Cognitive heat sink  

1. Clay Shirky has a wonderfully jarring short essay on the social surplus that gets consumed by television. I'm not quite as sold on reading this as part of a cycle of societal transformation though. Can people really be sucked away from television by more interactive media? Plenty of people are still drinking gin. Anyway, I hadn't heard of Shirky before but I'm ordering his book. [via Marginal Revolution]

2. Speaking of cognitive surplus, this mended spiderweb project (along with some of the other "uninvited collaborations" by the same artist, Nina Katchadourian) is pure genius. [via kottke]