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- Something's gotta give -- I just can't see how this can be sustained.
- Coffee is supposed to be sweet. If you're drinking flat or bitter coffee, you're a coffee fool.
- This is about the most exciting thing in my life right now," she says, handing out corn cobs to the audience. Also see Kickstart.
- Does anyone know if the Yellow Bikes in Portland are still available? They used to have them in Amsterdam (white) though not anymore, and I rode some in Helsinki (which had striped wheels).
Joyelle McSweeney reviews Drew Gardner's Petroleum Hat on Constant Critic:
The pacifist wanders through life in a state
of psychic castration,
his heart scarred by the talons of female avarice
and flawed psychology. He is a poor fool who has
listened too literally
to the women who lie and say that what they want
from men is adoration and understanding.
What they want is war.
As the poem trammels on through the chatrooms of existence, it is the pseudo-rational tone of its concluding lines that is most disturbing:
women are an anti-civilizing force,
actively creating more male aggressiveness.
It would seem that a wise society would have an
interest in creating a counter-force to oppose this.
Whoa. And: Rad!
Flow, mentioned in the previous post, has a lot of great anecdotes & items of interest. Viz:
- To lure recruits, into the Turkish armed forces, the sultans of the sixteenth century promised conscripts the rewards of raping women in the conquered territories. (p. 17)
- Early ethnographers have described North American Plains Indians so hypnotically involved in gambling with buffalo rib bones that losers would often leave the teepee without clothes in the dead of winter, having wagered away their weapons, horses and wives as well.(p. 62)
- There are natives of New Guinea who spend more time looking in the jungle for the colorful feathers they use for decoration in their ritual dances than they spend looking for food. And this is by no means a rare example. (p. 76)
- The culture of the Dobu islanders, as described by the anthropolgist Reo Fortune, is one that encouraged constant fear of sorcery, mistrust among even the closest relatives, and vindictive behavior. Just going to the bathroom was a major problem, because it involved stepping out into the bush, where everybody expected to be attacked by bad magic when alone among the trees. The Dobuans didn't seem to "like" these characteristics so pervasive in their everyday experience, but they were unaware of alternatives. (p. 79)
Stichomancy, as you may recall, is fortunetelling through the agency of books. You pick a book at random from the shelf, and then a page at random from the book, and then point your finger at a certain paragraph, and that is your fortune. This is mine from today, limited to the books here in the office:
From p. 53-54 of Good Business: Leadership, Flow and the Making of Meaning
Csikszentmihalyi is the author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Remedios Varo has more images of people toiling in their studies.
- Keiko, the whale in Free Willy tried to mate with the 8,000 lb. animatronic whale built for his stunts.
- Introverts of the world, unite! Someone you know, respect, and interact with every day is an introvert, and you are probably driving this person nuts.
- Kansas Farms as the look from outer space. Beautiful of course. You can also tell how well the crops are doing, and what they're growing.
- PARKing. In which some people put some money in a parking meeter, lay down some sod, installed a park bench, and created a small, temporary park. (via Beyond Brilliance)
- As we may think, an essay by Vannevar Bush, published in The Atlantic in 1945, has the kernel of a thousand great ideas in it, anticipating the internet
There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers -- conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.
- I've long been a fan of Squid Labs (who led me to the Vannevar Bush article), but failed to notice that iFabricate has turned into Instructables, a great site where people can upload instructions of how to make all kinds of things, including this awesome Pinball coffee table.
- Stevie Wonder sings "For once in my life", circa 1968.
- Yahoo Music Unlimited has changed everything about the way I listen to music. It's basically a music subscription service in which you can listen to anything in their gargantuan library for $4.99/month. For someone like me, who will be really into The Philadelphia Sound one week, and orchestral metal the next, this is good. The only downside is it doesn't work with iPods. Stewart even went out and got a Zen Micro to use with it, but it was such a piece of crap we were sorry we'd even heard of it. Apple claims it will never offer a subscription service, they're doing too well with their pay-per-song model, but they always say that just before they release something.
- This week on YMU, I can't get enough of The Greatest
I'm feeling sappy. Don't you love these old valentines? This one was originally uploaded by Lovely Lisa.
From one of my old favorites Oligopoly Watch, a good summary of the basic ideas behind his blog are given in the Financial Times by Barry Lynn. I don't have access to that paper, but Steve gives us the main points in the article, "Wake up to the old-fashioned power of the new oligopolies" (2/14/06):
- Policy makers have ignored the possible consequences of growing oligopoly control, even when it leads to debacles like last year's vaccine shortage. He lists a variety of oligopolies in iron ore, in technology, in energy, in food and personal care products, and wonders why there is no official concern.
- All this is leading to "corporate endgame", where fewer and fewer companies gain control over key pieces of the global economy as companies with "extraordinary scale and scope" manage to earn "disproportionately high profits."
- This leads to the abuses of oligopolies, including the control of political power, pricing distortions, control over is allowed into the market and when, and extreme profiteering.
- The growth of oligopolies was started by a"radical relaxation" of antitrust rules, starting with the Reagan administration.
- The suppression of innovation in some fields as control of markets makes certain kinds of innovation a threat, or at least an unneeded luxury. This stems form the ability of large companies to dominate whole sectors of the economy.
