I, Robot, Will Never Die
Moxie why those pesky fires can't be put out and why a Democrat messed up the situation.#
I've received a lot of phone calls...family, friends and such asking if I'm safe from the fires. Just more proof that East coast folks think the Apocalypse will begin with California.
We're going to fall into the ocean, you know.
That's the price people pay for temperate weather, a stable economy that relies on brainpower, creativity and ingenuity rather than a meaningless degree symbolized by the letters M,B and A or J, D. That's right, SoCal is afterall the center of all that is wrong with the world. Nevermind anyone try to find vegetables in their grocery stores during January without us. Or go to the movies or turn on the teevee.
Adam H wrote about meeting Paris Hilton back in May.#
We walked in and Paris was on the third barstool from the front end of the bar. To order a drink, there was a well area right next to her. Scooter and I walked over, I stood next to Paris and ordered a pitcher. When the pitcher arrived, I poured me a glass and decided that it was now or never to talk to Paris. I took a pull of liquid courage and introduced myself.
What followed was truly amazing. Paris is amazingly down to earth and kind. We talked for a good fifteen minutes before another friend of hers came by. Charming, graceful, and defiant at her friends from LA and people in the media which had her painted as a girl who had "never made her bed and ordered room service all of her life."
When I asked her what she thought of Altus and the people thereof, she said, "I love these people. These people are real people--they're nothing like those a**holes in LA. Sure I'm looking forward to going home, but I can't wait to come back here. I'm bringing my mother and sister back to visit."
Jane: "I'd rather make music that makes people's hips sway than their heads bang."#
Jessica posts the notes last night's blogger writer's meeting at Berkman.#
Ryan Overbey writes about our (Stirling Newberry, Matt Stoller, Chris Lydon, Derrick Ashong, and I) conversation after the Berkman meeting.#
[We] talked about blogs, politics, the Ghanian music scene, the Ghanian political scene, and how it all links together. It's a far cry from Buddhology, but why on earth do I come out of these meetings feeling vibrant, excited, energized? Because the ideas happening in this blog space are contagious- they radiate out to all our interests and spheres of life.
All kinds of old structures are dissolving before our very eyes. This week I ate at Three Aces, a little sub shop on Massachusetts Avenue. And there was a TV there, playing CNN's Inside Politics. I hadn't watched television in ages. But I've been very up-to-date on developments in presidential politics from reading across the spectrum: from Glenn Reynolds to Josh Marshall to The Clark Sphere to the totally clueless, laughable, and somewhat creepy Bush blog. With a few hundred feeds in my news aggregator, I also pick up lots of regional and national political information that shows up on academic, political science, and lawyer blogs. Scanning all this stuff usually takes half an hour, which is the time (including commercials) that I spent watching Inside Politics.
So I was sitting there, with my veal parm and fries, watching Inside Politics. And I was dumbfounded. I used to watch this show. I used to think this was good and informative. The show hasn't changed, but my media space has. Now I get an avalanche of deep, insightful information in thirty minutes. With CNN I get superficial sound bites for 20 minutes accompanied by 10 minutes of mind-numbing commercials. Because of blogs, I can't watch TV again. It's like trying to drive 25 miles an hour when you've just gotten off the expressway. It's too slow, and I've got places to go.
There is an intense falling away of old institutions as they lose their appeal by eating themselves and allowing members to benefit from betraying their system. And the new institutions that are being created are being founded on new ideas and technologies that can make them fast, better, more exciting, and more involved. It's not the destruction of hierarchy and organization, it's a new form, possibly, in the style of Stirling's "Sphere".
Driving home last night, Stirling and I continued the conversation about what's wrong with current institutions at a fundamental level and how to patch those problems in the new version. He believes that every system for needs to be able to provide predictive power to its populace: "How can I be sure we have a stake in each other?" and "What will happen if X?" I have to read more of Stirling's writing, he's an amazing person.
Stirling Newberry on the loss of faith in America.#
When even the Chinese are telling 'Bush is a chimp jokes' and worse, one suggests he get a sex change and ply the world's oldest profession to solve the American deficit crisis, you know that the aura of invulnerability isn't merely gone, it is completely forgotten.
There is a change in the Mandate of Heavan, as the Chinese is changing. As Howard Fineman's tightly argued piece makes clear, there is no longer any doubt to give Bush the benefit of.
[...]
The change comes because the old system does not work. The old system favored control from the top, and that control is cracking. [...]
The same is true of political campaigns - control is the expensive object, it is what warps and twists the shape of campaigns, and drives them to engage in politically useless acts which do nothing but put more power, and less message. The problem of the pyramid of dissemination - whether it is words or orders - is that by the bottom, the message is so hopelessly corrupt that it is at cross purposes with the original idea. It is also control and coordination which the law seeks to regulate, and therefore which people who want to create astroturf must evade. But that regime in politics is ending - people will no longer stand for what Newsweek aptly called "confusion, corruption and chaos".
