Alexis C. Madrigal

Collective problem solving is a tough business. Just ask Congress. Or your partner. Now, extend your team to thousands of anonymous individuals and define your task as distilling knowledge about the world. That's Wikipedia.

For all its warts, Wikipedia is a testament to the power of decentralized collaboration. Almost uniquely among online spaces, the volunteer-edited encyclopedia has been able to retain a culture that is generally productive and civil.

The Berkman Center is a leading institution for important research into the uses and impacts of digital technologies. We'll be previewing their regular brownbag lunches here on The Atlantic Technology Channel.

Joseph Reagle wrote his PhD dissertation on the history and culture of Wikipedia. What emerged from his research were a few simple rules that he calls Good Faith Collaboration, which is also the title of his new book.

The Wikipedia community has a certain attitude toward knowledge, Reagle found. They actively work to maintain neutrality, even if that's sometimes nearly impossible. "Wikipedia is not the place to argue about what's right and what's wrong, what's true and what's false," Reagle said. "Wikipedia is just trying to say what's out there."

And the community also has a specific approach to people, which Reagle contrasts with Godwin's Law, which (humorously? tragically?) states, "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." Wikipedians, instead, promote basic civility and consensus decisionmaking. The number one rule? Assume good faith. The rest of the site's rules are largely extensions of kindergarten etiquette, but the idea that to find consensus, you must see your opponents as people like yourself is important.

"Something has to resist the tendency of our online conversations to the lowest common denominator, and the tendency to see each other as Hitler," he said. "I taught conflict management and a lot of this stuff is relevant and germane to conflict management."

Reagle, who will present on his work at the Berkman Center today, argues that the way Wikipedia users think about their project has its roots in the utopian visions of H.G. Wells and Paul Otlet, who thought that if only knowledge was accessible and organized, the world would be transformed.

"They were quite inspired by index cards, microfilm and loose-leaf binders. They thought that if you could pull information out of the boundaries of the book and -- in our terms -- mash it up, and make it available to the world, it would bring about global accord," Reagle said. "If we really knew and understood each other, there'd be no more war."

Obviously, Wikipedia has a slightly smaller mission than world peace, but perhaps some of the lessons about good faith the site teaches us can be applied to other realms. That's my hope, at least.

But it's going to be tough.

"If we look at politics, everyone can say, 'I'm not going to take any low shots,' but there is a huge reward for doing so," Reagle said. "I think there is less of a reward in Wikipedia."

The features of the software helps, too. It's easier to be relaxed about newcomers' editing or changes being made when you can hit the revert button and restore what came before.

But Reagle thinks the dominant factor in shaping what Wikipedia has become was the conscious choice of the founders to actively create a place where people could work together. "I think the founders were quite cognizant of the way things worked on USENET and Jimmy Wales said, 'We need something different,' and they set out to develop those norms."

Like Wikipedia itself, which seems to tap our natural urge to correct things that we think are wrong, maybe our politics will self-correct. Maybe this period of extra nasty divisiveness in politics will push us out of the USENET phase and into a productive period of Wikipedian civility.

Steve Jobs made the rather unusual move to join Apple's earnings call to talk smack about his company's smartphone and tablet competitors. He said Android was "going to be a mess for users and developers" and said he anticipated "the current crop of seven-inch [i.e. not the iPad] tablets will be DOA, dead on arrival."

Apple crushed analysts' earnings estimates but disappointing growth in iPad sales drove shares down in after hours trading. In response to an analyst's question about "the trajectory of the iPad," Jobs gazed into his crystal ball and came up with the following prognostication about the iPad's future.

Well, the iPad is clearly going to affect notebook computers. And I think the iPad proves it's not a question of if, it's a question of when. There's a lot of development and progress that will occur over the next few years, but we're already seeing tremendous interest in iPad from education and, much to my surprise, from business.

We haven't pushed it real hard in business and it's being grabbed out of our hands. I talk to people every day in all kinds of businesses that are using iPads... The more time that passes, the more I am convinced that we've got a tiger by the tail here and this is a new model of computing -- you know we've already got tens of millions of people trained on with the iPhone -- and that lends itself to lots of different aspects of life, personal, educational, and business. I see it as very general purpose and very big... One could argue about the timing endlessly, but I don't think you can argue it's going to happen.

