic: my Atlantic Q&A with Dr. David Blumenthal, who supervised the Obama administration effort to move medical records into electronic form; and installments one, two, and...
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Intellectual Property After Everything Can Be Downloaded
1. Intellectual property in a world without scarcity. "More recently, new technologies promise to do for a variety of physical goods and even services what the Internet has already done for...
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How Home Plate Lives Up to Its Name
The name “baseball” tells us which objects are important to it. There’s the ball, and there are the bases. Pretty straightforward. Nowadays the ball gets most of the attention. There’s so much talk...
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How to Record the Sound of Silence
You’re probably familiar with 4'33''. Divided into three movements, it lasts four minutes and 33 seconds. It is entirely silent. 4'33'' is the most famous work of American composer John Cage, and...
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Where to Get Your Next Fix of MH370 News
Executive summary of what you'll find below: If you're looking for more discussion of MH370, please swap the first 90-minutes of this "Google Plus Week" (embed below) for the next 90 minutes you would...
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Here Is Every U.S. County's Favorite Baseball Team (According to Facebook)
Facebook Data ScienceHappy Opening Day. What’s your favorite baseball team? Wait, no, let me rephrase that: What’s the team you ‘like’ the most? The Facebook Data Science has just answered that...
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Outsourcing Is Reshaping the Philippines' Cities
Outsourcing is, in some ways, an old story: Cheap labor pulls in global corporations in search of profits. But it's playing out in diverse ways in different countries and industries. Recently, the...
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A Reason to Love April Fool’s: Haters Have Hated On It For 300 Years
Yeah, it's April Fool's Day. Surprise! Ugh. If you, like me, hate April Fool's Day, let me give you a reason to love it. You, in your hatred, connect with a long-line of similar haters down through...
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How High-Frequency Trading Computers See New York
1. Michael Lewis describes how high-frequency trading computers see Manhattan and beyond in his new book Flash Boys. "Any trading signal that originated in lower Manhattan traveled up the West Side...
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The New York Times’s New App Tries to One-Up Facebook
Today, the New York Times releases its new mobile news app, NYT Now. If you have an iPhone, you can download NYT Now, uh, now. And even if you’re merely interested in how the Times—this Manhattan-born...
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Will Living on Mars Drive Us Crazy?
When human space travel made its transition from pipe dream to reality, one of the unknowns humans contended with concerned not just the physics of space, but the psychology of it. How would the human...
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Inconvenient Objects
1. Designing against convenience. "The Uncomfortable is an collection of deliberately inconvenient everyday objects, by Athens based architect Katerina Kamprani." 2. The semiotics of "anti-aging"...
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That Old Space Race Feeling: NASA Memo Suspends Contact With Russians
Space has often been celebrated as a place that allows humans, literally and otherwise, to transcend the petty divisions of life on Earth. Astronauts, upon seeing the planet from outside its borders,...
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Today's 777s-in-Peril Update: Asiana 214, MH 370
1) Asiana 214. If you'd like to see professional pilots landing big airplanes, under difficult circumstances, with hundreds of lives at stake, watch any 20-second portion of this video below, taken at...
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There Have Been 57 Earthquakes of Magnitude 4.5 or Higher in Chile This Week
Another massive earthquake hit Chile this evening, a 7.6 aftershock to Monday's 8.2 magnitude earthquake. For perspective: If it had hit the lower 48 instead of Chile, the 8.2 quake would have been...
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You Take Back All the Mean Things You Said About Microwaves
In a world of in which kitchen gadgets of all kinds are celebrated, the original high-tech kitchen appliance, the microwave, continues to take abuse. Our colleagues at Quartz tried to prove the...
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Cloning a Millionaire
1. In 1978, a well-respected science journalist published a book claiming a millionaire had cloned himself. The writer remains convinced. "In His Image: The Cloning of a Man is science writer David...
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This Man Took 445 Photobooth Portraits of Himself Over 30 Years, and Nobody...
For three decades, starting in the 1930s, he did the same thing. He'd sit inside a photo booth. He'd smile. He'd pose. And then—pop! pop! pop!—out would pop a glossy self-portrait, in shades of black...
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It Was Once 'Somewhat Common' to Bind Books With Human Skin
You think Twitter is weird? Look at early print culture and the practice of what book historians call anthropodermic bibliopegy. That would be binding books in human skin. And while I now find the...
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'Coffee Flour': The Java You Can Eat
Making coffee is a complex thing. Long before the stuff makes it to your cup/glass/comically large thermos, it must be converted—from fruit to bean. Doing that requires that the fruit (the "cherries")...
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