Engineering

I meant to note how much I enjoyed Doc Searls' Little FM Transmitters piece. Somewhere inside Doc is an engineer (the kind that works with atoms, not bits).

Dave Winer notes that Doc's solution works.

Now Dave's "experience" of getting audio from his portable device through his car stereo is much better.

A little knowledge makes a difference.

The nature of ignorance is that we don't know what we don't know.

War of the Worlds

Excellent.

Bravo, Mr. Spielberg! Bravo!

I'd say H.G. Wells, Orson Welles and George Pal would all be pleased, for the most part, with what Steven Spielberg has done with the myth.

There were a couple of polite tips of the hat to George Pal's version, perhaps for us boomers. And I'll defer to Dave Golding on this, but I think there might have even been a wink to Donnie Darko fans.

I kind of think Spielberg may have wanted to show M. Night Shaymalan how it's done.

Excellent summer entertainment. Not great art, necessarily, but a good scare.

Nice mob scene too. Maybe if their cell phones had all worked they'd have been, you know, smart.

Synchronicity

I love synchronicity. I seem to encounter it more frequently when I'm in something of a productive period in what passes for my feeble efforts at thought.

Of two recent examples, one relates to me only indirectly. On my dad's weblog, he related a story about how, last Saturday, an acquaintance of his, a WW II Marine veteran, joined him at the local Walmart where they were helping to raise money for the Lenox WW II war memorial. Although they were acquainted with one another, they had never shared much of their experiences with one another before. As it turned out, they were both present at the last island assault against Japan in WW II, at Kume Shima.

I was talking with my parents last night, via iChat AV (one of the truly excellent technology developments), and Dad related the story again. I had never heard much about Kume Shima, so after I finished talking with my parents, I Googled it. There isn't much about the assault, but there is information about the date, June 26, 1945. And the date of Dad's post about meeting his friend the day before was June 26, 2005, 60 years later, to the day.

Sure, it's just a coincidence, but I harbor a suspicion, perhaps an irrational one, that there's sometimes more here than meets the eye. Perhaps not, but it does lend a certain sparkle to our otherwise rather mundane lives.

Well, that was delightful, but there was another delightful coincidence in store for me today as well.

I've been thinking about truth, and Mike Sanders' First Principle of his Longtailers' Manifesto, and freedom and ignorance. I can't say that I've stumbled upon any startling revelations, and much of what I'm thinking about is a closer examination of some ideas I've had before. But I felt as though I had enough to begin writing something about it, which is what the previous post was about. I started it last night, got distracted chatting with Mom and Dad and looking up Kume Shima, and then worked on it some more this morning. It was by no means finished, but it was enough of a complete idea that I wanted to post it, and I figured I'd just go on a little more later today, perhaps with a series of posts leading up to the 4th of July and Independence Day, with the implications attendant to that holiday.

So today I was hitting the usual (habitual) weblogs I always visit, and Jason Kottke's is one I hit every other day or so. This post happened to grab my attention because of the paragraph Jason quoted in his post:

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

This appealed to me because of that mention of "a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties," which is an idea that just keeps bugging me. It's part of an idea about "the ethics of ignorance," that won't go away. And the admonition "to be just a little less arrogant" appealed to me as well. I suspect, well, I suppose I know I come off sounding pretty arrogant myself around here; but I find the arrogance of others, like that of Ben Hammersley and all those who so uncritically subscribed to his ideas about "teaching" or "showing" the rubes in the "hinternet" how to behave so they wouldn't "destroy" Ben's "world," pretty hard to take. Phrases like "Deal with it!" are phrases that pretty much ensure I'll deal with it by getting in your face about it (and you know who you are). Maybe it's a testosterone thing. In any event, that little paragraph was like a little bell, and my Pavlovian response was to follow the link.

Wow!

I'd like to buy David Foster Wallace a beer sometime. In some ways, that's nothing special, I'll buy anyone a beer. But in another sense, that's pretty high praise from me.

Here were huge chunks of the ideas I was kicking around in my mind about Freedom, Ignorance and Power. And here they were presented in clear, compelling ways; something that I seldom feel I achieve. This is good shit.

The synchronicity element is, of course, these are the very ideas I'm trying to get my rhetorical arms around; but also, perhaps less so though, that they came to me by means of what is, effectively, a habituated behavior.

I did a little searching about Mr. Wallace, and read this Salon piece from 1996, which offers some very useful thoughts as well. A couple of examples:

That part of the book is supposed to be living enough to be realistic, but it's also supposed to stand for a response to lostness and what you do when the things you thought were going to make you OK, don't.

Been there. Done that.

I get the feeling that a lot of us, privileged Americans, as we enter our early 30s, have to find a way to put away childish things and confront stuff about spirituality and values.

Well, why do that when we have the latest application of RSS to go, "Oooooh...shiny!" over?

In any event, I recommend reading both pieces, they're not very long. The commencement address is the more useful in terms of concentration of good ideas. Mike Sanders I think will find much in that commencement address to inform the principles he's trying to lay out, and I think I'll have more to say about that as well.

Tonight, though, I'm skipping taekwondo so that my son and I can go see The War of the Worlds. It isn't often that he asks me to go to the movies with him anymore, so I'm going to enjoy that, and thinking deep thoughts, well, as deep as I can anyway, can wait a bit. But you can certainly think all the thoughts you want! And I encourage you to do so.

"Don't drive angry. Don't drive angry."

Freedom, Ignorance and Power

The other day, I posted a quotation from a Boston Globe commentary on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jean Paul Sartre. I quoted the part that appealed to me, and that seemed to reflect something of my own point of view with regard to what people, especially those who are perceived, rightly or wrongly, as authorities write. It is a minority view, I know. But free speech does not mean freedom from consequences.

I'm less enthusiastic about much of the main idea of the piece, that Sartre felt that we are "compelled" to be free:

There is a paradoxical element to Sartre's notion of freedom. Freedom itself is not free. We are compelled to act freely; there is no way to avoid being free. In his view, much of human life is a struggle to avoid the burden of such awesome opportunity. When terrorists, sex offenders, or corporate heads testify that they were under a religious spell, compelled to act as they did or ignorant of the truth, they are guilty of what Sartre called ''bad faith." Always, Sartre reinforced the simple truth that freedom can never alienate itself from a person any more than his shadow can.

This is a fairly compelling idea, seemingly consistent with what our culture tells us about the nature of freedom, but I'm not sure it's true. If anything, I think it gives us far more credit than we deserve. But there are aspects of this idea that I think do convey a powerful truth, and we would be well served if we understood them better.