Close of Business is a new video series that we're trying out. The idea is simple: at 5 p.m. (or thereabouts), we post a quick video summarizing the top three news stories of the day -- and give you one new Twitter or Tumblr to follow. Some of them we'll have written about; others will just be what people were talking about on the Internet.

Your Twitter account of the day: @N_E_I, the Nuclear Energy Institute, which I think provides timely and surprisingly balanced perspective on energy news.

Important links mentioned in this video:

Facebook in Privacy Breach [Wall Street Journal]

Microsoft's Billion-Dollar Bail Out Plan [All Things Digital]

October 18, 1985: Nintendo Entertainment System Launches [Wired]

See more video from The Atlantic Technology Channel.

Surely you've heard of Coal Oil Johnny, right?

Before J.R. Ewing, or the Beverly Hillbillies, or even John D. Rockefeller, there was Coal Oil Johnny. He was the first great cautionary tale of the oil age -- and his name would resound in popular culture for more than half a century after he made and lost his fortune in the 1860s.

A penniless orphan growing up, it was said Coal Oil Johnny once spent $100,000 in a day. It was said that he bought a hotel for a night. It was said he rode around in a bright red carriage adorned with a drawing of an oil derrick instead of a coat of arms. He lit cigars with hundred-dollar bills. Diamonds dripped from his fingers. "He one day found his coat so stuffed with greenbacks that it was uncomfortable," the New York Times recounted when he died in 1921. "He ran into a bank threw it at the teller and never came back again."

For generations after the peak of his career, he was still so famous that any major oil strike, particularly like the epoch-marking one at Spindletop in Texas in 1901, brought his tales back to people's lips.

His name was synonymous with lucking into a tremendous fortune -- and then pissing it all away. Coal Oil Johnny was to profligacy what Paul Bunyan was to strength. He even had a steed to match Bunyan's blue ox. She was a small horse named Bess, and she had fine tastes, too. Legend has it that one night in Braddock, Pennsylvania, Johnny rode her right into a bar on his way to a good time.

"He didn't know a soul but that didn't matter," the Perrysburg Journal of Ohio wrote more than 20 years later. "'I'm Johnny Steele. Close the doors and every one make a night of it with me. Give Bess a bottle of champagne to start with.' Bess was the beautiful little mare he rode and immediately interest was centered on the horse whom her owner said drank champagne. Bess, moreover, was the only sober one of the outfit some hours later."

John W. Steele, his real name, disputed the truth of some of these stories, but as in The Social Network, it's not really the facts that matter here. Coal Oil Johnny was a legend and like all legends, he became a stand-in for a constellation of people, things, ideas, feelings and morals -- in this case, about oil wealth and how it works.

Oil made common people rich beyond their wildest dreams. They did some crazy things with that wealth as the whole region got whipped into a frenzy. People spilled out of the oil regions crazed.

"Other misguided beings from the oil regions of Pennsylvania were scattered about the country doing foolish things, and many of their performances were afterwards credited to me," Steele himself wrote in his autobiography. "But as I had played the fool in so many directions, it was not strange that this was so, as possibly I was the 'king-bee' of the oil region spendthrifts."

And why wouldn't they buy crazy things? There was something about oil money that was slippery and dangerous and exciting. And besides, it was free! You could pump money out of the petroleum pools underneath land had been nearly worthless before.

"It was wealth from nowhere," said Brian Black, a historian at Pennsylvania State, who wrote the book Petrolia, about those early oil years. "Somebody like that was coming in without any opportunity or wealth and suddenly has a transforming moment. That's the magic and it transfers right through to the Beverly Hillbillies and the rest of the mythology."

And then the oil ran out, just a couple of decades after the first black gold came bubbling out of the underworld. The first oil region, like Coal Oil Johnny, ended up just as poor as it had been before the strike, even if the oil fat cats made a pretty penny.

"Coal Oil Johnny personifies what the whole country learned from the Pennsylvania oil boom," Black said.

And yet now we've forgotten this important peak oil parable. American crude production has dwindled to about 55% of its early '70s peak -- and the International Energy Agency thinks more than half of global production will come offshore by 2015. The time when striking oil required little more than some gumption is long over. The first oil well in America came from the hard work of a couple of blacksmiths with the backing of some investors. Now, we build offshore platforms, drag them miles out into the ocean, and pin them to the seafloor, so we can grind through thousands of feet of sediment to the oil pools beneath them. It's not the same playing field or the same sport.

