Look at the journey of a new idea, from its origin in greasy workshops and grinding machinery to showroom floors, or from the inscrutable mind of a genius to a gleaming plaything in your hand. It seems to me that the biggest sign that a technology is ready to take over the world is when it starts to think about the people who will use it.

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A nice piece on The Corrections author Jonathan Franzen’s appearance on the cover of Time magazine, particularly for the quote about his feelings, pre-Corrections, about the orthodox idea of the American novel, born by the likes of John Updike and Saul Bellow.

“Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society,” he wrote, “seems to me a peculiarly American delusion.”

I think the idea that a single book can stand for swathes of its society is why I’ve been drawn to American writing. But I think Franzen was right. America is much too fractured for these examinations of its tortured middle classes to represent anything wider than just that.

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• Thirty Five Images of Space Helmet Reflections - A compendium of faces peering from within bulbous glass at the great beyond (via Berg).
• The New Science of Morality - “Nearly all of us doing this work are secular Liberals. And that means that we're at very high risk of misunderstanding those moralities that are not our own.” Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s talk on how western liberal culture, the one that has essentially built the foundations for the study of human psychology, has a restricted moral spectrum compared to other cultures around the world, and why confirmation bias means it’s much to easy for these psychologists to profoundly misunderstand other cultures.
• Granta: Cinema's Invisible Art - An essay on the scriptwriter's talent of spare but vivid description, from the Coen brothers to Shane Black's awesome script for Lethal Weapon. No, really.

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• Charles Holland on Inception - A sober but enthusiastic view of Inception, noting its ludicrousness while loving its film-within-a-film complexities. Like a very, very good episode of Doctor Who on an unlimited budget, he says, rather explaining my misgivings: I don't much like Doctor Who's delight in story mechanics over, well, just telling a good story, which is why Inception didn't quite enthral me.
• Wired: Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown - Nice piece on the commercial realities of AT&T's experiences with its exclusive iPhone deal. Turns out that scaling up its data network to meet iPhone's (plus Blackberry and other smart phones', surely) demands has already cost the company $37 billion, with another $14 billion this year.
• FT's CEO on why paywalls are commercially and morally necessary - "The paper's digital subscribers reached 149,047 at the end of June, up 27% year on year and 17,000 up from January." Kinda think you need the specialisation, market type and scale of the FT to have this sort of success.

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Multi-storey car parks aren’t commonly beautiful places. They usually sit as ostracised blocks in the city, rough and slitted concrete walls facing the outside like the those of a gaol; an ugly and barely tolerated necessity of urban life.

How to redefine the multi-storey car park? If you’re stern Swiss architect Herzog & de Meuron, you try to invite the city into its structure, rather than close it off. 1111 Lincoln Road is a newly opened car park in Miami, situated on the border of its social downtown heart and its suburban sprawl.

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• An affectionate octopus - This sight will warm the cockles of any heart - even the three hearts of a cephalopod - though the huge welts from its gentle octopus sucker-love look a bit of a mood-dampener on the part of the human.
• Squid at play - So squid indulge in mating dances which appear to be similar to lekking, a behaviour some birds employ in which males gather together and display in order for females to pick out the best. The term 'lek' comes from the Swedish terms for rule-less play ('att leka' means 'to play'). This can only mean that squid either have a sense of style or fun. Biologist PZ Myers says that males gather to swim in large circles above the mating ground at dawn. The females arrive and they all dance together before pairing off and mating over and over again until after sunset.
• Squidblog - Profoundly sadly, this blog has been mothballed since 2006, but it's a delightful repository of old cephalopod news, including a 15-17m bull sperm whale with scars indicating tussles with 200-300kg squid all over its snout, research that squid inherit personalities from their parents, documentation of squid orgies and a cat wearing a squid hat.
• Humboldt squid: Soft, gentle kittens of the briny deep? - Clive Thompson on how a biologist is refuting general horror at the six-foot Diablo Rojo, with its 'fleshreaping beak', saying that they kinda like attacking his equipment, but they're frightened by his light.

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Oh my, do I want this. Spotted: the Warthog, the spherical robot from The Incredibles, that bounty hunter out of Star Wars, and isn’t that a grunt out of Robotron?

149 Sci-Fi Icons on One Poster | Design You Trust (via n0wak)

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Beautiful in their organic, subjective and muddled attempts to represent the world and his own life with objective information, Simon Evans’ works explore, as Frieze excellently puts it, “that wonderful gap between the words and life itself”.

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• Harris returns to the Capitol Wasteland - Armed with a gaggle of mods and tweaks to Fallout 3, chum Duncan Harris has gone to town taking pictures. This one, his character posing before the Washington Monument, is probably my favourite, but every one's a winner.

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We saw the original Last House On The Left last night, a Lovefilm delivery which we’ve been putting off for a while, what with all the warnings of it being horrible.

And it was. For those unaware, it’s a horror film, the directorial debut of Nightmare On Elm Street/Scream creator Wes Craven, about the abduction, rape and murder of two girls by a cadre of sadistic criminals and the subsequent revenge taken out on them by the parents of one of the girls. It was famously banned from general cinema release in the UK and Australia in 1974, and when it was mooted for DVD release in 2002, UK censors wanted to make 16 seconds of cuts. The distributor appealed the decision, calling film critic Mark Kermode forth to present an argument for the film being left unsullied, but the case failed - in fact, the appeal committee doubled the cuts to 31 seconds. Oops.

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