Tomorrow some excellent DC folks are putting on the second Learn-a-palooza, sort of a community-based DIY self-improvement day:
[R]esidents, artists, and business owners will offer classes on hundreds of different topics. Classes will range from "3 Basic Yoga Poses", to "How to Change a Bike Tire", to "10 Words in Farsi", to "Columbia Heights History", to "Intro to Red Wine", to "Learn to Sing", to "Be a YouTube Star". Anyone who has something to share (and basically we all do) can offer a class.
A truly constructive experiment in self organization and, oh, the things you can learn! May. 9, '08
I've discovered a piece of software so excellent that I must share. If you are, like me, a Mac-user too tight with a dollar to shell out for full-featured image editing program, you may well find, as I have, that Skitch is perhaps the most marvelous thing ever. I've never been on a Segway, but I remember hearing that they leave you with the impression that they are reacting to your intentions, without you even necessarily realizing what it is your heart and mind desire. Such is the way of the Skitch.
Scientific American has a nicely done article on open-access science -- broadly defined to include not only less-restricted journals but also wikis, blogging, and other online collaboration. I've been thinking lately about the idea of extracting small bits of knowledge that might otherwise dissipate into the ether. Along those lines, some MIT biologists-in-training are compiling and sharing those useful nuggets through a project called OpenWetWare:
[T]hey discovered that the wiki was also a convenient place to post what they were learning about lab techniques: manipulating DNA, getting cell cultures to grow. "A lot of the how-to gets passed around as lore in biology labs and never makes it into the protocol manuals," says Jason Kelly, a graduate student who now sits on the OpenWetWare steering committee... [W]henever a student or postdoc managed to stumble through a new protocol, he or she would write down what was learned on a wiki page. Others would then add whatever tricks they had gleaned. The information was very useful to the labs' members, notes M.I.T. grad student and steering-committee member Reshma Shetty, but "that information also became available around the world."
Also interesting is the discussion about how digital collaboration is coming to be a necessary part of a successful scientific career in the way that publishing and conference presentations have long been. May. 8, '08
What I'm curious about is how EFF convinced the court that an entirely digital archive constitutes a library. One imagines the "where the books?" question may have come up. May. 8, '08
Two reasons I'm loving Clay Shirky's recent talk called Gin, Television, and Social Surplus: (1) it provides Gilligan's Island-based arguments against the idea that twiddling with Internet is a waste of time and (2) it's given me new ways to think about extracting small amounts of (political) interest/agency/creativity that would otherwise either dissipate or never reach critical mass. May. 7, '08
I have always thought New Orleans is a useful dramatic counterpoint to the rest of the country. It has a different value system. It's not a money culture. It's a family--it's almost more European. It's, "who's your mama? Who's your granddaddy?" I had a moment--this is a very New Orleans moment. Liar's Poker came out. I was whoring for publicity and was sent out to be on every TV show. I was on the Letterman show. And after I was on the Letterman show, people stopped me on the street routinely because they recognized me from TV. And the tour, a week after that, took me through New Orleans. And I went there and I was staying with my parents, doing local media. I went over to the grocery store to pick up something for my mother. And I was walking down the aisle with a grocery cart and a little old lady was coming the other way. And she starts to point her crooked finger at me.
...
And I'm thinking, "I know you, you were on the Letterman show." But she gets closer and she says, "I know you, you're Malcolm Monroe's grandson." I said, "How'd you know that?" "I can tell by your face." And everybody is a celebrity in New Orleans because everybody knows you.
Emphasis added. My mom's family is from that part of the country, and I can attest that "who's your granddaddy?" is indeed a normal topic of conversation. May. 7, '08
You ever see Battle at Kruger, the 8-minute YouTube video a tourist captured of a life and death struggle between a herd of buffalo, a few lions, and a couple of wily crocodiles? The National Geographic Channel built an entire special around the clip, airing this Sunday. May. 7, '08
If you'd like to help those affected by Cyclone Nargis, Architecture for Humanity is fundraising to pay for design services that will aid in the rebuilding of Burma. May. 6, '08
IT Conversations recently posted an engaging ETech talk overlaying some of the ideas of Web 2.0 on Wall Street. It's worth mentioning for the connections it draws between finance and tech, but something else caught my ear.
