Our New 64-Bit World

A new article for Wired about how a technical problem at YouTube related to the music video for “Gangnam Style” points to a whole new scope for the technology industry.

When “Gangnam Style” hit 2 billion views back in May, a record at the time, Google’s engineers noted that it might also soon overflow the limits of a 32-bit integer. That fix was as simple as changing the memory space allotted to that data point from 32 bit to 64 bit, which is actually a relatively small change. It didn’t actually “break YouTube’s code” in any meaningful sense, let alone “break the Internet.” What’s mind-boggling about all this, though, is that the number that was pushing those limits loosely correlates with a quantity of people.

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Facepalm Pilot

I’ve somehow ended up with a new column for McSweeney’s called Facepalm Pilot, in which I’ll fiddle around with “the intersections of technology and stupidity.” There are many of these! So, data-driven satire, I guess?

First up, an interactive graphic exploring scientific and ethical conclusions based on zombie sociology.

My Triumphant Return To Academia

I wrote what I believe is the The Awl’s first technical white paper.

Gyro

My goal here was ostensibly to put together an essay for the Village Voice about the new Aphex Twin album, but it’s actually more about the absence of the new Aphex Twin album, and how I got highly attached to an amazing leaked track in the interim.

Not only has James never released another album like Selected Ambient Works 85-92 — worse yet, these days he just doesn’t really release albums at all. It’s been 22 years since that debut, and for more than half that time he has existed only as a beloved ghost. The last thing he released before disappearing was 2001’s Drukqs — twisted, knotty, and in places totally incomprehensible. Frankly, it has proven exhausting to be a fan of a musician who was first brilliant, and then difficult, and finally just totally absent. more

Apple + U2 album release

I wrote a very opinionated post for Wired about Apple’s recent decision to force downloads of the new U2 album on all iTunes users.

There’s a very simple reason why this is unprecedented, and that is because it doesn’t make any sense. Never before has such a major technology company also operated as publicist for a creative artist. The whole endeavor yearns desperately to be a landmark new innovation for the music industry, perhaps something along the lines of Radiohead’s legitimately earth-moving In Rainbows, which was self-released with variable pricing in 2007 and remains the gold standard against which music industry innovation is measured. But this is not In Rainbows, and as such should instead be remembered primarily as a monumental blunder by the tech industry.

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Update: At 1:30pm today I’m going to be a guest on CHQR AM 770 in Calgary to discuss this fiasco; listen here.

Simpsons reviews

Two short blurbs for The Verge as part of their attempt to crowdsource reviews of every episode of the Simpsons.

CSS Zen Garden API

Just dug up a terrifically stupid project I did a while back – a submission to the CSS Zen Garden design gallery which formats the usual page content to look like a fake REST API response in JSON format. It’s totally useless, but all the same, live demo + GitHub.

Counting White Dudes

I’ll mostly be working on secret internal tools in my new role at the New York Times, but I also recently built a neat public-facing data visualization for Scratch Magazine, a digital magazine about the financial and logistical realities of working as a professional writer. I created an interactive graphic which reflects the demographics of the leadership in journalism. They are almost entirely white and male. Surprise?

This data visualization actually fails in an interesting way. The color scheme was conceived such that one parameter (hue) would map to gender (pink vs blue) and another parameter (brightness) would map to race (light for white people and darker for people of color). This doesn’t actually work, though, because in the entire corpus of publications and editors surveyed there isn’t a single female editor of color. As a result, one entire quadrant is empty and there’s no need for dark pink. It therefore might have made more sense to give the box mapped to the lone black male editor much flashier and more salient treatment, but there’s also something poignant about the industry’s intrinsic racial bias being strong enough to prevent us from using, you know, actual colors.

I’ve shared the source code for this data visualization on GitHub and have generalized it a bit so it can be easily reused to set up similar audits of other industries. Please get in touch if you’d like some help in doing so.

NYT

Extremely exciting news: I’ve started working at the New York Times as a data visualization engineer on the data science team.

Twitter and Television

A few nights ago I stayed up late to start watching season 2 of House of Cards as soon as it premiered, and as you might expect, I freaked out when Frank Underwood immediately kills Zoe Barnes in the first episode, so I wrote an essay for Wired about the odd sensation of sharing a cultural experience like that via the internet despite the availability of video-on-demand services like Netflix.

Even in the middle of the night, I wasn’t alone. Both Netflix binges and traditional broadcast television are increasingly subject to an internet-based social halo surrounding fandom, and nobody wants to be the one who misses the party.

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Google Glass accessories

My article for Slashdot about the importance of an accessory market to the success of Google Glass. This time, a relatively civil discussion!

Each iPhone accessory and app is both a potential selling point as well as a tether for existing users—if you need to re-buy your cables, apps, docks, mounts, and speakers, even a free phone starts to look a lot less compelling. Google Glass isn’t a phone and doesn’t have any direct competitors running iOS, but it is still the closest thing there is to a market leader in the emerging world of wearable computing. As such, it currently faces similar strategy questions which could prove just as influential in defining its success.

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