The first objection I have to the idea is that it implies that everything we do, every action we take, has its origin in some explicitly volitional, cognitive choice. It seems that the vast majority of our behavior is habituated or conditioned, simply because we lack the cognitive resources to attend to the millions of potential "decisions" we could conceivably "reason" our way through each day. Alarm clock rings. What to do? Turn off alarm? Ignore it? Why is it ringing? Should I still get up, or should I just stay in bed? What should I have for breakfast? Should I eat breakfast? Should I eat something I like, or should I eat something "healthy?" Should I get out of bed on the right side or the left side of the bed? Should I write something in my blog today? Whose blogs should I read first? Should I read anyone's blog first? Which blogs should I read? What should I write about? Is it necessary for me to express an opinion about this bullshit that some idiot is posting? Am I being too harsh? Have I just ended that sentence with a preposition? Is it appropriate in this case? Should I go to work today? What should I wear? If so, how? Car? What about the greenhouse effect? If I walk, will I get there in time? What is the bus schedule? Should I quit my job and look for a new one today? Which route should I take to work? How fast should I drive?

For those situations that present themselves as sufficiently novel to elude a conditioned or habituated response, the "first cut" of our cognitive "reasoning" apparatus is an emotional one. A situation is sub-consciously framed in the context of what it most closely "feels like;" and this prunes an enormous quantity of potential decisions from the tree, allowing us to use our limited cognitive resources more efficiently. In general, a situation may "feel" good, which suggests opportunities to be pursued; or "feel" bad which suggests potential threats to be avoided. If a situation is so different as to evoke neither a "good" nor a "bad" feeling, then more cognitive resources are devoted toward reasoning our way to some kind of response, although even this is probably more complicated than it appears. It seems possible that the experience of encountering something so different that it didn't evoke either a "good" or a "bad" feeling before may have resulted in a negative outcome, which has associated a "bad" feeling with novel situations, which results in behaviors that seek to minimize the potential to encounter novel situations. Alternatively, a positive outcome may result in behavior that increases the potential to encounter novel situations. So much of our "free will" is governed by behavioral and emotional processes that operate somewhat below the threshold of cognitive volition.

What is interesting, and complicates this picture even further, is that much if not most of this is cognitively accessible. If we're made aware of these processes, our awareness of them can make them subject to cognitive intervention. This is the basis for cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). It's also the basis of much of the practice of "mindfulness." But it's important to bear in mind that this does nothing to increase the quantity of cognitive resources we can devote to volition. Which is to say, we are still going to be relying on conditioned, habituated behaviors; and emotional "pre-processing" shaping our perceptions. What one hopes to do through CBT or the practice of mindfulness is to identify those habituated behaviors that are not helpful and develop new ones, and to alter or refine the emotional pre-processing of perception to avoid setting ourselves up for negative outcomes.

It seems to me that any discussion of freedom has to take into account the nature of human behavior and the limitations of human cognitive resources. It's not clear to me that Sartre, or the author of that brief essay, appreciate those limitations.

And I appreciate that I'm out of time for now. More to follow.

Biography Log

An old sailor wonders what the word "blog" means.

iTunes 4.9

Installed iTunes 4.9 this morning via Software Update. Podcast support is live. Go to the Music Store in iTunes and on the left-side, just below the "Choose Genre" pick-list, you'll see the link for the podcast section.

My biggest request would be to add The Diane Rehm Show.

Mary Fahl

Caitie gave me a $20.00 gift certificate for the iTunes Music Store for my birthday. Yesterday I used it to add some more songs to my iTunes library.

One of the neat things I found through the iTMS is The October Project and vocalist Mary Fahl. Apparently the group disbanded shortly after the release of their second album, but they have an EP released in 2003, so I'm not sure what's up with that. Mary Fahl, the vocalist who gave the group its voice has a solo album from 2003 available at the iTMS.

Herd

Batman Begins

Best. Batman. Ever.

But, you know, since it wasn't interactive, it must suck. I just sat there, passively, you know, watching the movie. There were no buttons or keyboards for me to fiddle with. I had to devote my attention to the story, fer chrissakes! How 20th century is that?

Just Another Word

"While Sartre's idea of freedom differs from what we find in America, he has also been compared to the American pragmatists, particularly when it comes to writing. Such an activity, according to philosopher Thomas Flynn, is the way one acts upon the world. Actions produce effects, and for these the writer must be held responsible, be he the author of ''Common Sense' or 'Mein Kampf.'"

Blame Sartre.

Not sure I agree with all of this, but it's an interesting point of view.

In a Similar Vein

Big Boo-tay!

Movie Quotes

Jason Kottke asks if the American Film Institute missed any good quotes in its list of the 100 Greatest Movie Quotes of All Time.

Wow. Where to begin?

I mentioned one in Jason's comments, "Klaatu barada nikto." (Though I probably spelled "barada" wrong.) That's from the classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still. (Note to self: Always use the Find command in these sorts of things. Somebody else mentioned KBN long before I did.)

Here are a few others that would be on my list:

"I was born ready." Jack Burton in Big Trouble in Little China.

Virtually the entire script of The Princess Bride. But certainly, "Inconceivable!" and "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

"No matter where you go, there you are." Buckaroo Banzai in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension. From that same film, let's not forget:

"Laugh while you can, monkey boy!" Emelio Lizardo

"Use more honey!" Emelio Lizardo

"The only reason time exists is so everything doesn't happen at once." Penny Priddy

"It's not my damn planet, monkey boy!" John Big Booté

"Big Boo-TAY! TAY!" John Big Booté

"Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be connected to." B. Banzai

"Just be cool, she'll hold." Perfect Tommy

"That's a big no can do." B. Banzai

"What's that watermelon doing here?" New Jersey

"The president wants to know if everything's okay with the alien space-cloud, or should he just go ahead and nuke Russia?" World Watch One Operator

"Tell him yes on one and no on two." B. Banzai

I'm sure there are several dozen more I've forgotten. Have to watch it again soon to refresh my memory.

"There is no spoon." Bald kid in The Matrix.

"Mister Anderson!" Agent Smith, in The Matrix Revolutions

"So, you have some skills." The Mergovinian in The Matrix Reloaded.

"My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next." Gladiator

"Your good is better. Your better is blessed." G in Holy Man.

"It was the disappearing Rolex trick." G in Holy Man.

"There's a new sheriff in town." Reggie Hammond in 48 Hours

"Pork bellies! I knew it! I knew it!" Louis Winthorpe III in Trading Places

"Which way you headed cowboy?" Girl in truck.

"I was just about to figure that out." Chuck Noland in Cast Away

There are probably too many others for my tired and feeble memory to recall just now. But these are a few that would be on my list.

(A short while later...) Oh, crap! "Wax on. Wax off." Mr. Miyagi, The Karate Kid

Nature Deficit Disorder

Heard an interesting interview with author Richard Louv on the Diane Rehm Show yesterday. (I really hope her shows will be available as podcasts at the iTunes Music Store soon.) He's written a book called Last Child in the Woods. Although I'm not fond of the too-cute "nature deficit disorder," I think the idea has merit, and is another worthwhile counterpoint to the "irrational exuberance" of today's technologists who would wish to "teach" the rest of us how to behave in the "new" world they've "created." Perhaps they're not all that well acquainted with the "old" world, and perhaps there's something they might learn from it as well.

