Jacques of all Trades

Slate tells us the secrets behind creative pairs:

What makes creative relationships work? How do two people—who may be perfectly capable and talented on their own—explode into innovation, discovery, and brilliance when working together? These may seem to be obvious questions. Collaboration yields so much of what is novel, useful, and beautiful that it’s natural to try to understand it. Yet looking at achievement through relationships is a new, and even radical, idea. For hundreds of years, science and culture have focused on the self. We talk of self-expression, self-realization. Popular culture celebrates the hero. Schools test intelligence and learning through solo exams. Biographies shape our view of history.

The author attributes our skewed view of individualism as the driving force to a range of sources, including Rene Descartes and Ayn Rand.  

However, if twosomes are such a key, who forgot to tell Schoolhouse Rock, De La Soul, and Jack Johnson?

This is an interesting, and pretty thoughtful take on the potential impact of the iPad… refreshing to hear speculation from a cultural standpoint, rather than from the fanboy/techie/developer viewpoint.  I’m really tired of hearing about the lack of Flash as a bug, when it is clear that most media is moving away from flash anyway.

chrbutler:

Totally agreed on this peripheral point, too:

Even better would be to ditch the shelf metaphor altogether in favour of something more appropriate for digital content; something more innate to the medium.

One button to merge them all. One button to find them…

Thanks, Google!

infoneernet:

Managing a big address book can be a challenge, so it’s no surprise that the top request for Google contacts is a fast, easy way to merge duplicate contacts. You’ve been able to merge contacts one-by-one for a while, but now we’ve added a single button that merges all your duplicate contacts at once. To clean up your contact list in one fell swoop, just click the “Find duplicates” button in the contact manager, review the merge suggestions (and uncheck any suggestions you don’t want merged), and hit the “Merge” button.

» via The Official Gmail Blog