By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We’re facing a crisis, one that could very well corrode the way humans have communicated since we first evolved from apes. What we need, so say these proud Luddites, is to turn our backs on technology and embrace not the keyboard, but the pencil.

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By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We’re facing a crisis, one that could very well corrode the way humans have communicated since we first evolved from apes. What we need, so say these proud Luddites, is to turn our backs on technology and embrace not the keyboard, but the pencil.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

In April, Time magazine used a stock photo of coins in a jar on its cover to illustrate a story about “the new frugality.”

Last week, the photographer who took the picture, Robert Lam, proudly pointed out his achievement in the Photography Talk forum on the Web site Model Mayhem.

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A week ago, StatOilHydro, Norway’s majority state-owned energy company, debuted the world’s first floating offshore wind turbine. The advantage of a floating turbine–as opposed to one firmly anchored in the seabed–is that it can be located in much deeper waters than standard offshore windmills.

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The first time I saw a lolcat–those funny images of felines with grammatically questionable captions–it took me a minute to understand the joke.

“What’s with the misspellings?” I wrote the friend who’d IM’d me the link. “Cats are dumb and can’t spell?”

“Pretty much,” my friend replied.

“And they have bad grammar?” I wrote, still processing the idea.

“Yes,” he wrote. “Get it?”

I did. In fact, I couldn’t stop laughing.

By now, even the most casual observers of the Internet are aware that lolcats have become a certifiable Internet phenomenon. Their flagship site, Icanhascheezburger.com, is one of Web 2.0’s big success stories–on track to top a billion page views this year–and its content is entirely user-generated.

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On July 3, Chief Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S. District Court in California made a ruling particularly worthy of the nation’s attention. In Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation Inc. v. Bush, a key case in the epic battle over warrantless spying inside the United States, Judge Walker ruled, effectively, … that the president lacks the authority to disregard the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. The story of how Al-Haramain’s lawyers negotiated the journey thus far to Judge Walker’s ruling … is a surreal saga, involving a top-secret document accidentally released by the government, a showdown between Bush lawyers and a federal judge, the violent destruction of a laptop computer by government agents, and possibly even the top-secret shredding of a banana peel.

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