Web slows after Jackson's death

The internet suffered a number of slowdowns as people the world over rushed to verify accounts of Michael Jackson's death.

Search giant Google confirmed to the BBC that when the news first broke it feared it was under attack.

Millions of people who Googled the star's name were greeted with an error page rather than a list of results.

It warned users "your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application".

"It's true that between approximately 2.40PM Pacific and 3.15PM Pacific, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson and saw the error page," said Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker.

It was around this time that the singer was officially pronounced dead.

BBC News

Report: 90% Of Waking Hours Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles

PALO ALTO, CA—A new report published this week by researchers at Stanford University suggests that Americans spend the vast majority of each day staring at, interacting with, and deriving satisfaction from glowing rectangles.

"From the moment they wake up in the morning, to the moment they lose consciousness at night, Americans are in near-constant visual contact with bright, pulsating rectangles," said Dr. Richard Menken, lead author of the report, looking up briefly from the gleaming quadrangle that sits on his desk. "In fact, it's hard to find a single minute during which the American public is not completely captivated by these shining…these dazzling…."

"I'm sorry," Menken continued. "What were we discussing again?"

The Onion

15 year old wins texting championship

Wall Street Journal

Pay Taxes Willingly...

More Old School Tax Images at www.taxhistory.org

Future Happiness For Americans

"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."

Thomas Jefferson

Future of Open Source: Collaborative Culture

On the cover of indie-rock band Bon Iver's recent Top 20 record Blood Bank is a striking photograph of a snow-encrusted, rusted car door. The record label didn't commission the image, or find it an art gallery or stock photography bank; instead, it licensed the shot from amateur photographer Lauren Hudgins, who had posted it to her Flickr feed last year when she was teaching English in Japan.

She hadn't expected anything much to come of the photo. "I was hoping for Flickr recognition — people viewing it, faving it, making comments about it,” she says.

Hudgins' picture is a success story of the new open source culture, in which anyone with an internet connection can make their creations available to the public, unmediated by the old gatekeepers of mass media. The result has been an unprecedented outpouring of creative works. As of early June, for instance, more than3.6 billion photographs had been uploaded to Flickr alone. As the best of those works are now making their way into the broader cultural landscape, they're breaking mass media's stranglehold on the ownership of meaningful content.

WIRED

Twitter Tracker

One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21 -The Flaming Lips

One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-2...

Unit three thousand twenty one is warming
Makes a humming sound - when its circuits
Duplicate emotions - and a sense of coldness detaches
As it tries to comfort your sadness -

One more robot learns to be something more than
A machine - when it tries the way it does - make it seem
Like it can love -
Cause it's hard to say what's real - when you know the
Way you feel - is it wrong to think it's love
When it tries the way it does...

Feeling a synthetic kind of love
Dreaming a sympathetic wish -
As the lights blink faster and brighter -

One more robot learns to be something more than
A machine - when it tries the way it does - make it seem
Like it can love -
Cause it's hard to say what's real - when you know the
Way you feel - is it wrong to think it's love
When it tries the way it does...

Modern Art

'Digital Fire', marker on graph paper, 2002(?).

Report: kids' use of tech growing exponentially

Kids today are increasingly savvy at using things like computers and cell phones—this much is no surprise. But, according to a new report from the NPD Group, children's use of tech is growing exponentially and is changing over time to reflect their parents' changes in technology usage. There are differences between genders when it comes to different devices, too, and more kids than ever are getting their own laptops, cell phones, and other electronics.

ars technica