I lucked into rediscovering Coal Oil Johnny. I have a thing for non-musical records, particularly energy-related stuff. So, a couple of weeks ago, when I headed out to an estate sale in Bethesda, Maryland, I couldn't help but purchase the $1 record called "Coal Oil Johnny."

Produced by Little People Records of British Columbia, I haven't been able to find anything about the production of this record, not even a date. Nonetheless, I was sure it would be some thinly veiled morality play, and indeed it is. You can listen to the whole 25-minute play right here thanks to my USB turntable.

The big SEC/Commodity Futures Trading Commission report that came out two weeks ago pinned the blame for starting the May 6 Flash Crash on a single trade by a Kansas firm. The story went like this: the firm used an algorithm that traded a type of S&P future called an E-mini based on the volume of the market, without taking into account price or timing. As the trade began, high-frequency traders jumped into the market and -- for a set of complex reasons -- the volume exploded, leading the algorithm to accelerate its own trading. The speed spooked the market and because other futures are pegged to E-minis, everything went haywire.

This was a neat narrative, but now it is encountering opposition. The firm that people pegged as making the trade, Waddell & Reed, released its own trading data to the once-obscure research firm Nanex, which has made a name for itself analyzing the Flash Crash. They released a report, which sometime Atlantic Technology Channel author, Joe Flood, glossed for his day job at the institutional investing magazine, ai5000. The short story? The Waddell and SEC/CFTC stories just don't match up.

Since the Crash, Waddell's stock price has dropped more than 20%, and the company has been reduced to sending out BP-esque missives about how it didn't intentionally to blow up the world. But in hopes of clearing its name, Waddell provided Nanex with its own trading data from the Flash Crash (with Barclay's certifying the authenticity of the data).

With the new data in hand, Nanex has concluded that the regulators' report just doesn't fit the timeline: most of Waddell's selling took place after the Crash, during a rebound. "The algorithm was very well behaved," reads a Nanex report released this afternoon. "It was careful not to impact the market...And when prices moved down sharply, it would stop completely."

The Crash, says Nanex, was actually caused by the aggressive reselling of those contracts by other firms (Nanex doesn't say what kind of firms, but the SEC-CFTC report identifies them as high-frequency traders). "Rather than making sure the sale would not impact the market, they did quite the opposite: they slammed the market with 2,000 or more contracts as fast as they could...As time passed, the aggressiveness only increased, with these violent selling events occurring more often, until finally the e-Mini circuit breaker kicked in and paused trading for 5 seconds, ending the market slide."

CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton says that the reselling of the E-Mini's played a role in the crash, but he's confident in the report's finding that the Waddell trade started the downward spiral. "We looked at hundreds of thousands of trades, and this is the one that stands out. It was just one domino, but it was the domino that started the decline. It didn't fall any harder than any others, but it was first one to fall....Any stories that are trying to pin everything one one culprit like in a whodunnit mystery [aren't fair] but this trade was the start of things."

The argument here is not just a technical one. There are important policy and rhetorical consequences to either story. If the Flash Crash was caused by one dumb trade, regulation might be beside the point; it's hard to regulate against incompetence. But if Nanex is right and high-frequency traders turned a mundane trade into, well, the Flash Crash, then perhaps there is a better argument for limiting some algorithmic trading behaviors.

In any case, maybe we should still keep the Flash Crash case file open... at least until we have another one with which to compare it.

Close of Business is a new video series that we're trying out. The idea is simple: at 5 p.m. (or thereabouts), we post a quick video summarizing the top three news stories of the day -- and give you one new Twitter or Tumblr to follow. Some of them we'll have written about; others will just be what people were talking about on the Internet.

Your Twitter account of the day: @amhistorymuseum, the American History Museum.

See more video from The Atlantic Technology Channel.

The National Museum of American History reminds us that it was on this day in 1928 that you could first purchase a commercial ticket to fly across the Atlantic Ocean.

The Graf Zeppelin, seen here over Chicago, would have been your airship. You would have been one of twenty lucky passengers on the hydrogen-filled dirigible. 43 crew members were needed to pilot the vessel through the sky.

"It flew across Europe and the world through the 1930s. At the same time, airline companies began to proliferate, flying early piston-engine airplanes. The sizes of these planes were small," the Museum instructs. "Like the Graf, they accommodated just a few passengers and commanded high ticket prices. Until the widespread adoption of the DC-3 aircraft, commercial air transport of passengers was for the wealthy and the daring."

