Washington Post.

I think that nobody argues issues better than comedians, because they’re more than happy to look past the emotions tied to a subject and point out the truly absurd.

The Silent Partner – BuzzFeed Mobile.

Love this profile of one of the guys who works behind the scenes to make great things happen. The power of an outsize personality can’t be denied, and some of them are great builders in their own right, but all too often the hard work of the guys helping to build stuff goes unnoticed and unrewarded. In both the public sphere, e.g. by the press and customers, and in the private sphere, in terms of recognition or compensation.

The Future of Bitcoin : The New Yorker.

This is a great overview of where bitcoin is at the moment. It’s a truly fascinating technology, both in the quality of the work that was put in to developing it and in the mystery of its origin.

140 Characters is a Joke – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report.

The power of the RSS reader – Marco.org.

I like what Marco is saying here. I don’t totally agree with him about the fallacy of the river approach, but otherwise he’s spot on. The river style RSS content flow is relevant to high-noise (i.e. high output) sources. There will be some articles you don’t want to miss but the majority of content you can skim or skip. But I don’t think that it disqualifies these feeds from your reader. A good reader should be able to differentiate the high value content from the low (for any particular user). Dave Winer loves the river paradigm, and handles the value proposition by creating multiple rivers.

An alternate approach is to use folders or tags to segregate content, though you still end up with Inbox Overload Syndrome. I like a recent suggestion by a selfoss user to be able to specify some feeds as “noise.” These would be available in the reader but not as part of the unread articles. Thus the interesting stuff doesn’t get drowned out by the river.

The best system would be able to dynamically adjust what’s shown based on user preferences and usage history. Kind of like Google Reader’s old “magic” reading order or the way it showed your most read feeds on the home page. Not many reader projects have the resources to fulfill a request of that nature. For now I’ll settle for tagged feeds that can be filtered of “noise.”

Licence restrictions: A fool’s errand : Nature : Nature Publishing Group.

A well-argued case for open access vs. semi-open access to scholarly material. It can easily apply to other types of content.

Bob Woodward and Gene Sperling: What Woodward’s John Belushi book can tell us about the sequester scandal. – Slate Magazine.

and now I must reconsider all those thoughts I have had after reading a Woodward story. Or reading a synopsis of a Woodward story. Or hearing an opinion about so-and-so based on a Woodward story.

You get the point.

Japanese Photobombs Get Creepy and Spooky. Even with Cats..

Cats, man. If anyone could bring out their natural creepiness it’s the Japanese.

Dragon's Crown brings Norse mythology to a side-scrolling universe | Polygon.

I love VanillaWare’s games. The graphics are beautiful and the gameplay tight. There is an unmistakable design style to their games. Their liberty with the human form almost has to be mentioned. All I can say is that it is certainly … interesting.

Google Reader: Why did everyone’s favorite RSS program die? What free Web service will be next? – Slate Magazine.

A lot has been written about the folly of free software, and Google’s choice in particular. I think Manjoo does a good job of covering why free software may not be the best choice, i.e. longevity. I’ve been trying to be better about supporting the developers of the software I use for just this reason.