I'm glad I grew up out in the "sticks." My parents owned the woods across the street, and the woods behind our house were owned either by my uncles, or one of our neighbors who didn't seem to mind (or even know) if we played in them. Chris and Caitie each got a taste of that before Mom and Dad moved down into the village. When Chris was a small boy, he enjoyed looking for fossils in the shale that was all around the place, and often used as part of the road bed. When we were in New York for two weeks for the kidney transplant, we took a walk with my Uncle Tony from his house to the stone quarry not far from where he lived, and where my Uncle Dave and Aunt Mary Ann used to live before the quarry bought them out. At one point, we were in a field surrounded by woods and hedgerows and you couldn't see a road or a telephone or power line. This seemed to startle Chris, because he said, "Wow! It's just like Jurassic Park!" He had just turned 10 a couple of weeks before, and Jurassic Park II was just out, so dinosaurs and Jurassic Park were fresh in his mind.

Since then, we did several camp-outs with Boy Scouts, and he had three summers in the mountains of Maine. It's not the same as the experience I had growing up, but it's probably better, in terms of being relatively close to the natural world, than what many other kids experience.

If you'd care to, I recommend listening to the Real archive of the show. If you'd prefer to listen to it as an MP3 file later on, you could use something like Wiretap Pro or Audio Hijack to record the Real audio stream to disk while you do something else, perhaps while you're sleeping?

Paying Attention to Attention

One way of looking at mindfulness or the practice of meditation is to regard it as paying attention to your attention.

This is an interesting post.

Write On

"That’s why we have to endure weird fashions in marketing copy and business books: those pages of half-sentence paragraphs; the jargon; the endless ellipses; the “mood” fragments that flatter while they hide information, [italics mine] and the daft claims, like the one on Bono’s celebrity website, which announces that they are Making Poverty History. (More poverty, more places, than ever before?)"

(Not that I've never been guilty of any of the myriad sins mentioned in that post.)

Color Me Happy

It's nice to read about a happy outcome every now and then.

Bullshit

The purpose of this list is to provide an initial, helpful framework of this emerging industry and highlight its key players who are influencing the adoption of open media and proving the impact it is already having on the technology industry, journalism, and marketing. To achieve this goal, we created the following categories: Pioneers, Trendsetters, Practitioners, Toolsmiths, and Enablers. We combined both a subjective and objective process, including nominations from bloggers, surveys, and measurable data using Technorati’s blog search engine, which tracks more than 11.5 million weblogs and over 1.2 billion links. We respectfully acknowledge that the list represents our best educated guess in a fast-changing and fluid market. There are obviously many other folks one could persuasively argue should be included (hence our 50 honorable mentions list). And we admit that there was no way we could do justice on this list to the many great open media contributors operating outside of the U.S. who did not pop up on our radar screen.

So the "purpose of this list is to provide an initial, helpful framework of this emerging industry?" Really? That's interesting. What's a "framework?" Don't we usually build something on a framework? What are these guys building? It's an "initial framework," so presumably there is no "framework" already extant upon which something, maybe it's supposed to be a "surprise," can be built. I guess. Adding "initial" to "framework" shows that they looked around and couldn't find one, so they had to make their own. They saw a "need," I guess. And so they shouldered the burden to answer that need. Quite commendable of them, no?

Then we go into "to achieve this goal." Um, what goal? Is the "purpose," the goal? The "framework?" I guess the framework was the goal. But what is the purpose of the framework? What's the goal of the framework? Oh yeah, I think that's supposed to be a surprise. Or something. But to achieve the goal they had to create categories, because, you know, you need structure to create a framework; hence: categories.

Then, since transparency is such a value these days, we have a little explication of the process that was used to develop this framework. (I can't make up my mind if I want to use "scare quotes" or italics for all the "bullshit" words. Well, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, or so I've been told.) But they used both a subjective process and an objective process to establish the "framework" around these "categories." I wonder how that works? Because, you know, it sounds to me like it's a subjective process that chooses how to use the objective data. So the whole thing is pretty much subjective. I think the numbers are in there just as a kind of protective coloration, but what do I know? I'm just a cranky guy.

You know what I think? Well, you probably know what I think, but I'm going to tell you anyway. I think it's all bullshit. I think the world needs this "framework" like a rooster needs socks. I think it's all just a scam to get some high attention-earners to vector a little attention toward these attention-seeking entities. A little fancy, high-tech, brown-nosing. Invoke that whole reciprocity thing. I link you, you link me, we're a happy family... Oh, sorry, just had a hideous flashback to a purple dinosaur that traumatized me as a parent.

The thing is, I think most people know it's bullshit. I just think we're all so infatuated with ourselves "as the new, new establishment," leading the "Open Media Revolution," that we're disinclined to turn our noses up at the stench. It sure has hell doesn't reek of authenticity. Well, if anyone did think there was a crying need for a "power list of bloggers, social networkers, tool smiths, and investors" I guess we have one now. We can all sleep soundly tonight.

Moon, June...

Woke Up On the Wrong Side of the Century

Think I'm cranky? Check out this guy. (Via Jon Husband.) Like Jon, I thought this was a particularly choice paragraph:

Yeah, well, they weren't interested in making a distinction between energy and technology (or, more precisely where Google is concerned, a massive web-based advertising scheme -- because it is finally clear that all this talk about "connectivity" just leads to more commercial shilling, shucking, jiving, and generally fucking with your headspace in the interstices of whatever purposeful activity one may be struggling to enact on the internet).

He's a much more entertaining writer too!

His comments on the state of the airlines reflect my impression of where the "great flattening" is taking us. Not to say that that's a bad thing, but it's going to be a lot worse if we don't go in with our eyes open.

Holidays

I was tempted to name this post Halleydays, but I didn't. First, a Fathers' Day shout-out to my old man, Sailor Jack. It's true, the older you get, the smarter your parents seem. Happy Fathers' Day, Dad.

With regard to the inspiration for Halleydays, I guess I have a little different perspective. I'm not divorced, the lawyers are working on it, but I have been separated for a long, long time. When it comes to holidays and the kids, the kids come first. They seem to enjoy the expectations attached to certain days. I've got Caitie this weekend, so there's no friction there. We're not doing anything special, which is fine with me. In fact, Caitie's mom has asked me to come to her house to try to locate a water leak in the garage for her. I wanted to say it was probably cheaper than calling a plumber, but that's probably not true. My track record with plumbing is pretty poor. Most of the non-trivial leaks I've tried to fix have ended with me calling a plumber. But we'll take a look. It's just another day.

You can make any holiday into an emotionally draining ordeal, and it seems like a lot of people do; but that's all inside your own head. That's something only you have power over. It takes a while to understand that. And you have to let go of a lot of stuff that we seem to like to hang onto to understand it. But there it is.

I am an authority on that. Doesn't mean a damn thing though; because it won't make any difference to you until you become one too.

Update: Just because I know domestic engineering is a fascinating topic to so many of us (well, me anyway), I wanted to point out that I think I've solved the problem by means of telephone tech support, and it's not a plumbing problem.

