Happy Coming Out Day. Come Out. It’s good for you… “The more you’re in the closet, the worse for you,” says Robert Trivers, a Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University. “There is an immunological dimension to self-deception.” In his new book (out in the UK, Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others, and coming soon...

It’s hard to find a company that seems in as muchlf-inflicted chaos as Netflix — one of my own personal favorite companies. In recent months it seemingly has not just shot itself in the foot but bit itself in the lower proximities. Is that an exaggeration? No. Just look at this story about a massive corporate about face: Netflix Inc. is abandoning its widely panned decision to separate its DVD-by-mail...

Millions of people claim they were at Woodstock despite the fact there were only 400,000 or so. And with the passing of Steve Jobs, millions will claim that they bought the 128K, the first Apple computer, 25 years ago before the brand became the standard by which all other computers are compared. No matter. I myself finally escaped the clutches of Bill Gates and his evil PC Empire a mere three years ago and...

Save Our Books! by Peter Funt DENVER — A protest by students at the University of Denver is eye-opening because of how it is being conducted, what it has so far achieved and, most of all, what it concerns. Students here are demanding more books. Activism at DU has a rich history, including the anti-war protest in 1970 known as Woodstock West, and the earlier Coffee Break Riot of 1965. In the ’65 incident,...

Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell Jobs, 2011 by Lea Suzuki In 1984, I convinced my about-to-be (then) husband not to buy a Macintosh ($2,495/$5,440 in 2011 $). It wasn’t just because it was expensive. It wasn’t interoperable, you see, and the dairy cooperative we worked for was an IBM shop. Mainframes and IBM PCs (not clones) didn’t talk to Macs. Heck, Microsoft Word wasn’t around yet! Instead,...

President Obama: Michelle and I are saddened to learn of the passing of Steve Jobs. Steve was among the greatest of American innovators – brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it. By building one of the planet’s most successful companies from his garage, he exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity. By making computers personal...

Tributes are pouring in for Apple’s Steve Jobs. And cartoonists honor him the best way they know how — with memorable cartoons. Here are four of them: David Fitzsimmons, The Arizona Star Martin Sutovec, Slovakia Randall Enos, Cagle Cartoons These cartoons are copyrighted and licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Is the state of the world really as dire as world leaders who recently spoke at the U.N. General Assembly would lead us to believe? Have we all gotten carried away with gloom and doom? For Argentina’s Diario Decuyo, columnist Andrés Oppenheimer cites a recent report that asserts things are on the upswing almost everywhere, from life expectancy to education levels to the number of wars. For the Diario...

Why do public school teachers have such a bad reputation in the US and get little pay? That’s one of the things I don’t get. It’s quite different over here. The job is well paid and respected by most folks. As a country with little natural resources, Germany depends on innovation and a smart work force. Education is good for democracy, happiness etc. The children are our future, yade, yade. The...

Cardow, The Ottawa Citizen This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

There are two seemingly unrelated issues here, but the timing and the pun are too good to pass up, so let’s travel these twin paths and see where they meet. Yesterday, Hank Williams, Jr. managed to either stick his foot in his mouth, his head up his ass, or pulled off the seemingly impossible feat of doing BOTH simultaneously. Which brings us to Albert Einstein and the Theory of Special Relativity. Last...

Received wisdom (read, rumors and leaks) around today’s Apple event… A Sprint exclusive. $20B for 30B iPhones. If it really is a white label deal I just might switch (and sell my old iPhones for top dollar). A $99 iPhone? iPhone 4S or 5? I’m guessing both. An expansive Facebook deal and a three screen strategy. Phone, tablet, big screen (formerly known as “the TV”). Assistant,...

Media and Technology Did The NYTimes Change The Story's Lede To Implicate ProtestersOnce-upon-a-time, long before blogging software became synonymous with digital publishing, a core ethic of those who blogged was “show the reader when you change an article.” The resulting full disclosure was a boon to readers. Two recent incidents from the MSM illustrate why I think news organizations should...