The Graf drew crowds wherever it went as people stared up at the huge machine flying over the landscape. Even 30 years after its first flight, The Baltimore Sun called her, "undoubtedly the most famous aircraft that ever sailed through the skies."

As a lover of history, one thing I worry about on a daily basis is that we aren't preserving archival information about software well enough. I don't just mean the bits themselves, but all the atoms that surrounded them. The manuals and self-help books, the retail displays and yes, even the press packets.

For example, who is archiving the universe of Where In The World is Carmen Sandiego? (Perhaps only Mizuko Ito?) Yet for a certain generation of kids, it was one of our earliest bases of geographical knowledge. Where else did a ton of 9-year-old Americans willingly learn fun facts about Colombo, Sri Lanka? That Broderbund logo could still send me into a cold sleuthing sweat.

In any case, Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, did his own small part to preserve our software legacies. He posted the original press packet handed out at the launch of Windows 1.

Beyond its kitsch and "That's so OLD-LOOKING" value, there is actually historically important information in the packet. For example, we see that when Microsoft put out a feature comparison chart -- nominally looking at its competitors -- we don't see Macintosh. Instead, we see GEM, Digital Research's graphical user interface, and IBM Topview. That's meaningful as a statement of how Microsoft wanted the press to see its business and precisely why we need more software ephemera and institutional documents.



Oh, and you gotta love the screenshots. Just look at that GUI! It just screams EASE OF USE.

Frederick Evans' 1896 photograph Kelmscott Manor: Attics looks for all the world like the work of human hands. Dreamy and soft, we look down from one end of an attic along the trusses and beams of a roof toward an open area where light floats in from our left. Alternating strips of grays remind us that photographs were just complex configurations of light, dark, light. And yet, right around this time, they became something more. They became art.

A group of friends and collaborators known as the pictorialists swept through the photography world. Led by Alfred Stieglitz, they called the chemicals they affixed to paper art, and what we see when we look at Evans' photo -- its use of the camera to obscure reality with light rather than highlight it -- is an argument for the elevation of art by machine. They influenced all photography that came after them from Edward Weston to Ansel Adams to your Hipstamatic snapshots.

As with all important artistic movements, we have to ask: why did this happen? What forces were at work that led this group to do something new in the world?

"Many arguments abound, but I maintain it was a technological invention," said Alison Nordström, curator of photography at the George Eastman House, the country's largest film museum. "In 1888, George Eastman invented the Kodak camera. It was relatively cheap. Compared to the old ways of taking photographs, it was really easy. Suddenly, everyone was a photographer. Anyone with a small amount of money and a little bit of skill could take pictures. Suddenly, your mother was a photographer."

For those interested in using photography to make art for art's sake, this was quite a challenge to their status, Nordström explained Thursday at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. in a lecture timed to coincide with the opening week of a new exhibition, TruthBeauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845-1945. They had to justify their artistic practice.

"The effort was to claim that this machine, this camera, could make art. And one of the easiest ways to make things that people understood as art was to make things that looked like art," she said. "So unlike snapshots, pictorialists' photographs looked like paintings and charcoal drawings and etchings."

Many works like Edward Steichen's "Flatiron--Evening Camera Work 14" (above) play with fog and smoke. They hide things in the greyscale and even tend toward a hazy abstraction. Everything becomes a little harder to see and a bit more romantic. I'd long, lazily assumed that turn-of-the-century photos looked like this because of technical reasons, that this was just how cameras made photos at the time. That's not true. These photographers were skilled enough and their techniques good enough that they could have made razor sharp portraits, but they didn't. Instead, we have two decades where the best photographs work like memories not recordings.

To my modern eye, they share that impressionism the intentionally digitally degraded cell phone snapshot, all soft-focus and odd-lighting.

Hipstamatic, a popular app for the iPhone, lets users choose old "films" and lenses to create different effects. In a world where anyone with a few hundred dollars can buy a digital camera that will shoot flawless, sharp images of anything automatically, Hipstamatic makes taking photos harder and more subject to random variation. The images it produces are dreamy and imperfect. It's difficult to frame photos well, so canted angles and half-scenes appear regularly in the flickr photosharing groups dedicated to the app's output. Just look at Neema Naficy's photograph of the selfsame Flatiron building in New York.

When you use Hipstamatic, it practically forces you to shoot arty photographs. We can all be cell phone pictorialists now.