- Competition is directed downward to the smallest suppliers and the individual worker, so that larger companies can be spared real competition.
I'd love to know what the antitrust rules that were "radically relaxed" during the Reagan administration were. Anybody know?
I was at Old Navy on Market Street today, and was greeted by a nice girl who offered to give me a bag and then showed me where the pajamas were. The woman at the checkout was also really sweet, smiling. But while they were completely sincere, there was something unheimlich about them expending their niceness in the service of the great megacorporation that is Gap Brands. It's sort of alienated kindness.
When you order stuff from Etsy, which I do more and more of lately, you often get little treats. Bilzy came with an extra scarf and a little blanket, a biography, a picture of Bilz, the Chilean cola he's named after, a letter, some pictures of his friends, and a lovely handwritten letter from the artist, Splink.
I've talked about this before.
A nice summary of weird but normal activities of the brain, in A Theory of Fun
- The brain is good at cutting out the irrelevant, by which we mean, if you tell someone to count how many jugglers appear in a movie, they will almost surely miss the enormous purple gorilla in the background.
- The brain notices more than we think it does. When people are under hypnosis, or in some special circumstance they can remember and describe more about something that they can't under normal conditions. Although this odd fact has been much abused, as in Repressed Memory Therapy.
- The brain is actively hiding the real world from us. Raph gives the example of people drawing the simplest, most iconic or habitual symbol of something rather than the thing itself. Books like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
Michael and I were chatting on GoogleTalk in Gmail. I like having chat integrated into mail, it's very convenient and reduces the # of open windows on mydesktop. But I was expressing my horror that all the email transcripts were being archived by default. 80-90% of all users use defaults, sometimes even more. Which means that I am permitting my interlocutors to store our conversations on Google's servers without my explicit permission. You can change a conversation to "Go off the record" but when would you want any conversation to be, by default, on the record. Google may believe they're fighting the good fight against the government, but as we know, we're under a government that flagrantly disregards the law when it comes to seizing and collecting the communications of its citizens.
This is the default:
Google archiving on its servers your chat transcripts by default may even be illegal. Michael pointed out the California Penal Code 631:
Michael and I were also wondering if this is the default in *desktop* search. I have a mac, so I can't check. Does anybody know?
- My grandfather liked to save things, and had jars full of nails and washers and pencil stubs cluttering up his basement, but everyone's favorite jar was the one labelled "Pieces of string too short to use", a good title for this blog entry.
- The U.S. Coast Guard is called by some the "Hooligan Navy".
- It took the Catholic Church 100 years to figure out that books were dangerous: they banned Copernicus's heliocentric view of the universe 100 years after the printing press was invented.
- We're always quoting Alan Kay, who said "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." When asked what is the best book to read about computer systems, Kay recommends they read the U.S. Constitution because it has created a system affecting millions of people for hundreds of years.
Last week I had dinner with some remarkably brilliant people, and we were talking about the importance of stories, how the human mind tends towards narrative, how causation, fort-da, one thing follows another chronology is necessary -- otherwise everything would happen all at once, haha. But the mind can't help but construct narratives out of everything. I brought up the research by Peter Nisbett wherein he found that people make up stories for 'how they know something' (look up his other stuff too, he did studies of people explaining why they thought one pair of identical panty hose was better than another pair, stuff like that). Someone once told me we sleep because we need to have a beginning and an end. We argued whether or not mathematical equations are narrative, and concluded they are not.
Why Start a Company?. On the blog from Plum, a new startup that just came out of stealth, a story about why they started the company, based on a personal story by the founder. It's a great story. Similarly, when we were trying to explain Flickr, we'd tell a story of Stewart's grandmother's 80th birthday party, where the photo albums were spread out across the table from the 20s, 30s and 40s, and how everyone would say things like "That must be the house on St. Lawrence Street just before the War" and "That was Tom's girlfriend Katie from 1974..." -- and how the conversations around the images were the metadata, but after the party was over, and everyone went home, everything was lost; no one knew where the albums were anymore -- obviously they had to be online, where everyone could get to them, and shared...thus, Flickr. A pretty good story. But even better is when people start telling us the exact same story, unbeknownst to them: one of my friends tells me she put some old family photos online, and found a long lost relative in Brazil, who started annotating the photos with her.Looking at the graphic in the previous post is a little depressing; it reminds me of a fluorescent lit grocery store with a hundred brightly colored packaged goods clamoring for your attention. I'm burnt out on hearing/reading about/keeping track of all the bright shiny objects that are all over the place. But Plum has gotten off on the right foot, with its moving and very personal story.
Not quite as cluttered as the million dollar home page, but getting there. By Stabilo Boss.
I'm up for the first time in two days; I've been in bed sick since Friday and am cancelling my trip to London, which is a big drag. Even more horrible is getting sick on the weekend, and getting sick during three consecutive beautiful, sunny days. Yuck. Now back to bed again.
It's not a flash mob, it's a PILLOW FIGHT!!!
Rules:
1) Tell everyone you know about PILLOW FIGHT!!!
2) Wait for the Ferry Building clock to strike 6:00pm
3) Don't hit anyone with out a pillow (unless they want it)
4) Don't hit anyone with a camera
5) HAVE FUN!!!
(Rain plan: put your pillow in a plastic bag, see Rules 1 - 5)