A couple of weeks ago, Maria mentioned she was having problems with the heat pump and had some people over to work on it and the air handler. Later, when I was at the house, I noticed that whoever had worked on the air handler had left one of the access covers off. I was on my way somewhere at the time and didn't stop to try to put it back on, though I now think I should have, and I promptly forgot about it. Apparently the parts that hold it in place are deteriorated from rust so much that it won't stay on. That came to me this morning when Maria e-mailed me that she thought the water was coming from the garage into the laundry room.

Well, the plenum for the air handler is in the garage, right behind the washing machine. With the access cover off, humid outdoor air is being drawn into the air handler where the moisture is condensing on the cooling coils. We've had some very hot, very humid days the last few days. I called Maria and I asked her to look outside the garage where the drain pipe from the plenum discharges. She can't see the drain pipe because there are a lot of leaves and crap down there. So there's the problem. The heat pump is now having to cool both interior air and warm, humid exterior air, so it's running longer. Too much humid air is entering the plenum, condensing, and the drain is probably plugged so it's backing up into the bottom of the plenum and then into the laundry room. I told her to get the access cover on and hold it in place with duct tape, and get the drain discharge cleared away. I also suggested she put the air handler fan on to try to help dry out the bottom of the plenum. Her electric bill is likely to be very high this month as well.

She didn't think you could get that much water from condensation, but you can get a lot of water from condensation. I can't really say I've solved the problem, because the problem really is that the air handler probably needs to be replaced. But I'm pretty confident I've nailed the source of the water.

How Cool is This?

Wow! I had to take a minute to point to DittyBot. It's a good tutorial in using Automator, and an interesting application as well. Pretty damn clever, if you ask me. (And I know, nobody did.)

Update: I noticed that Euan Semple linked to the DittyBot the day before I did, but I didn't see it at The Obvious first. It came to my attention as part of a saved Feedster search I have on AppleScript. Just like this other SMS-based AppleScript. Cool.

A Different Note

Okay, I'm done with the gadfly bit for a while. It's my weekend with my daughter, so I probably won't be doing much here after this.

Saw something sad this morning on my way to work, though I didn't know how sad at the time. Traffic was backed up at the gate and I thought it was a security exercise of some kind. But then I saw the security vehicles with their lights flashing near the first intersection on the naval station. As I drove past, I saw a full size pickup truck being loaded onto the back of wrecker, with significant front-end damage and a power pole with a chunk of concrete missing.

I later learned local police had been pursuing the truck down the road leading to the base. The driver ran the gate and apparently lost control of the truck trying to make a turn at the first intersection, colliding with the pole. I was later told he had a passenger asleep in the bed of the truck, and he was killed in the collision. I'm not sure about the condition of the driver, or why they were running from the police.

Much less depressing, but still kind of a downer, I dropped by the barber shop this morning to get my ears lowered and discovered that all the barbers were new. The old barbers had been there for quite a long time, and had cut my hair for me while I was still on active duty. They knew me and always said, "Good morning, Commander Rogers!" when I dropped by. It's not that I'll miss being called "Commander Rogers," (well, maybe a little) but I did enjoy chatting with those guys. At least I did get a decent haircut, though they raised the price by 50 cents.

And we've got a new instructor at the do-jahng, which is always interesting. He's a pretty young guy, but a fourth degree black belt. As they all have, he has different ways of training, emphasizing different exercises that work different muscles. This is a good thing, but I must say my legs are pretty damn sore. Warm-ups with this guy are always punching drills on the heavy bags, followed by stretches and then kicking drills on the heavy bags. It'll be interesting to see if he's running the Saturday black belt class tomorrow, typically the most demanding class of the week. I kind of expect he will be, so I'm not sure just what we'll be in for tomorrow.

And that's probably about enough out of me.

The New Etiquette

What sort of etiquette do we need to help bridge the gap between self and other? What kind of etiquette would dissolve the differences between us and them?

Is there a form of etiquette that would help us not fear the loss of a thing that exists only in our shared illusions? Is there an etiquette that helps us understand how to get along with one another in this world, before we worry about creating new forms of etiquette for imaginary new worlds?

What sort of manners are those that suggest that one group of individuals has a point of view, or a vision of a thing, that trumps whatever other points of view there may be? Is it mannerly to regard those who may have a different point of view, or who may not share a particular point of view as threats, as people who might destroy a world? Is it polite to regard newcomers to a new world as "old" people?

Are the difficulties of this world due to a deficiency in etiquette, an ignorance of manners? Or might they be due to a deficiency in self knowledge? Might they be caused by an unconscious dependence on fear as a means of social control?

Just a few questions for those who would set about creating a new etiquette.

Affordances and Habituated Behavior

Online shopping has been widely available for only a relatively short time, about a decade or so; but long enough to establish certain expectations or habits of thought that can impose barriers to achieving certain objectives.

I got an earful today at lunch from a guy I work with who knows I'm a Mac user. He wanted to try out the iTunes Music Store. He went to Apple's web site and downloaded iTunes and installed it. Then he went back to the web site to try some 30 second samples and to download some music.

He spent almost 45 minutes getting increasingly frustrated trying to figure out how to download music from Apple's iTunes web site. He kept following links, only to find more, "propaganda" as he called it, regarding all the wonderful virtues of the iTunes Music Store. He eventually figured out that you needed to use the iTunes application to buy and download the music, not his web browser, but he was extremely frustrated by that point.

It got worse though, as he was signing up for his Apple user account, he received an error message and he wasn't able to complete his sign-up process.

I looked at Apple's iTunes Music Store web page, and the page about buying music, and I think he's right. If you don't look carefully at all the illustrations, there's nothing in the body text that explicitly tells you to use the iTunes application to access the iTunes Music Store. The illustrations do convey the idea that you use the iTunes application, but he's expecting to use the browser to buy music, so he's not really seeing the information contained in the illustrations.

He maintains that Apple probably loses hundreds of potential customers a week due to experiences just like his. He's no rube from the "hinternet," he's a guy that deals with technology every day, manages Windows networks, and is generally a very sharp guy. You could even say he's a "technologist." He does a great deal of online shopping, and his experience in this regard worked against him by creating an expectation that wasn't matched by Apple's iTunes application, or by Apple's presentation of their offerings at their web site. A URL that ends in the word "buy," from which you can buy nothing seems like a frustratingly mixed message.

This too is a social problem, more so than a technical one. But the problem is one of expectations and habituated behaviors, and we're all vulnerable to problems of this nature. There's no technology that can anticipate and preclude all such problems, but perhaps a greater awareness of our own nature as habituated beings might help us avoid becoming frustrated and enable us to search for alternative explanations to our apparent frustration.

I didn't share that message with him, because it wouldn't have been received in this context. The "problem" wasn't his "fault." But it is an opportunity to raise the issue in a larger context, one that all of us share in the one world we inhabit.

Good Snark Hunting

The digital recording of Ben Hammersley's talk at Reboot is available here. The slides are also available in PDF format. I've listened to it a couple of times now, and I'd like to share a few of my thoughts, such as they are at the moment. This may not be everything I think about his talk, but it's my biggest criticism or objection.

