• How to pick a new cell phone. Looking for a new verizon phone and this is the first useful website I’ve found.
• The inventor of my favorite phone. I love the old, solid, you can kill a person with it AT&T corded phones (Known as the Model 500). This is the guy who designed them.
• My favorite NYC bookstore is out of business. Was back in NYC recently and was sad to hear Gotham book mart is gone. At least landmarks 2nd avenue deli and shopsins made it back from the dead (Check out the design of shopsins amazing menu - pdf).
• History of the Brannock foot measuring device (you know the one).
• Man flies with jet powered wing. Straight from the sci-fi movies, this 48 year old man built a wing, that looks almost like a kind of jetpack and flies him around at almost 200mph.

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• PBS miniseries: Carrier. Fascinating 10 hour show that explores what life is like on the U.S.S. Nimitz. A carrier off the Persian gulf in 2005. Hits on management, morale, morals, work, design, you name it.
• Interview with Vint Cerf, a father of the Internet. Note his dispelling of an innovation myth.
• You’re an author, me too! On the increase in authors and decrease in readers.
• List of 50 best cult books. Surprised Ender’s game didn’t make the list. That was the underground book only the hip geek kids (is that an oxymoron?) were reading in college in the early 90s.
• The best advice I ever got. List of short interviews with Tina Fey, Larry Page, Tony Robbins, and more.

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Here’s this week’s linkfest:

• What every freelancer should know. Advice from a salon.com writer on traps and tricks.
• Where are all the great ideas? Harvard Business Review editor asks where should we be looking for the next wave of big ideas?
• Mistakes pro bloggers make. Solid advice on contracts for blogging and what rights to fight for. (Hat tip, Working Girl)
• Report of amazon.com changing prices per user. According to this report, they dynamically change prices based on their profile of you in some cases.

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• Strange Maps. Some blogs have perfect titles.
• It’s a train, no it’s an office, it’s recycling! Folks in London use old subway cars as their office.
• Indexed, the book. If you remember the clever website of cool diagrams on index cards, then here’s the book.
• The last lecture: a love story for your life. More on Randy Pausch, his life and his famous lecture.

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• Interesting thread about Google’s origins. It’s not the best source, notes from a 2003 talk, but it mentions a few facts I hadn’t heard before of annotations being the goal of Pagerank, not search. (From Googlesystem)
• Transclusion. This was one of the coolest ideas from Nelson’s books Literary Machines. Saw this mentioned by chance in a few places this week. Makes me think of Clarisworks elegant object sharing and Microsoft’s clunky OLE.
• Dying professor gives last lecture. Anyone in CMU circles knows about this one, but for those who don’t I highly recommend it. Unexpectedly good and inspiring.
• Information week’s new blog, The New age of Innovation. This smells of MBA business school hype-laden rhetoric, but I haven’t poked around enough yet to pull out the hatchet. If you check it out, let me know what you think.

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• Interview with George Carlin. One can learn a great deal from this man about public speaking. He has a new HBO special.
• Sidewalk Innovation. It’s funny: we can make supersonic jets and go to the moon, but making sidewalks that don’t crack from the growth of trees is just too much for us. Well not anymore. the answer? Rubber (video).
• Record number ratio of Americans in prison. Not sure how anyone can seriously argue there aren’t serious problems in America. Either we have too punitive a culture (e.g. drug possession ‘crimes’), our culture produces more criminals than other cultures, or we are miserable failures at designing prisons to minimize repeat offenses. (Check out the documentary Prisontown for one powerful slice of the American prison system).
• Are CD’s the next 8-track tapes? Article claims almost half of all teenagers in the U.S. bought zero CDs in 2007. The death of the mix-tape was sad enough, but I doubt mix-flash drives and playlists will ever be Valentines day staples like mix-tapes used to be.

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• Better than free. An interesting take on what happens to creative work when anything can be copied for free.
• The undersea Internet. Good summary and analysis of the recent Internet cable crisis, which left 75 million people without Internet access.
• A history of the phrase “look and feel”. Design observer writes about how this phrase started and what it says about design.
• A collection of bookmarks found in used books. Surprising how many different designs for a 5′x2′ strip of paper there are.
• Is Obama a Mac and Clinton a PC. An interesting attempt to compare the design of their respective websites to their merits as candidates.

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• The tipping point reconsidered. A social network researcher at Yahoo disputes some of the claims of Gladwell’s book.
• The lifecycle of a blog post. What happens after you publish a post? This interactive diagram explains all.
• Edward De Bono, is a creative thinking master. In his 70s, he is a legend among creative thinking gurus, but his website design is circa 1995.
• Steve Frank has a review of trees. Satire on the sad state of tech writing today. Loved this.
• What advice would you give your younger self? Interesting question. The reverse is also good: what advice would the version of you ten years younger give to the older version of you today?

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Linkfest for Thursday:

• This week in science podcast. If you want your science news infused with a sense of humor, this is for you.
• Surprise - drug research biased. Apparently the efficacy of anti-depressant drugs has been overstated by the companies that make them.
• Cool Tools. Kevin Kelly, a founder of Wired magazine, runs this website of smart tools and gadgets, mostly non-hi-tech, for people who like to work smart. There’s an e-mail newsletter too (Hat tip to Lynn).
• Moleskinerie. One of my favorite cool tools are my moleskine notebooks, and this blog is about the many different ways people use ‘em.

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Here’s the good stuff I’ve found this week:

• Conversations on cell phones cause traffic jams. Not a surprise, but this study says hands-free doesn’t matter.
• Funny list of bad types of public speakers. I make a living as a public speaker, so this was a good read.
• Story of a self-published book in progress. Interesting for you writers out there as it’s a candid tale of authorial frustration.
• Bill Gates makes fun of himself as his steps down from MSFT. Still not sure I like the guy, but in some ways he’s way humbler than Steve Jobs.
• Super interesting video project of people judging others based on appearance. If you liked the book Blink you’ll both dig this and be terrified (how can this instinctive behavior be good)?.
• The folly of airport security. A good summation of the charade that goes on at American airports.

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• Innovative minds don’t think alike. I have a love / hate relationship with this article. Can you count the number of innovation myths here?
• Google is God. Some interesting stats and throwing down of the M word in comments. Also see this for a retort.
• What have you changed your mind about. Why? The latest question from the folks at edge.
• David Simon, Producer of The Wire (my favorite TV show), on the importance of dissent.

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• Updated list of online games with good UX design. The folks at goodexperience update this list of games with the primary critieria being fun, easy to learn gameplay.
• How it all ends. A very smart, funny, well produced but low-tech, youtube video about understanding global warming. Interesting primarily for it’s well done wacky / teacher / presenter learning style. This took significantly more time to make than to watch. It’s just flat out good, intelligent communication of an opinion.
• Apophenia. Whenever you meet someone with misplaced faith in some crazy stock market investment strategy, instead of just calling bullshit, you can now tell them they suffer from apophenia.
• Lakota indians threaten to secede from the U.S.. Hard to tell how far this will go as the logistics here are complex no matter what the laws are, but it’s an interesting story so far.

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