This post by Stirling is great as well.#
Why has it played out this way? Because the people in the campaign are fighting the last political war - the election of 2000. They are pursuing a strategy that would have lost even then, just as the Germans end ran the French defenses in World War II as easily as they had in World War I, because the French reinforced where they did not need additional defense anyway. This failed understanding of the last election is even worse today.
[...]
The old politics - of complacency, of the consumer electorate, of the pyramid, is dead. None of the candidates who pursued this road are viable. Those that try and crawl back to it, will find that there is a hostility to this kind of politics.
Why is this? Because it is business as usual. And business as usual means a massive deficit, a blank check for "chaos, confusion and corruption". And a few more young Americans sent back from Iraq on stone cold slabs. To say "it is the way things work" is exactly wrong: it is the way things aren't working.
Strange Women Lying in Ponds comments on Thomas Friedman's "It's No Vietnam".#
Today's Tom Friedman column is pretty much right on the money. He begins by laying it on the line in terms of the level of depravity that has been exhibited by the terrorists in Iraq:
Just stop for one second and contemplate what happened: A suicide bomber, driving an ambulance loaded with explosives, crashed into the Red Cross office and blew himself up on the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. This suicide bomber was not restrained by either the sanctity of the Muslim holy day or the sanctity of the Red Cross. All civilizational norms were tossed aside. This is very unnerving. Because the message from these terrorists is: "There are no limits. We have created our own moral universe, where anything we do against Americans or Iraqis who cooperate with them is O.K."
[...]
Read the whole thing. Friedman has a warning for the Bush administration which SWLiP thinks is well taken.
In the meantime, contemplate the nature of our enemies; they know no moral boundaries, and because nothing matters to them more than our destruction they will never give up. The only way we can possibly defeat such depravity is to establish a decent, prosperous, civic society where ruthlessness and tyranny once stood.
Sébastien Paquet sums up why I don't like comments on blogs.#
I wish there were a page that aggregated the comments that Jon Husband keeps posting in all the right places - except for his own weblog.
A weblog can be your online identity and by commenting on another blog, rather than commenting on your blog and linking, you are cutting yourself and leaving that part somewhere.
Edward Bilodeau writes on the impossibility of knowledge representation.#
Forget about capturing knowledge. Instead, focus on creating learning objects. Before I forget, and I'll expand on this at some point in the future, I'm glad to see what seems like an increasing number of people realizing that the idea of capurting and storing knowledge doesn't make much sense.
Knowledge can only exist in the minds of people. When you try to capture what people know, you render their explicit knowledge into information. If you are trying to manage the knowledge within an organiation (which to me means that you are trying to ensure that the knowledge posessed by the people that make up the organization is applied and increased towards the goal of achieving the organizations objectives), and are hell-bent on 'capturing' what people know, then what you want to do is create information that can be effectively used by others to learn. In other words, rather then creating 'information' objects, you are trying to create 'learning' objects.
Words can't communicate thoughts and ideas exactly, all they can do is provide some sign posts and directions to where the idea is inside every person. So if you think about trying to completely specify and capture an idea/thought/knowledge then you will be trying to do something that nothing has ever been able to do. So instead, focusing on the possible, building objects that help people learn the idea or experience the thought. This what art tries to do to its viewers: express some feeling or emotion - a component of life.
Eli Chapman writes about Human Pacman.#
Mixed Reality Lab Singapore's Human Pacman is an interactive ubiquitous and mobile entertainment system that is built upon position and perspective sensing via Global Positioning System and inertia sensors; and tangible human-computer interfacing with the use of Bluetooth and capacitive sensors. Although these sensing-based subsystems are weaved into the fabric of the game and are therefore translucent to players, they are nevertheless the technical enabling forces behind Human Pacman.
Grant: I wish there wasn't so much nice stuff at Banana Republic, I could spend thousands of dollars there right now
sillygwailo: I could spend thousands of dollars in the United States too.
sillygwailo: oh wait, you're talking about the *store*.
Kevin Burton writes about Wikipedia on a PDA.#
If you haven't checked out Wikipedia yet I would suggest you give it a shot. It's fairly comprehensive and the editorial process seems to be doing a great job. Here's an example (Second World War ).
All content in Wikipedia is also distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License and is available from an SQL dump.
Which has me thinking... what if I bought a Linux PDA and installed the wikipedia software? The database dump is only 300M and right now a 512M CF card is about $60.
Lawrence Lessig thanks Seth Finkelstein for his influence on the recent DMCA exemptions.#
The Copyright Office just released its report (pdf) on exemptions from DMCA restrictions. There's good news and bad news. Let's start with the good. The Office granted four exemptions. One of the four was an exemption for censorware. This exemption was argued for strongly by a number of people, but none argued it more effectively than Seth Finkelstein. Based largely on his testimony, "compilations consisting of lists of Internet locations blocked by commercially marketed filtering software applications that are intended to prevent access to domains, websites or portions of websites, but not including lists of Internet locations blocked by software applications that operate exclusively to protect against damage to a computer or computer network or lists of Internet locations blocked by software applications that operate exclusively to prevent receipt of email" are exempt from the DMCA.
