Web Monitor
16:02 UK time, Thursday, 16 July 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Web Monitor forgoes the screen breaks to find the most interesting bits of the Internet. Make sure you share your best links by sending them via the comment box.
• We've already been informed by a work experience boy at Morgan Stanley, Matthew Robson, that Twitter isn't for teenagers, as posted on Web Monitor previously and . However, it turns out forcing politicians to answer in 140 characters works out quite well. The using questions from Twitter with the help of regular political tweeters and .
He managed to answer curiously named gitfinger's question - What path should the UK take with its defensive capability? With this:
"Key thing is to be ready to fight stateless conflicts, no longer the old state vs state cold war conflicts."
• , North Korea's possible next leader Kim Jong-Un likes Nike. It may not seem like big news but, as Web Monitor previously noted, the there is almost nothing known about leader Kim Jong-Il's third son apart from one photograph leaked by his ex-sushi chef. So that might mean he likes sushi too.
• The leader of the Conservatives, about what he learnt from bringing up a disabled child. Ivan, who had cerebral palsy and epilepsy, died in February:
"The day you find out your child has a disability you're not just deeply shocked, worried and upset - you're also incredibly confused.
It feels like you're on the beginning of a journey you never planned to take, without a map or a clue which direction to go in."
• In the New Yorker the weighty tomes on obesity theorists who are trying and work out why the American gut has ballooned in the last few decades. Just one of many theories is that the brain, a calorifically demanding organ, has got bigger:
"As man's cranium grew, his digestive tract shrank. This forced him to obtain more energy-dense foods than his fellow-primates were subsisting on, which put a premium on adding further brain power. The result of this self-reinforcing process was a strong taste for foods that are high in calories and easy to digest."
• Going to the opposite end of the scale was Richard P Feynman from the California Institute of Technology who died in 1988. , one of linked to and on how to downscale. Feynman highlighted a big challenge in physics - going small. He looked at solving the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale - after all the principle of making small stuff may seem quite simple but you need tiny fingers and how can you oil your machinery?:
"They tell me about electric motors that are the size of the nail on your small finger. And there is a device on the market, they tell me, by which you can write the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin... Why cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica [er, shouldn't that be ] on the head of a pin?"If you want to join Web Monitor's network of friends to share links, find us on - we're called .
• The director of the Institute of the Future on how personal transformation has changed since the beginning of the internet age. Psychiatrist George Vaillant's longitudinal studies of 268 Harvard men, and posted on Web Monitor, showed that re-inventing yourself is just a normal part of life. Gorbis reflects that this reinvention is now documented on Facebook, Twitter and the rest:
"What is interesting about the technology environment we live in is that for the first time in our human history we are able to create persistent and mirror-like references points of our lives that keep former identities in constant view. Videos and photographs taken from birth, snippets of life documented on Facebook, streams of thoughts on Twitter, inner wonderings revealed in blogs -- these are all new reference points for creating and shaping our identities, our senses of self. And unlike previous reminders, often tucked away in shoe boxes, desk drawers, and attics, these are much more sensory-rich, pervasive, and easily accessible, to us and others."
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