I began to listen to the talk with a certain expectation, based on what I'd read at Dave Weinberger's weblog. I expected to hear a very snarky commentary about how the inhabitants of the "hinternet" were clueless, compared to the enlightened wisdom of the digerati.

At first, I was very surprised to hear what seemed to be a fairly light-hearted presentation, that touched on many issues in a way that seemed to reflect my own point of view. In fact, I did not hear the words that most exercised me in reaction to Dave Weinberger's post until the very end of the presentation, and then I was very disappointed, if not exactly as exercised as the first time I read Dave's comments about it.

The main criticism I have of his talk is the sense of entitlement that seems to undergird the general thrust of the argument that delivers its conclusion at 27 minutes and 10 seconds into the talk; that we need a new movement to teach the "people in the hinterlands, the people in the dark, sort of northern towns of England, equivalent, how to deal with each other in this new technological world that we've already created and that we're already using. Because if we don't grab those people and tell them how to behave in these worlds, they will destroy the world, because there is more of them than there are of us. So we have to develop a new etiquette and a new way of dealing with each other in these things that we're building, before anybody else, other than the people in this room, and people like us, will embrace it as well. Thank you very much."

That's as near a verbatim transcription of his conclusion as I can manage.

For 25 minutes, Mr. Hammersley gave a very amusing presentation. He made his audience laugh, and he validated them. At the beginning, his opening premise is that intersection of technology and etiquette is one of the big problems that "we technologists have to come to terms with." So he identified himself with his audience as a "technologist," sort of immediately dividing the world into technologists and non-technologists. He wore a skirt, which is probably a disarming distraction most of the time. (Which is to say I think he wears one for more than just his two stated reasons. I think he might feel it gives him a social advantage of some kind, as new people are initially somewhat off-balance as they try to process a somewhat incongruous appearance. Listening to a recording of the talk, I didn't know he was wearing a skirt, apart from a number of references to it. I don't have any problem with men wearing skirts as long as they have the legs for it.) He identified with his audience and drew them in through use of the pronoun "we," and he was rather witty and entertaining. It seems to me that that's a pretty thorough effort at disengaging the audience's critical thinking faculties. He's not about to challenge his audience in any way. He's there to entertain them, and then give them a "mission," one that, naturally, they are uniquely suited for by virtue of their special knowledge as "technologists."

I was quite relieved and encouraged when the very first question from the audience began "When you say we have to 'teach' people how to behave..."

Mr. Hammersley cut off his questioner before he even had a chance to finish his thought. This suggests to me that Mr. Hammersley was at least somewhat aware of the rather presumptuous nature of his conclusion. Yet he went ahead and offered it in his presentation anyway, so I gather he genuinely meant it. He immediately offered his own take on the deficiency, suggesting, rightly I think, that we have to start talking about it. Perhaps "we" was meant to be more inclusive in this context, but he's not clear. But this idea is betrayed in his subsequent remark, "Because there are more old people than there are of us." Okay, so now it's "us" and "old people." Picture me jumping up and down, and the throbbing vein in my left temple. And I'm not exercised about the word "old" in the context of "age." I'm exercised about the word "old" in the context of "new world," and this is one of the reasons I'm so sick of the "world" metaphor for the internet. There is only one world, and we all have to live in it.

His questioner tried to make the point that "That's exactly the attitude that works against having more people learn how to use these new technologies." Mr. Hammersley replied, "Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I quite agree. That's it absolutely. Yeah. That was me being stupid. Sorry."

The guy who asked that first question is my hero, and I'm happy to know that at least one person listened with his critical faculties engaged.

I'm not convinced, by his response, that Mr. Hammersley sees a problem with his point of view. I think his self-deprecating admission of stupidity was more a way of disarming his questioner and the audience, than an admission of some deficiency in his conclusion. He's exactly right that many of the problems we confront with new technologies are social ones. They are not new problems, they are old problems being manifested in new ways. Technology does not change human nature. It does not change what human beings do. It expands those activities in space, and compresses them in time. The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory Mr. Hammersley cites is the same formula that has governed middle school and high school assemblies for generations, and in similar venues long, long before. I think it's at least very presumptuous of Mr. Hammersley, and at worst an expression of a very élitist sense of entitlement, to sort of just assume that technologists are people who are somehow uniquely suited to solving these problems. I think it is at least possible that there are people in the "hinternet" who may may have as much insight, possibly more, into solving these sorts of social problems than a self-selected group of "technologists," who seem quite content to talk only amongst themselves.

"If we don't grab those people and tell them how to behave in these worlds, then they will destroy the world, because there is more of them than there are of us."

This, in my opinion, is part of the problem with the myth-making attendant to the opportunities the internet presents. Turning it into a "world" or "worlds," I'm not really sure how Mr. Hammersley got to the plural there, turns an artifact into something much more emotionally freighted. The internet could vanish in a flash of light and a puff of smoke tomorrow and the world would still be here. But these romanticized notions create something that must be "saved" from yet another division between "us" and "them." So yes, meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Someone who wants to save an "us" from a "them."

The finger is not the moon. I think this is a pretty good example of someone giving the "rest of us," the finger.

As usual, I'm authority on nothing. I make all this shit up. You are responsible for your own thinking.

Blog Song

Joni Mitchell's People's Parties just came up in the rotation, and it seemed to me that the lyric could be a meditation, in some ways, on the dynamic of weblogs. Of course, that just reminds me that there's really nothing new under the sun.

People's Parties, Joni Mitchell

All the people at this party

They've got a lot of style

They've got stamps of many countries

They've got passport smiles

Some are friendly

Some are cutting

Some are watching it from the wings

Some are standing in the centre

Giving to get something

Photo Beauty gets attention

Then her eye paint's running down

She's got a rose in her teeth

And a Iampshade crown

One minute she's so happy

Then she's crying on someone's knee

Saying laughing and crying

You know it's the same release

I told you when I met you

I was crazy

Cry for us all Beauty

Cry for Eddie in the corner

Thinking he's nobody

And Jack behind his joker

And stone-cold Grace behind her fan

And me in my frightened silence

Thinking I don't understand

I feel like I'm sleeping

Can you wake me

You seem to have a broader sensibility

I'm just living on nerves and feelings

With a weak and a lazy mind

And coming to peoples parties

Fumbling deaf dumb and blind

I wish I had more sense of humor

Keeping the sadness at bay

Throwing the lightness on these things

Laughing it all away

Laughing it alI away

Laughing it all away

What? No "One more thing..."?

The text of Steve Jobs' commencement address at Stanford.

"Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith."

Thanks, Pascale.

Ethics of Belief

Belief, that sacred faculty which prompts the decisions of our will, and knits into harmonious working all the compacted energies of our being, is ours not for ourselves, but for humanity. It is rightly used on truths which have been established by long experience and waiting toil, and which have stood in the fierce light of free and fearless questioning. Then it helps to bind men together, and to strengthen and direct their common action. It is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements, for the solace and private pleasure of the believer; to add a tinsel splendour to the plain straight road of our life and display a bright mirage beyond it; or even to drown the common sorrows of our kind by a self-deception which allows them not only to cast down, but also to degrade us.