A telling anecdote from Fred Wilson: With my phone in hand, I looked up at the young man helping me and said “can you make a photocopy of this page so I can take it home with me?” He looked straight at my phone and said “that has a camera in it, right?” I felt silly and chuckled. My friends who were with me laughed at me and the irony of the situation. I snapped a picture of the sheet...

“I don’t collect vinyl. I have a small collection. I’d say none of it is prized.” That’s Gregg Gillis speaking in episode 4 of Hulu’s, A Day in the Life, from documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock. The quote comes as a series of interviewers repeatedly and mistakenly ask the musician about his career as a DJ: I never play with DJs; I never really associated with DJ culture....

Nicholas Carr is beyond words: With the Fire, as with its its whizzy-gizmo predecessors, the iPad and the Nook Color, we are seeing the e-book begin to assume its true aesthetic, which would seem to be far closer to the aesthetic of the web than to that of the printed page: text embedded in a welter of functions and features, a symphony of intrusive beeps. Even the more restrained Kindle Touch, also introduced...

The check from Metropolitan Edison arrived, as it always does, at mid-month. You see, we don’t pay our local utility for electricity. It pays us for the surplus electricity we generate from the 20 photovoltaic cells on our south-facing roof, which is more than enough to light our house, run our appliances and heat our water. The installation of the system was not cheap, but because of generous federal...

Chris Anderson’s take on the cause of email overload: E-mail is easier to create than to respond to. This seems counterintuitive — after all, it’s quicker to read than to write. But reading a message is just the start. It may contain a hard-to-answer question, such as “What are your thoughts on this?” Or a link to a Web page. Or an attachment. And it may be copied to a dozen other people, all of...

Me in March 2010: The truth is, when it comes to revenue, Google is a one trick pony. Online advertising is it. (Google captures 70 percent share of search ad revenue and about 30 percent all online advertising.) For all the cool projects coming out of Google Labs, none makes money. Google makes it easy for customers to switch to competitor’s products and, unlike other technology giants in years past, the...

Yeah, global financial markets are way down, the Pakistani intelligence service conspired with insurgents to attack the U.S. embassy in Kabul, and the Chicago Cubs will not be going to the World Series yet again. But the big news is that pieces of a disintegrating NASA satellite that once was the size of a bus are expected to enter the Earth’s atmosphere late Friday or early Saturday as a fiery meteor...

After months of drought, it finally rained last night in Middle Georgia. A wild, heavy rain with bouts of loud thunder and lightning that had the dogs running scared. I woke up happy, even mildly euphoric; the rain had arrived, our trees might survive. Soon enough that turned sour. Why? Maybe the dogs? Maybe not. I’m a fairly happy guy. Still, sometimes in the night I have odd terrors. Scared remembrances....

Jamal Simmons Says “Broadband Technology Can Help Spur Economic Development” & “We’re Moving into a Technologically Driven World” by Janet Shan Jamal Simmons, co-chairman of the Internet Innovation Alliance, principal at The Raben Group and former strategist for then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, continues to make the case for the urgency and importance of broadband...

If I asked you to close your eyes and conjure up a scientist, would would you see? Would it be an aging Einstein, a dapper Doctor Who, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Madam Curie? What if I then asked you, “What do scientists do?” Could you answer? With science and math scores at abysmal levels in the US, perhaps this entertaining chat with six (very non-stereotypical) scientists should be incorporated...

In the book Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge envisions a world where crowdsourcing is S.O.P. and “games” can be a source of public good. Today, we’re living that vision. Over a three-week period, online gamers playing Fold.it were able to decipher the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus. (The Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, M-PMV, retroviral protease causes an AIDS-like disease in monkeys.) One...

In a classic “bait and switch” customers are enticed (“baited”) to purchase a specific product but when they try to buy it they discover that it is “out of stock” and the salesperson begins the up-sell (“switch”). But bait-and-switch as a technique is not such a narrowly-defined behavior. Some people apply the term to product advertising with extensive “fine...