In the course of writing The Glass Cage, I’ve had cause to do some research into the history of robots. I have, after much reflection, concluded that the greatest robot of all time is Giganta, not only because it’s a robot that “automatically produces fun” but also because it’s “designed with feet indentations so children can rest.” (I hope our future overlords have such thoughtful features.)

I don’t hand out the title of best robot ever lightly. I’m also very fond of the “does not compute” robot on Lost in Space, who bore the appropriately utilitarian name of The Robot, and it’s no secret that I carry a torch for the Jetson’s robot maid, Rosie. But, despite its total lack of ambulatory and verbal capabilities, Giganta rules. (R2-D2 and C-3PO, on the other hand, were dweebs; they set the cause of robots back by three light-years at least.)

Footnote: I’m pretty sure that Giganta the robot is not related in any way to the DC Comics character Giganta, who seems to be designed for anything but fun.

Here’s an interesting little chart, from Ivey Business Review, on the current state of the digital magazine market (click on image to enlarge it):

Game Informer, the dominant title, by far, in digital subscriptions, is published by the GameStop retail chain. You get a subscription to the magazine as part of a bundle of benefits when you upgrade to a premium loyalty card. As AdAge reports, “When GameStop rolled out its loyalty program in 2010, Game Informer‘s digital circulation was just 4,844. It climbed to 223,000 in 2011, 1.2 million in 2012 and nearly 3 million today.”

It’s still early days for digital magazines, and it’s impossible to predict what the future will bring. But the initial hype about the iPad as an attractive publishing platform for magazines doesn’t seem to have panned out. After the introduction of the Kindle, ebook sales exploded for a few years (before flattening out more recently). Although digital magazine subscriptions nearly doubled over the last year (from a tiny base), they haven’t experienced anything like the ebook boom – at least not yet. “Tablet circulation has not increased as rapidly as publishers had hoped,” writes AdAge.

As long as magazines and other publications give away their content through the web, paid digital subscriptions will probably continue to be a hard sell. (Newspapers had to put up paywalls before they could sell digital subscriptions in substantial quantities.) Caught between the superior convenience of the free web and the superior experience of print, the tablet edition may end up being a niche product.

Just in time for your Labor Day barbecue, the Rough Type curatorial staff is pleased to unveil “Semiprecious,” our much delayed second Spotify mixtape. Glam out.

Rough Type Mixtape #1.

The online science magazine Nautilus is now also an offline science magazine. Its first issue has just come off the press. To mark the occasion, the editors asked me to write a brief essay about the resilience of paper as a reading medium.

It begins:

Gutenberg we know. But what of the eunuch Cai Lun?

A well-educated, studious young man, a close aide to the Emperor Hedi in the Chinese imperial court of the Eastern Han Dynasty, Cai invented paper one fateful day in the year 105 A.D. At the time, writing and drawing were done primarily on silk, which was elegant but expensive, or on bamboo, which was sturdy but cumbersome. Seeking a more practical alternative, Cai came up with the idea of mashing bits of tree bark and hemp fiber together in a little water, pounding the resulting paste flat with a stone mortar, and then letting it dry into sheets in the sun. The experiment was a success. Allowing for a few industrial tweaks, Cai’s method is still pretty much the way paper gets made today.

Cai killed himself some years later, having become entangled in a palace scandal from which he saw no exit. But his invention took on a life of its own. …

Read on.

21. Recommendation engines are the best cure for hubris.

22. Vines would be better if they were one second shorter.

23. Hell is other selfies.

24. Twitter has revealed that brevity and verbosity are not always antonyms.

25. Personalized ads provide a running critique of artificial intelligence.

26. Who you are is what you do between notifications.

27. Online is to offline as a swimming pool is to a pond.

28. People in love leave the sparsest data trails.

29.  YouTube fan videos are the living fossils of the original web.

30. Mark Zuckerberg is the Grigory Potemkin of our time.

1 – 20

“This has been a great era for the study of error,” David Brooks writes today. “We know that if you ask people what movie they want to see next week, they’re likely to mention a classy art film. But, if you ask them what movie they want to see tonight, they’re more likely to mention a mindless blockbuster.”

I’m sorry, but I’m confused. Where’s the “error” here? Does the error lie in wanting to watch a classy art film next week or in wanting to watch a mindless blockbuster tonight? Surely it doesn’t lie in the altogether wonderful ability of a human being to hold both those ideas in mind simultaneously. Is Brooks suggesting that perception and desire should be static qualities, existing independently of the passage of time? If so, he really needs to watch a lot more classy art films.

Still from Solaris.