In the session, a former Salomon Brothers exec named Peter Bloom casually disparages a book I just finished, Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker. Bloom dismisses Lewis' account of life as a Salomon bond salesman in the '80s as "a novel." That's not an altogether unexpected reaction, as Lewis' portrait of Wall Street isn't all that flattering -- unless you're the type who thinks that it was Gordon Gecko was the real hero of "Wall Street."
But Bloom's dig made me wonder what the response was to Liar's Poker when it came out in 1989 and what financial types might make of it today. Google is failing to turn up anything really insightful about the reaction to the book by the sort of people who are its subjects, but I'd love to be able to read something on whether Bloom's poor opinion of Liar's Poker widely shared by those working in finance. Do young traders pass around copies of it during orientation? There has to be some discussion of that somewhere, but I can't seem to find it.
With Jane away for a few days, I've been watching whole lot of television. With the warning that this post contains Lost spoilers if you haven't seen the episode aired last Wednesday here in the U.S. (titled "Something Nice Back Home"), one of the questions that I have is why the show's creators seem to be establishing Jack Shepard as the iconic leader figure in what seem to be the final moments before rescue, when leadership on the show has always been fluid -- emergent, even.
When Jack falls ill with appendicitis in the last episode, he's consumed with the idea that he's going to fail the survivors in the hour that they need him most. Even taking into consideration Matthew Fox's appropriately rugged good looks, it's always seemed strange that Jack has been held up so often as the key to survival for the island's habitants. We've seen a number of characters actually function as decision makers or influencers (Sawyer, Locke, Kate, Sayid, Ben, Juliet, Hurley, etc.) and I think its fair to say that just as often a new tent is set up and attacks are launched because the group, or some segment of the group, coalesces around a strategy.
I'm particularly intrigued by this idea of leadership on Lost because how groups manage to survive in a relatively confined and often hostile space is to me one of the more compelling themes of the series. Having the good-looking doctor serve as the "great man" of the island makes the whole business less interesting, I think. We know Jack is one of the Oceanic Six (though I'm entirely confused as to what that even means when we have a supposedly dead Charlie appearing to Hurley, etc.)
My bet? Jack's rendered entirely weak during the whole get-off-of-the-island process, which leads to some of them indeed making it off and ensuring that Jack's miserable as a result. Emergent leadership emerges victorious.
I looked up the etymology of the word "hokum" because I wanted to make sure I was using it correctly in an article I was working on. Fascinating! Turns out that hokum is a blend of the words "hocus-pocus" and "bunkum" -- the latter of which has its own great history:
From Buncombe, a county in North Carolina. On 25 Feb 1820, Felix Walker, a US Congress person (whose territory included Buncombe County, NC) gave a rambling speech on the Missouri question with little relevance to the current debate. Walker refused to yield the floor, informing his colleagues that his speech was not intended for Congress but that he was "speaking for Buncombe."
Wonderful stuff. I was so surprised to find that hokumandbunkum.com was available that I had to have it. I don't know what I might do with it, but was too good to pass up. May. 5, '08
Since it's Friday, I thought I might, for the first time, indulge in a some cliched cat blogging. My friends, this is Lily. Now, I'm sure most cat owners think that their cat is adorable, and perhaps even more adorable than every other member of the species. But I have to tell you that this is a ridiculously cute cat, nonpareil. Lils has mastered the art of hanging out in a chill "no worries" sort of way. In this photo, her paw is hanging off the stereo not for comfort, but for the simple reason of appearing stylish. I'm not cool enough to own this cat.
