The New Audience: John Lasseter

Academy Award winner John Lasseter, the chief creative officer of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios and principal creative advisor for Walt Disney Imagineering, at the Academy event "The New Audience: Moviegoing in a Connected World."

Before there was Photoshop

lynda.com celebrates 25 years of Photoshop showing us how Konrad Eek works up a print using only darkroom techniques. Fascinating, so much is done by feel. 

Face It, Your Brain Is a Computer

Gary Marcus in The New York Times: 

There is much that we don’t know about brains. But we do know that they aren’t magical. They are just exceptionally complex arrangements of matter. Airplanes may not fly like birds, but they are subject to the same forces of lift and drag. Likewise, there is no reason to think that brains are exempt from the laws of computation. If the heart is a biological pump, and the nose is a biological filter, the brain is a biological computer, a machine for processing information in lawful, systematic ways.

The sooner we can figure out what kind of computer the brain is, the better.

The Man Who Broke the Music Business

One Saturday in 1994, Bennie Lydell Glover, a temporary employee at the PolyGram compact-disk manufacturing plant in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, went to a party at the house of a co-worker. He was angling for a permanent position, and the party was a chance to network with his managers. Late in the evening, the host put on music to get people dancing. Glover, a fixture at clubs in Charlotte, an hour away, had never heard any of the songs before, even though many of them were by artists whose work he enjoyed.

Later, Glover realized that the host had been d.j.’ing with music that had been smuggled out of the plant. He was surprised. Plant policy required all permanent employees to sign a “No Theft Tolerated” agreement. He knew that the plant managers were concerned about leaking, and he’d heard of employees being arrested for embezzling inventory. But at the party, even in front of the supervisors, it seemed clear that the disks had been getting out. In time, Glover became aware of a far-reaching underground trade in pre-release disks. “We’d run them in the plant in the week, and they’d have them in the flea markets on the weekend,” he said. “It was a real leaky plant.”

And that's how Stephen Witt's The New Yorker profile of Glover begins. Then it goes on to describe how Glover became the source of much of the music downloaded by the masses via Napster in the nineties. The article was the precursor to Witt's book How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy.

The Birth of Breaking News

Discovered via the great Kottke.com:

No one is alive that can remember life before your day could be interrupted by a newsflash. The first event in this country to be experienced that way was when the transcontinental railroad was completed in the Utah desert in 1869. The entire nation was waiting for the moment a golden spike (wired to the telegraph) struck a silver hammer (also wired up to the telegraph), creating the first massive breaking news story.