William Clifford, The Ethics of Belief

The book I'm reading, Truth: A Guide, opens with a discussion of William Clifford's The Ethics of Belief, and William James' The Will to Believe. I had read the James essay, but I hadn't read Clifford's. Good stuff to chew on.

If You Insist

Doc Searls and I are engaged in a public discussion of what the activities of those who write about the internet mean. I think that's probably the best way to describe it. It's a worthwhile discussion to me, others may find it boring and faintly ridiculous. Your mileage may vary.

I believe we humans who share this planet face many challenges. Some of them are a consequence of the things we do, some of them are a consequence of the forces of nature, some of them are a consequence of human nature. Many of these are especially difficult problems, like global climate change, some are merely technical, though they are made more difficult by various aspects of human nature. We've exhibited an immense capacity to cooperate and meet challenges together before, but I think things are reaching a point in terms of scale that there is some reason to be less than sanguine about our potential to rise to each of the challenges that face us. Thinking clearly would seem to be essential if we're to have the capacity to overcome many of the problems that complicate our already complex existence.

Doc and Dave Weinberger are two individuals who have become highly, and I use that word with some reservation, influential in shaping how we think about the internet and what it means. I don't claim to know the depth and breadth of opinion about the nature of the internet, but in those areas where I find the most energy, the greatest vigor in advancing any vision, that vision is largely consistent with what Doc and Dave and others put forward.

I find that vision unreasonably positive. It's as if the "irrational exuberance" of the dot com era persists in the myth-making of the new century. I believe a more sober analysis, while less romantic, might make some problems more tractable. I believe many of the ideas they advance, if they continue to be adopted, make many problems less tractable.

Doc is correct when he writes, " Prepositions tend to give away the methaphors that frame our thought: the same metaphors that supply the vocabularies we think and talk (literally) in terms of." This is the framework of a belief system. A set of ideas we use, often unconsciously, to orient ourselves to the events in our world, the one world we all share.

Doc also writes, "Dave keeps insisting that, just because some of us (notably Cluetrain authors) speak at conferences, and have somewhat popular blogs (there are many that get far more traffic than either David Weinberger's or mine, for what little that's worth), that we're in charge of something."

The word authority can conjure different responses depending on the aspect one is most sensitive to. I believe Doc is responding the idea that authorities are often in charge of something. That idea of being "in charge of something" is most closely related to the idea of responsibility, the close correlate of authority, and its too often misunderstood other correlate accountability. But authority also refers to expertise, or knowledge, a finger pointing to the moon. Although Doc and Dave don't present themselves as people who are especially in charge of anything, they emphatically do present themselves as authorities, at least insofar has informing how the rest of us ought to think about the internet.

At some point I would like to go back and look at how the automobile was received and interpreted by the authorities of the day, as it was being introduced to a mass market. I think it's probably reasonable to say that nobody seriously raised the notion of nearly 50,000 deaths in automobile accidents each year, or bad drivers, or the possibility of smog, or the depletion of finite natural resources, or the economic disruptions due to global competition, or the changes in scale to human architecture and urban centers as a result of our accommodating ourselves to this new machine. I don't know, but I'd be fairly confident that apart from some luddites who fear any new technology, the response by the thought leaders, the opinion makers, the authorities of the day was probably a uniformly positive one. If we had had a more balanced, more nuanced view of the anticipated benefits and potential problems of widespread adoption of the automobile, might history have unfolded a little differently, perhaps a little better?

That's just idle speculation on my part, and it doesn't prove anything. But I think it does suggest that we human beings now have some fairly substantial experience with the adoption and implementation of new technologies and the consequences thereof, that we might be able to help shape the beliefs and thoughts about new technologies in a more sober, more rational way.

Unfortunately, our competitive nature seems to offer some significant barriers to that. We compete for attention and one way we compete for attention is by promoting something as good. This is the aspect of faith. This internet thing is all good. The other way is to appeal to fear and promote something as bad. For better or worse, people have little appetite for the middle ground. They want to be either for something, or against it. It doesn't have to be that way, but we need to find champions who can speak articulately in a way that makes a more balanced view at least palatable, even if it's not likely to be especially compelling.

One quick example of the consequences of the framework being erected by Doc and Dave and Ben Hammersley and others may be found in this from Doc's weblog:

"With little fanfare, there is a battle going on for the soul of the Internet. The United Nations and the ITU (International Communications Union) are trying to wrest control of domain names, the DNS and IP addresses from ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). This battle manifests itself through the U.N.-created World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) and the ITU-lead Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG).

If that sounds extra wonky, it is.

It also couldn't be more important."

The italics is Doc quoting Elliot Noss, the next two sentences are Doc's. By all means, read the entire post and the links it points to. Nowhere do I note anywhere in Doc's post a note of caution, or an illumination of nuance. I take that sentence, "It also couldn't be more important," to be an endorsement of the argument and the sentiment. I don't know how else it might be parsed.

Doc speaks of "framing" and "metaphors" and so please note the framing and metaphor at work here: a battle. A zero-sum contest, where if one side "wins" the other side "loses." And what is at stake? Another metaphor, the "soul" of the internet.

The internet has no soul, it is an artifact. Human beings have souls, maybe. Their souls are perhaps something to be concerned about. The "soul of the machine?" Perhaps we might read Forster again. One encounters this quite often in the metaphors and myths put forward by Doc and Dave and others. I've objected to the notions of "the values of the internet," because again, the internet is an artifact, it doesn't have values. People have values, and not all the people using the artifact share the same values. This is unhelpful and places barriers in the way of seeking reasonable solutions to legitimate problems, and like it or not, Doc and Dave are among the authorities placing those barriers there. They are responsible for them. Not solely, perhaps not consciously, but nevertheless they are responsible.

It's not about who controls your speech, it's about who is responsible for shaping the way you think about an issue.

There's much more to say about this, but I'm out of time for this morning. My apologies if you find this boring or faintly ridiculous, but be warned I'll insist on returning to it. I also happen to believe it couldn't be more important.

Teaching

Ben Hammersley says he "misspoke" when he mentioned that "we" (whoever "we" really are) need to "teach" the rubes, I mean, people of the hinterweb (another new word to divide us, each from one another) how to behave in the brave new world of the digital machine. Perhaps there's a hint of humility there, or maybe it's just an awareness of the appearance of arrogance. Who knows? We await the MP3. The digitized truth will set us free.

I was interested in Don Park's post on the woman who refused to clean up her dog's crap. Most of the reaction to Don's post seems to be along the lines that what happened to the woman was no big deal, and anyway, she deserved it. It seems we never did abandon our love for public humiliation. Perhaps our new virtual world can have its own, humane of course, version of the stocks and the pillory, where nobody really gets hurt; and the smart mob, can teach those who don't know how to behave the new etiquette.

I can hardly wait.

