Big nasty contradictions usually point to some deeper misalignment. Based on what I know of the Valley, the culture it exports, and the nature of the winner-take-all New Economy it’s building, the only thing I can come up with is this:

All the Valley’s talk about transhumanism, human potential, life extension, and generally “changing the world” is a bunch of hooey. It’s a myth — in the pejorative sense of that term. It’s a fluffy religion meant to snooker young professionals into giving their employers everything they have and working their brains down to the myelin until they become too old to be relevant anymore.

No, it’s worse than that.

They don’t get too old to be relevant. They get too old to be cheap.

—

Adam Ierymenko on the inherent dissonance of the Singularity true believers and the devaluing of a workforce creeping into middle age.

Which isn’t entirely true. It’s more that you’re supposed to have made it by the time you’re 35 or 40. You should be able to retire thanks to a few liquidity events, work should be something you can’t give up because you’ve spent your entire life hustling.

[via buzz]

In short, these eighty members represent an America where the population is getting whiter, where there are few major cities, where Obama lost the last election in a landslide, and where the Republican Party is becoming more dominant and more popular. Meanwhile, in national politics, each of these trends is actually reversed.

—The G.O.P.’s suicide caucus

The latest clash of old money and nouveau riche in Pacific Heights

Shame this can’t be resolved Highlander-style. The one left gets the fancy view. 

natgeofound:

The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge from Yerba Buena Island in 1936.Photograph by the California State Department of Public Works

Verbal Expressions are a much more human-parseable regex

I love this idea. Has a real Bret Victor feel to it. [via tiffehr]

It’s called Wraith and it uses a headless web client like PhantomJS and ImageMagick to diff how your site gets displayed.

Mourning has become an all too isolated experience—but Facebook and Twitter have become a place (strange as it may seem) where the bereaved can find community, a minyan of strangers to share their prayers. Yes, it might seem strange to stumble upon announcements of death or the intimate details of dying amidst updates about summer trips to Costa Rica, Anthony Weiner’s escapades, and the arrival of a new puppy. But this strangeness is the strangeness of the real.

—From tweeting death by Meghan O’Rourke

MIT has posted a very detailed internal report about its role in the arrest and prosecution of Aaron Swartz

That one new feature you added? That sparkly, Techcrunchable, awesome feature? What did it cost your user? If the result of your work consumes someone’s cognitive resources, they can’t use those resources for other things that truly, deeply matter. This is NOT about consuming their time and attention while they’re using your app. This is about draining their ability for logical thinking, problem-solving, and willpower after the clicking/swiping/gesturing is done.

Of course it’s not implicitly bad if our work burns a user’s cog resources.Your app might be the one place your user wants to spend those resources. But knowing that interacting with our product comes at a precious cost, maybe we’ll make different choices.

—Kathy Sierra is writing again at Serious Pony, which is just wonderful. This post on the designer’s responsibility helping our users manage their cognitive load is absolutely required reading.

I gave a short-ish talk at San Francisco Creative Mornings about food, which I was equally excited and terrified to do. It actually turned out mostly ok! If you put this in a tab in the background, you don’t have to watch me reading off my screen too much or worry about my pocket square desperately trying to escape.