I definitely just lost complete contact with people that normally would have been part of my life. I mean it’s also an interesting metric for your life to see who some of your closest friends are, you know, and who’s willing to take the time.

I find it an interesting thought experiment to contrast this idea with Clusterflock, which is the clearest example in my life of the relationship-building power of the internet and social technology. The internet made it possible to seek out an entirely new tribe of people – people with which I have so much in common and so much to talk about, but that I hadn’t realized existed.

But then there are social networks like Facebook, which at their worst takes all of the people who are already part of your life – your co-workers, your school chums, your family – and hands them a level of intimacy about our lives that they haven’t really earned and don’t particularly deserve. I think that’s why it’s so interesting when these online relationships predicated on intimate knowledge but passive communication go bust when one party pulls out of Facebook – we’re just learning a hard lesson about the differences between that kind of intimate knowledge and true friendship, which for the longest time I thought were one and the same.

A couple relatives recently found me on Google Plus (I use it primarily for the sad remnants of what was once Google Reader). I hadn’t even acknowledged their existence before they were already commenting on every single piece of information attached to my name. This, I’m told, is keeping in touch.

Look, we’re idiots: None of us knows what, exactly, goes into city planning, but we assume it’s probably a lot of distinguished gentlemen emailing each other about math, statistics and blueprints. But somewhere along the line, somebody accidentally CC’ed the insane asylum, and we wound up with the following civilizations that simply should not be.

(via @tylercowen)

A crowd had come out to greet them. Through the scope he saw a woman, with a child close by, approaching his troops. She had a grenade ready to detonate in her hand.

“This was the first time I was going to have to kill someone. I didn’t know whether I was going to be able to do it, man, woman or whatever,” he says.

“You’re running everything through your mind. This is a woman, first of all. Second of all, am I clear to do this, is this right, is it justified? And after I do this, am I going to be fried back home? Are the lawyers going to come after me saying, ‘You killed a woman, you’re going to prison’?”

But he didn’t have much time to debate these questions.

“She made the decision for me, it was either my fellow Americans die or I take her out.”

He pulled the trigger.

(via the browser)

Tim Mantoani took photographs of famous photographers holding their most iconic images:

The Tank Man of Tienanmen Square. Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston in victory. The portrait of the Afghan Girl on the cover of National Geographic. Many of us can automatically recall these photos in our heads, but far fewer can name the photographers who took them. Even fewer know what those photographers look like.

Tim Mantoani hopes to change that by taking portraits of famous photographers holding their most iconic or favorite photos in his new book Behind Photographs: Archiving Photographic Legends. Mantoani has shot over 150 of these portraits in the last five years, most of which are contained in the book.

The photograph above is Neil Leifer holding his photo of Ali and Liston taken on May 25, 1965.

The trailer for Matt Lenski’s Meaning of Robots:

The benevolent Mike Sullivan, age 65, has been shooting an epic stop-motion robot sex film in his apartment for the last 10 years. Obsessed with constructing the miniature robot porn stars, his apartment now overflows with thousands of them.

(thanks, Sarah)

A short documentary of brief interviews with elderly New Yorkers:

I don’t have answers, even at this stage of the game. I have no answers.

Beautiful and heartbreaking.

(thanks, Chris)

by Kim Noble

(Did you spot the stormtrooper?)

posted by Pete

People are always nicer someplace else. The rotten little shits.

Stray dogs figure out how to use Moscow’s subway system to get downtown to neighborhoods where the food is better.

For years, a house cat in England takes the public bus to get around town, unbeknownst to its owner.

A jungle leopard in India, needing to cross a swollen river with its cub, gets a man to ferry her and her cub across in his canoe.

Dolphins at a dolphin show in Hawaii instantly figure out a mistake their trainers have made and cover for them pretty well, preventing embarrassment all around.

The wild ocean cousins of those “tame” show dolphins have a long-standing partnership with fishermen along the coasts of both Brazil and Bengal that means more fish for all.

In Western Australia’s Shark Bay, wild dolphins being studied by scientists from Harvard, appear themselves to be studying the humans — including this reporter.

And other examples of animal intelligence.

(via marginal revolution)