Kuro5hin.org reports on the new Reporters Without Borders report.#
Reporters Without Borders recently released its second world press freedom ranking. With North Korea and Cuba forming the bottom two rungs and Finland, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Norway all tied in the lead, the European countries did considerably better than the rest of the world, especially the Arab world. While the US, despite no major domestic changes affecting reporters in the last year, fell to a 31st place tie with Greece, down from 17th.
The ranking was compiled by asking "journalists, researchers, jurists and human rights activists to fill out a questionnaire evaluating respect for press freedom in a particular country" from September 1, 2002, to September 1, 2003. The study "does not look at human rights violations in general, just press freedom violations" and is not a ranking of the quality of the press, just its freedom.
Philip Putnam writes about why he doesn't believe in ghosts and on his thoughts about fiction writing.#
Tonight is Halloween, All Hallows' Eve, a time of ghosts and spirits walking by night . . . which leads me naturally to think about literary realism, and about politics. How can you write in a truthful and realistic way about something that doesn't exist?
I don't take much notice of critics, except when they praise me extravagantly. But one of the remarks they sometimes make about my work does coincide with a mild puzzlement I feel about it myself: in common with some other writers whose work is read by children, I am chided for writing fantasy, because fantasy is a lesser form than realism, and everyone knows that there are no such things as elves or hobbits or, for that matter, ghosts and disembodied spirits, so nothing interesting or truthful can be said about them.
Michael Lucas-Smith writes about Microsoft changing the meaning of Refactoring.#
ARGH! I hate this.. why do people always have to misrepresent things? This time it's Microsoft.. changing the meaning of Refactoring to be 'Transform my code'. The worse thing is that any tool that says it is a Refactoring tool will now be shunned by microsoft people because "It can't surround some code in an If statement".
Yes, that's right. Refactoring does not change the behaviour of the code. But here we have Microsoft offering people refactorings such as "Surround with.. Do While".
Jay Rosen has his questions answered by Brian Dominick...#
PressThink: 1.) If you walk up to a journalist with: "did you know you're biased?" by far the most likely response from that person will be: actually, you're saying that because you're biased. Does that strike you as a sensible conversation, worth continuing?
Brian Dominick: Of course everyone is biased. Everyone has a perspective. We prioritize facts based on something. We put quotes in a certain order and allow for them to be a certain length-- based on something. For that matter, we seek out quotes from various parties, instead of other various parties, based on something.
[...]
A journalist is first and foremost a filter-- the amount of information (the amount of sources) excluded from a story always exceeds, exponentially, the amount of information/sources included in the story. The same goes for choosing what stories to cover in the first place. That determination is based on something, and that something is a bias. Or, you can call it whatever you wish (criteria, standards, etc.), but whatever that is, that's what is meant by bias, if the term bias is to be useful to us at all.
Tony Pierce blabs about Beyonce.#
the other night we were talking about beyonce's legs and i am fully in love with beyonce and i couldnt care less about a hot girls body parts since parts is parts, etc.
but beyonce has some thick thighs and i cannot lie.
so because the world is far more judgmental about body parts of sexy sirens, i was telling karisa that beyonce needs to either quit dancing so much that her legs look so mighty, or she needs to stop wearing skirts like the one pictured.
Aaron Swartz writes about an interview with Larry and Sergey from Google by Fresh Air's Terry Gross.#
Terry asks if there are countries that block Google results. Their first answer: the United States. "The United States has the Digital Millenium Copyright Act [...] there are probably a handful of sights -- maybe a hundred web pages are blocked for that reason. [...] In France and Germany there are some rules against Nazi sites [...] a handful of sites are blocked. [...] The country can block certain sites in some countries [...] the most famous case for us was [...] China."
Tom Coates writes about political clarity in the UK.#
For many recent Labour voters the last couple of years have been a bit of a troubling time - with some of the actions of the government (particularly with regard to the War in Iraq) seeming to be violently and almost universally at odds with the views of the electorate. As a result, I think it's far to say that their popularity has waned. But while people have become vaguely disillusioned with Labour, the other political parties haven't really seemed to be particularly inspiring any kind of reaction at all. In a way it's a bit of a surprise - whether you like the policies or not, it's difficult to deny that the Conservative policy raft has been more interesting than it has been for a long time. But that doesn't seem to have made much of a difference either way. On the whole - with the exception of occasional terrifying statements by Oliver Letwin, the only things they do that get any press or interest from the public have been their bi-weekly attempts to commit televised hari-kiri.