Op-Ed Contributor - Google's Earth - NYTimes.com

William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition, draws an eerie parallel:

Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.

Cross-reference the above with a skit from The Onion: Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village.

What Is It About 20-Somethings? - NYTimes.com

Arrested development on a massive scale, otherwise known as “emerging adulthood”:

We’re in the thick of what one sociologist calls “the changing timetable for adulthood.” Sociologists traditionally define the “transition to adulthood” as marked by five milestones: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child. In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had, by the time they reached 30, passed all five milestones. Among 30-year-olds in 2000, according to data from the United States Census Bureau, fewer than half of the women and one-third of the men had done so. A Canadian study reported that a typical 30-year-old in 2001 had completed the same number of milestones as a 25-year-old in the early ’70s.

Admission: I’m not in my twenties anymore. But I’m close enough to that “golden era” (snicker). I, too, am guilty of dragging my feet on the path to being a grown up. 

Smoking, Drinking, Writing, Womanizing, Smoking, Drinking... - Mad Men - Television - NYTimes.com

Weiner’s achievements with “Mad Men,” which is produced by Lionsgate, are plentiful, starting with the storytelling. Setting it in the early 1960s, on the cusp between the repression and conformity of the cold war and McCarthy-era 1950s and the yet-to-unfold social and cultural upheavals of the 60s, allows Weiner an arc of character growth that is staggering in its possibilities. It also gives him the opportunity to mine the Rat Pack romance of that period, when the wreaths of cigarette smoke, the fog of too many martinis — whether exhilarating or nauseating — and the silhouettes specific to bullet bras only heightened the headiness of the dream that all men might one day become James Bond or, at the very least, key holders to the local Playboy Club.

How to Permanently Delete a Facebook Account - wikiHow

With the growing stink about their privacy policy, the time has come to quit Facebook for good. This step by step guide will show you how.

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