But there's a key difference between what the original pictorialists did and what we do with our smartphones: Hipstamatic photos are quick. They may have the look of a handprinted, turn-of-the-century gem, but they require none of the dedication that the pictorialists brought to their work. It wasn't just what the photos looked like that made them art, but how the artists making them thought about what they were doing.

The cornucopia of photographic and printing techniques created by chemists in the 19th century -- platinum, gum bichromates, liquid silver emulsion, palladium, photogravure --   allowed the pictorialists to make all kinds of aesthetic decisions. Sometimes, they even took brushes to certain emulsions to give them just the right look. And though Hipstamatic may offer the illusion of lens and film choice, the reality is that we control very little about the resulting images. The computer known as your phone does all the post-processing that would have once been done by hand.

Hipstamatic users like myself are more like the push-button camera users of their day, even if the qualities of our images hearken back to Steichen and Stieglitz. If suddenly everyone can be not just a photographer, but a pictorialist, what's a real artist to do?

Nordström said one key response she's seen is that photographers that want to be seen as artists produce huge works, counting on their scale to separate them from the tiny, low-resolution productions of the low-rent digital camera realm.

But she also suggested that the separation between art photographers and snapshotters has long had more to do with attitude than any kind of technical virtuosity. The pictorialists practically started the debate about whether photography should be art, and they won it with their arguments and cultural position as much as with their work. They made sure to get their work into salons and even museums as early as 1911. They said over and over: this is art.

All that hard rhetorical work eventually paid off. The public accepted photography as a valid medium for artistic expression. By the time the sharp lines of modernism slowly overtook pictorialism through the teens, just about everybody agreed with Henry Peach Robinson's contention in his 1867 book, The Elements of a Pictorial Photograph, that photos could be works of art. Nordstrom's talk ended with the quote, tying together the multiple strands of thought about the relationship between technology and art.

Robinson is saying: technology is a tool, and art is what an artist does.

So while technique and knowledge are important, the tools are not. Some artists may differentiate themselves by blowing up their prints to XXL and mounting them on special paper, but others are dedicating themselves to the iPhone and its photographic potential.

The iPhone artists are executing a nearly identical operation to the pictorialists'. To make people understand something as art, you make it look like the art they already know, right? Everyone knows the pictorialists made art photos, so now you make your iPhone shots look like their gum bichromate prints. You say over and over, iPhone photos can be art. And you push your work into the cultural institutions that define the edges of the art world.

There's an exhibition of iPhone art touring the country right now. It debuted in San Francisco last month, and will hit Chicago and New York in the next two weeks. "Pixels at an Exhibition" features art produced solely with the iPhone -- and some of it is gorgeous. I rest my case with Maia Panos' "Morning Glow," a fine example of the iPhone pictorialist genre.

Close of Business is a new video series that we're trying out. The idea is simple: at 5 p.m. (or thereabouts), we post a quick video summarizing the top three news stories of the day -- and give you one new Twitter or Tumblr to follow. Some of them we'll have written about; others will just be what people were talking about on the Internet.

Your Twitter account of the day: @KremlinRussia_E, the Russian president's feed.

See more video from The Atlantic Technology Channel.

"Are you getting the iPad in tomorrow?" I asked the Walmart electronics rep in Landover Hills, Maryland.
"The iPad?" the rep asked.
"Yeah, the Apple iPad," I said.
"Do you want the iPad or the iPad," I heard her say.
"Uh, the iPad," I said.
"Do you want the I-P-O-D or the I-P-A-D?" she responded.
"The iPad. I mean, the iPad. I-P-A-D," I said.
"No, we don't have that," she replied.
"Are you getting it in on Friday."
"Nope, only the I-P-O-D."

That was the best customer service experience I had searching the Washington, D.C.-area for the iPads that will hit some Walmart shelves come Friday.

Other locations bounced me around their phone systems for ten or fifteen minutes before hanging up on me. Other operators sent me to the electronics department where the phone rang eternal. One store in Laurel, Maryland hung me up three times before the lady at the switchboard explained, "I'm in the middle of a Code Adam, that's probably why it disconnected you." A Code Adam, Wikipedia told me, is when there is a child missing in a store. Yikes. Another store rep asked me to call a different number because he couldn't forward me to electronics. I called back on the new number and was routed right back to the same guy.

All that to say, Walmart sure isn't the Apple Store.