The Progress & Freedom Foundation's Tom Snydor has assembled a critique of free culture advocate and Change Congress founder Larry Lessig that is worth a read, if only to better understand exactly how Lessig's nuanced approach to copyright so throughly agitates those who fully embrace the idea that creative content is property, to be held by the individual like an acre of land or an iPod.
But you have to hand it to PFF and Syndor, in that they really went full-bore on their criticism of Lessig's thinking on copyright. I mean, Buzz Bissinger went easier on Will Leitch when the author ranted and raved at the sports blogger on Bob Costas's show the other night. You can pretty much call the winner of an argument the minute that one side trots out the phrase "quasi-socialist utopianism," which does a disservice to sensible arguments that a more thoughtful approaches to challenges in creative content -- like network neutrality -- might actually require more regulation.
For the crowd associated with The Progress & Freedom Foundation -- a self-described "market-oriented" think tank -- "regulation" is like "pedophile" or "patriotism": one of those phrases that you toss out to circumvent thoughtful discussion. But Lessig has advanced a model for thinking about regulation that involves multiple players: architecture/code, society, markets, and the law, and an honest adversary would be useful in advancing that framework into wider applicability.
The original Toronto subway tile colour scheme was generated by combining a number of background colours with four trim colours...The colours were chosen to discourage rowdy behaviour and loitering rather than for aesthetic reasons. Consequently, they have the institutional quality of hospital or penitentiary walls. For many years, Torontonians grumbled that their subway stations looked like public washrooms. But now, decades later, the remaining designs have become Modernist classics.
Apr. 30, '08
Some notes on how typographers Jonathan Hoefler & Tobias Frere-Jones have rendered the ampersand in a handful of their different fonts. As for the word itself:
[F]olk etymologies abound. The likeliest account, offered by the OED, is explained by early alphabet primers in which the symbol was listed after X, Y, Z as "&: per se, and." Meaning "&: in itself, 'and'", and inevitably pronounced as "and per se and", it's a quick corruption to "ampersand," and the rest is history.
Sara Tucholsky is a softball player for Western Oregon University who hit a potentially three-run homerun during a game against Central Washington this weekend. Tucholsky twisted her knee rounding first and was unable to continue. The WO coach reminded the team that it they were to help her along, Tucholsky would have been declared out.
Then Mallory Holtman, the powerful first baseman for Central Washington, said words that brought a chill to everybody who heard them: "Excuse me, would it be OK if we carried her around and she touched each bag?"
I'm crying, literally. Little tears are welled up in the corners of my eyes. Apr. 30, '08
This World Without Oil alternative reality game may be old news (it wrapped last summer), but it seems to me to be an incredibly compelling attempt to engage people in a political question through gaming. The game is played by participants finding all sorts of digital ways to collaboratively craft a global reaction to a fictional oil shortage. More please. Apr. 29, '08
The proper collective noun for architects is, allegedly, a "jealousy." I'm not sure I buy it. Apr. 29, '08
Filmanthrophy: the art of doing good by making movies. Apr. 28, '08
Long-timers at the British Library's main reading room complain that newer users on their laptops just don't look like they're working. Library staff have been called in to mediate:
A library spokeswoman said that...today's researchers have a new, more interactive approach to their work. "The library has changed and evolved, and people use it in different ways," said the spokeswoman..."They have a different way of doing their research. They are using their computers and checking things on the Web, not just taking notes on notepads."
To be fair, the article notes that some of the newer patrons also regularly answer their cell phones while in the reading room, which is an offense properly punished by caning. Apr. 28, '08
Michael Joseph, Safaricom's CEO, explains that the company needs to teach people to need Google. Like virtually every African country, Kenya has several times more cell phones than Internet users. People have cells because they "understand the value that a phone gives them," Mucheru says. Despite futurists who crow about the Internet's potential to enrich Africa, Mucheru admits that, as yet, the average person isn't sold.
From our link-hating friends at Harper's: the odds that a story in a British newspaper is a reprinted press release are a mind-blowing 3 in 5. Apr. 28, '08
