"Last December, Andrew dropped out of university. “We signed him up for freshers’ events, hoping he would socialise, but after two weeks he’d not been to a single lecture or seminar,” Mary continues. “He was in paradise: he had internet in his room, a cafe nearby, and nobody to badger him. When essay deadlines and exams came up, he just dropped out. He knew he would fail.”"
SelfControl is an OS X application which blocks access to incoming and/or outgoing mail servers and websites for a predetermined period of time. For example, you could block access to your email, facebook, and twitter for 90 minutes, but still have access to the rest of the web. Once started, it can not be undone by the application, by deleting the application, or by restarting the computer – you must wait for the timer to run out.
Call for the internet. As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge.
Google has rolled out a subtle change to Google Reader that lets you create custom feeds to track pages that don’t already have them. You can subscribe to updates for any webpage simply by typing the URL into the “Add a subscription” text box.