In the mean time, Dan Gillmor has started posting little one minute podcasts, A Minute with Dan Gillmor. In the inaugural one called, appropriately enough, Bad Behavior, he discusses a topic very near to my heart, bad drivers.

The tag line to whatever it is I do here is from the movie Groundhog Day, as Bill Murray is instructing the woodchuck in the finer points of safe driving, "Don't drive angry. Don't drive angry."

That means something to me. I never knew I had an anger problem until I went to see someone about another problem I was having. She kept wanting to talk about my "anger problem," and, naturally, it made me mad. But it was one of those things where I kind of get hung up on proving I'm right and someone else is wrong, like that never happens anymore, so I didn't just stop seeing her. Anyway, over the course of many weeks, I began to discover that, yes, I did have an anger problem. This was the first of many somewhat difficult and disappointing, but important and, ultimately, liberating insights I was to have into my own behavior.

One of the many times I got angry was behind the wheel of my car, in situations much like the one Dan describes. Often, I would want someone to "teach that guy a lesson" too, and too often, I would entertain the notion that it could be me. Kind of like Clark Griswold as Mad Max, or something. So I'd tailgate, or pass on the right and then cut off someone who had cut me off, or flip him or her the bird, or blow the horn, or just shout curses fecklessly in the car. It wasn't good for me, and it wasn't good for the folks who had to share the road with me.

But what I learned from talking to the nice lady who told me I had an anger problem was to pay at least as much attention to what was going on inside me as I was to what was going on outside of me. In this regard, the road became a part of what Buddhists might call "my practice." Someone would cut me off or do something reckless, and I'd feel the familiar emotional reaction, but I learned to focus on that reaction, rather than on the other driver. After all, what could I do about the other driver? (Well, one day we'll be able to take high definition video of the offender, including their license plate, and then post it to the web with all the self-righteous umbrage we can muster. Probably while we're driving. Yea, us!)

So I learned to pay attention to what I was feeling, and what I was believing that gave rise to those feelings. A lot of times, we sort of assume we know what's going on when the other person is behaving badly, they're just being a jerk! Well, maybe they are; but maybe they aren't too. Maybe someone is racing home to deal with a sudden emergency. Yeah, we'd all like to believe we'd drive safely in that situation, but maybe we wouldn't. Maybe they're late for an important meeting and if they miss the meeting they'll lose the big sale or their job. Maybe they are just self-centered and self-absorbed and inconsiderate of those around them; but if they haven't actually just caused an accident, and given the fact that there's little else you can really do, isn't that more to be pitied than raged against? But the point is, you don't know what the circumstances are for the other person. What are the ethics of ignorance? If you genuinely believe they are a menace, perhaps the most appropriate thing to do would be to pull off the road and call the authorities.

But our emotional responses are often habitual in certain situations, daily commuting being one of them. Learning to be aware of these habitual responses and practicing mindfulness helps one to live a conscious life. So ultimately, I went from wanting to teach those other drivers a lesson, to what I could learn from those other drivers about myself.

Just something to think about when we think about people needing to be "taught" and getting "what they deserve."

Postscript: So, do I still have an anger problem? Anger is like the flu. Everybody gets it, and if you're relatively healthy and treat it properly, it's unpleasant but it isn't a really a "problem." If you're not healthy, or don't treat it properly, however, it can become a real problem. I've learned how to try to stay healthy, and how to treat my anger. Doesn't mean it isn't still a problem now and then, but even when it is, it's less of one than it ever was before. Most people with anger problems are like me, they don't think they have one.

Resonance

A commenter at Don Park's weblog mentioned E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops, which I recall reading, I think, in the ninth grade as an assignment. It seems it made a greater impression on me than my faint recollection of it suggests.

I couldn't help but think of Dave Weinberger and Ben Hammersley and so many of the other true believers when I read this paragraph:

"The Machine," they exclaimed, "feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being. The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine." And before long this allocution was printed on the first page of the Book, and in subsequent editions the ritual swelled into a complicated system of praise and prayer. The word "religion" was sedulously avoided, and in theory the Machine was still the creation and the implement of man. but in practice all, save a few retrogrades, worshipped it as divine. Nor was it worshipped in unity. One believer would be chiefly impressed by the blue optic plates, through which he saw other believers; another by the mending apparatus, which sinful Kuno had compared to worms; another by the lifts, another by the Book. And each would pray to this or to that, and ask it to intercede for him with the Machine as a whole. Persecution - that also was present. It did not break out, for reasons that will be set forward shortly. But it was latent, and all who did not accept the minimum known as "undenominational Mechanism" lived in danger of Homelessness, which means death, as we know.

And these are for Doc:

Not bad for 1909.

Watching the Clouds Go By

This is from 11:26 a.m. to 5:25 p.m. today, one shot every minute, looking east. Next time I think I might try locking the exposure. I didn't use the H.264 codec because not everyone is up on QuickTime 7 yet, so it's just a rather muddy JPEG compression. Because the pictures are taken at regular intervals, you can see where the wind speed increased. I used my old Kodak DC290, which has a very nice time-lapse photography feature. I also used the lowest resolution since it was going to end up on the web. One of these days I'll try it at a little higher resolution with no compression and then perhaps create an HD version.

I know I should create a poster frame, because this takes a while to load. Maybe later, I'll have to look up how to do it, and I'm out of time tonight.

Abort, Retry, Fail

Remember a few days ago when I was bitching about Doc Searls' assertion that the web was so "unmediated" that it was almost meaningless to call it a "medium?" And then Dave Weinberger piped up to point out that it was "differently mediated," and that somehow this meant something that I was missing or something? And then there was the usual give-and-take between the usual suspects and then it kind of died down as we all went "Ooooh...Shiny!" on the latest hip, dope, cool new thing to occupy our attention, or distract us from our suffering? Remember all that?

Well, Dave and Doc headed east to participate in one of those conferences that everyone who's anyone always seems to be attending, specifically Reboot, and apparently it's the 7th iteration of this particular gathering of the digerati. Dave Weinberger is giving reports from the conference in his weblog, and one of those he shared with us is here, wherein we may read this:

Our mission, says Ben, is a new Tatler that will teach the people in the Hinternet "how to deal with each other in this new technological world that we've already created." If we don't teach them that, they will destroy the new world because "there are more of them than there are of us." He adds that he doesn't mean "teach" so much as show.

Read the whole thing. Yeah, he oversimplified, but I'm not sure any amount of complexity or nuance could save this piece of tripe.

"New technological world that we've already created." There's Dave's fixation with the "web as world" metaphor or whatever. Picture me jumping up and down.

There's no lack for self-esteem in this crowd, I can tell you that!

We've (us, our group, our "tribe," our "mob" (maybe it's "smart")) created (I guess maybe it's a done deal then. Is it the seventh day? Do "we" get to rest now? Probably not. Have to protect "our" creation from those rubes in the "Hinternet.") a new world!

Let me put on my Church Lady voice, "Well, isn't that special."

