A massive landslide poured into, through, and over the town of Shuanghe, in China's Sichuan province after days of torrential rains. Twenty-one people were reported missing

This is an incredible photograph of a landslide destroying the town of Shuanghe. It was one of Life Magazine’s The Week’s Best Photos: 7.30.10.

But what about when you don’t get a chance to check in with Twitter? Isn’t it possible you might miss something?

That’s where the nifty tool paper.li comes in. It creates a daily newspaper-like web page from the links tweeted by the people you follow. (Here’s mine.) You can read it with your morning coffee, just like a real newspaper (but without all the obnoxious ink stains or ungainly page folding).

I like the way paper.li sorts the last day’s tweets into categories like Arts & Entertainment, Health and Technology. The top stories are featured on the front page, but you can click through to view all the stories in any particular category. The front page embeds all tweeted photos and videos, making them much easier to browse. One or two of the day’s popular hashtags are also featured.

You can set up a newspaper for a person’s Twitter feed or a specific hashtag or list that you want to follow. This tool makes it a lot easier to keep up with what’s going down on Twitter — but again, only when you want to.

[via W5 Blog]

There’s a certain frivolousness to all these eloquent arguments over free will. The fact is, we are deeply wired to believe in our freedom. We feel like willful creatures, blessed with elbow room and endowed with the capacity to pick our own breakfast cereal.

And I will also quote William James on the subject:

I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier’s second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will — ‘the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts’ — need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present — until next year — that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

via My First Act of Free Will | Wired Science | Wired.com.

Previously: Thoughts on free will and fatalism.

Google’s master plan – DO NOT ERASE! Top-secret photos of the master whiteboard at Google have been posted. Pay careful attention to the small print. (Click through to view the rest of the photos — it’s a big whiteboard.) [via io9]

Also, I should have followed my own rules and not read an article titled “The End of …”, or at least I shouldn’t have taken it seriously. (In this case, it was forgetting.) But Tom Scocca got a few good zings in while refuting some of the article’s claims.

And here’s something I’ve wondered whenever I see the statement that all HR departments google the names of every single job applicant: Um, names aren’t all that unique. I mean, my name is pretty uncommon, yet there is another person with the exact same name who lives in my state and, I happen to know for a fact, posts embarrassing photos of herself on Facebook. (No, this is not me!) So how do you determine that the person you googled is the right Tom Jones or Susan Smith or what-have-you?

Doom-saying articles like “The End of Forgetting,” never really ask that question.

I don’t have much to say about content mills, except that once I identify one, I avoid it with extreme prejudice. I also noticed that when you google the term content mill, the first result, “What Is a Content Mill,” comes from a well-known content mill. Irony in action.

Anyway, it appears a backlash is a-brewin’. People want this crap out of their search results. Yeah, me too. Anyhoo, here are some good links on the subject for further reading:

The Search Engine Backlash Against ‘Content Mills’ (MIT Technology Review)
Google, Content Farms & Why This May Be Blekko’s Moment (Search Engine Land)
MediaShift’s Guide to Content Farms (PBS)
Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried and How Google Can Combat Content Farms (ReadWriteWeb)
Content farms v. curating farmers (BuzzMachine)
Content dust bowls (Magellan Media)
The Future of Media Isn’t Free Content, It’s Cheap Content (Metafilter)

By itself, however, greed wouldn’t have triumphed. It needed the aid of cowardice — above all, the cowardice of politicians who know how big a threat global warming poses, who supported action in the past, but who deserted their posts at the crucial moment.

We’re doomed.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Who Cooked the Planet? – NYTimes.com.

I very much appreciate a movie that doesn’t feel like it has to spell everything out for me but lets me come to my own conclusions about what the story meant. Such films are rare indeed, but Inception definitely fits in that category. (By the way, I think having a passing familiarity with Greek mythology helps in understanding Inception.)

While I don’t agree with everything in this article, I thought it was an interesting interpretation (and not a completely obvious one): The Neuroscience of Inception (Wired Science).