The Apple Store is one of the most pleasant retail experiences ever created. The stores are nicely designed. The products are on display and always usable. Better yet, the employees know what they're talking about and seem trained to act like normal human beings instead of human bots. You get used to a nice experience buying Apple products, and it becomes part of how you think about the brand, even if you know that it's just a damn store like all the other ones selling you stuff.

It's one thing to buy deli meat or a rake from Walmart. That's cheap stuff that doesn't require a lot of handholding or knowledge to sell. But a $500 purchase is substantial. Before dropping that kind of cash, you might want to talk to someone who knows what the iPad can do and can explain it. In fact, it might be precisely the subset of new Apple customers who would purchase their device at Walmart who need some convincing.

Maybe the iPad sells itself, but if it doesn't, don't count on Walmart clerks systematically helping out.

One other note. We checked with the five closest Walmarts to D.C. and none of them will be selling the iPad tomorrow. The store in Hanover, Maryland has them in stock already, but won't be selling them until the 22nd of October. That implies a smooth phased roll-out as the weeks go by.

Dell shares did not soar with its earnings announcement, as investors "have come to expect good news from the PC giant, analysts say," USA Today noted. "They almost become kind of boring by their success," Barry Jaruzelski of Booz Allen Hamilton's Booz & Company global technology and electronics practice told Reuters.

Now, the Dell scheme is obviously a bad practice -- and I already excoriated Dell for it -- but in the wake of the settlement, there's another important angle to consider. Were it not for a fraudulent accounting practice, analysts would have been all over the company for missing its targets. Yet Dell was still a great company with an excellent business that really did innovate with its supply chain management and sales tactics.

Perhaps it is precisely the Wall Street top cover the Intel payments provided that allowed Dell management to innovate without fear that some 25-year-old Goldman analyst's opinion about what might maximize investor returns would hurt their share price.

So, while Dell deserves the lion-share of our scorn, a system that over-privileges quarterly results over a company's long-term needs -- and the analysts who run it -- should share in the humble pie. Our current way of pricing technology companies is broken.

This article has been updated. We originally stated that Barry Jaruzelski was from the wrong Booz.

If you work in online media, you probably don't need to tell me what the graph above shows. Only one website can serve up the kind of traffic that makes your Digg frontpages, Reddit hits, and Drudge links look puny by comparison. That website is Yahoo.

It sounds crazy, but across the media landscape Yahoo is baked into many sites' statistics. They can send as many uniques to your website in a few hours as you get for the whole rest of the month. And if you get a slideshow Yahoo'd, forget about it, your traffic stats will look like the chart above for a year.

Now, we read in the Wall Street Journal that AOL and some private equity firms are thinking about buying Yahoo. There's a lot of skepticism about the deal. New York venture capitalist Matt Harris tweeted, "As @pmaeder (the yoda of VC) once said to me: tying two rocks together won't make them float. /cc: yahoo, aol mgmt." Wired's Epicenter blog editor, headlined his article on the possible deal, "Yahoo + AOL = Really?"

But perhaps AOL is really serious about becoming a real media company and Tim Armstrong is serious about becoming a media mogul. Combine TechCrunch, the local blog network Patch, and AOL's buttoned-up journalism efforts like PoliticsDaily with the Yahoo traffic machine... and maybe you've got something?

That'd be bad news for the rest of the Internet as Yahoo traffic stopped propping up everyone's unique visitor and pageview counts. Already, the site has been keeping far more of its front page links within its own domain.

Well, there are houses and plants that Tweet, so the clear next step is a Snuggie that does, too. The do-it-yourself site, Instructables, has a hilarious step-by-step guide to embedding a switch into your Snuggie so that you can use your blanket thing directly to send a message like, "Mmmm... So warm in here #smuggie," to all of your Twitter followers.

The system isn't very sophisticated; you can only send out a single string of text. But it's great as a training task for those familiarizing themselves with the open-source microprocessor, Arduino, which has become popular among physical computing enthusiasts.

In any case, why am I ruining this with real-life context? The point is that someone figured out how to make your blanket Tweet!

Close of Business is a new video series that we're trying out. The idea is simple: at 5 p.m. (or thereabouts), we post a quick video summarizing the top three news stories of the day -- and give you one new Twitter or Tumblr to follow. Some of them we'll have written about; others will just be what people were talking about on the Internet.

Your Twitter account of the day: @laphamsquart, Lapham's Quarterly's feed.

See more video from The Atlantic Technology Channel.