"They will destroy the new world." The barbarians are at the gates! The Morlocks are eating the Eloi! Sound the alarm! Man the barricades!

Not only was Doc wrong that the web is unmediated, but Dave didn't go far enough in explaining how it was differently mediated. It's going to be mediated by the right people, the people who created the new world, so that those other people don't destroy it.

Now, Dave Weinberger may protest that he oversimplified and I'm leaping to conclusions or drawing the wrong inferences from his brief synopsis of what was probably a lengthy, and I'm quite certain scintillating, presentation. I don't think so, because what I'm objecting to is the attitude of entitlement exhibited by those who supposedly "get it." The guys who have a Cluetrain™ RailPass. The New Prometheans, bringing the light of networked, digital clarity to a benighted humanity. Thus securing for themselves a special place near the top of the hierarchy. The synopsis was sufficient to show me that that attitude was very much in evidence.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Somebody's always trying to sell you something, and it ain't the truth. Mostly I think these conferences are about these folks selling themselves to each other. "Here's why we need to be in charge." Not that that's likely to happen. Other folks have their own ideas about that, and it probably won't be the rubes in the sticks that "destroy the new world." I suppose they might draw comfort from the understanding that destruction is the antecedent to all creation; or the doctrine of non-attachment due to the transient nature of all phenomena. Or maybe they'll all just go do shots of schnapps and remember the "good ol' days," when they were the masters of the universe, and post pictures of each other to Flickr.

"Weather is here. Wish you were beautiful."

Kind of a wet, gray, soupy day, thanks to Arlene. I wouldn't mind the rain so much, and the the wind is kind of pleasant, but the humidity is like 93%. Blech. But that's Florida! The Sunshine State! Any of you thinking of moving here should probably consider Arizona instead. Yes, definitely Arizona.

"You can't handle the truth!"

AKMA has a nice quotation up regarding the nature of the truth and how we might wish to talk about it. I'm pretty sure I don't live up to that standard, but I can certainly recognize its worth. I prefer the more contemporary translation offered in another post AKMA links to, but the meaning is pretty clear.

In other truth-related trivia, I was browsing through Books-a-Million today and picked up a copy of Truth A Guide by Simon Blackburn, which I could have saved a lot of money on had I bought it at Amazon. But it's hard to just browse at Amazon. Anyway, the author is a philosopher, so perhaps he's a man of some authority on the truth; certainly a man with an informed opinion anyway. I'm probably what could be termed an absolute-relativist, though on alternate days it's likely I'm a relative-absolutist. Mostly, I'm just a guy with an opinion.

Truth be told, I also picked up Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton. I may regret buying the book. It was kind of in impulse buy, fueled by my interest in our fixation on rank in hierarchies. Not sure if this'll be very helpful, but I liked the pictures.

Now to just make time to read them...

An Encouraging Development

I like Technorati's new beta design. Unlike Scoble, I won't claim that they "listened to my pleas," but many of the things I've pissed, moaned and complained about are addressed in the new design.

First off, there is no link to the Top 100! Hallelujah and high-ten your partner! There is a link to a "Popular" page, and I was surprised and gratified to see there is no link to the Top 100 there, either. And, when you click on the "More Blogs" link, there is a list, but they're described as being ranked by popularity (Actually, I take that back. They use the word "biggest," which is probably even better! It's more value-neutral than "popular.") as measured by links! Woo-hoo! None of this "authority" bullshit.

(Another update: I guess I need a new prescription for my bifocals, because sure enough, there's a link to the "Top 100" in the "Popular" page. Still, it is an improvement. It would be better if they just dropped the whole "Top 100" reference. They rely on bloggers' desire to be in the "Top 100" to help direct attention to Technorati, and apart from that "weak curiosity" Emerson warned us about, there's little informational value in who's "in" or "out" of the "Top 100." So my enthusiasm for the new design is dampened somewhat.)

But... (There always has to be a "but.") On the About page rests the tired claim that Technorati is "the authority on what's going on in the world of weblogs." And on the Terms of Service page is the same disclaimer of all responsibility for relying on their so-called "authority." Technorati could call themselves the "leading source of timely information what's going in the world of weblogs," and I wouldn't object. I don't know if that's any more true than being "the authority," but it wouldn't make a mockery of the concept of authority and responsibility.

So, for the most part, I think it's a very good job at addressing what were, to me and a few other folks, some serious shortcomings. I'm glad to see it. Change that first sentence on the About page, and I may have nothing to bitch about.

Well, there's probably not much chance of that...

Boring Job a Health Hazard?

According to this study, a dull, dead-end job increases your risk of heart attack. (I say reading health study reports increases your risk of heart attack. Someone should study that.) The threat appears to be the inability of heart to adapt should something new come along and actually place a demand on it.

I say take up martial arts!

Well, you could just exercise, I guess.

Oh, and be thankful you have a job. Really. Even if it's "boring you to death." You can always exercise, but at least you're not unemployed! An attitude of gratitude probably isn't going to increase your risk of anything, except maybe serenity.

Say What?

Dave Weinberger is jetting over to Copenhagen to speak at the Reboot Conference about the Natural Shape of Knowledge. That "Shape of Knowledge" thing is the title of his talk, not the subject of the conference, which, as near as I can tell, has no subject or purpose. He offers a glimpse of his preparations for his presentation and I... have nothing to say. I don't have a friggin' clue what he's talking about, nor do I even have an inkling of why it matters or why I should care. Which is why I feel kind of ignorant sometimes reading stuff by Dave and AKMA and even Shelley.

But that's okay. It keeps me from having to "jump up and down" so much. My knees thank you all.

Human Nature

Like the phrase "markets are conversations," I am repelled by the notion of "smart mobs." It seems to me that anyone coining such a phrase (Howard Rheingold is the person most closely associated with it in my mind, having written a book with the same title.), has never had a close encounter with a mob. I have, and I found it a frightening and profoundly disturbing thing.

With that in mind, Don Park points to a timely example of human nature and how technology expands what human beings do in space and compresses them in time, both the good and the not-so-good. I would categorize this as among the latter. Perhaps more troubling are the comments from his readers that this is no big deal, and that she deserved what she got.

Who was that guy with that whole "cast the first stone" thing? AKMA? Bueller? Anyone?

The internet. "This changes everything." Yes, we're all so empowered now.

Tell me, what's the enabling technology for compassion? What's the enabling technology for wisdom? Are these features planned for Web 3.0? 4.0? When?

He's Back

Picked up my son last night at the airport. Naturally, the flight was delayed so they didn't get in until about 11:20 and I didn't make back to the Dave Cave until almost 1:00 AM.

Sounds like he had a great time. Two of the adults came up to me and said they really enjoyed him in the trip. That's always nice to hear. I told him to burn his pictures to CD and then just give me a copy.

I gather he was in on a surprise for his English teacher. Unknown to her, her boyfriend had flown to Paris and he planned to propose to her at the top of the Eiffel Tower. So Chris and one of the other adults made sure she made it to the top at the appropriate time, and I gather it was a complete surprise and he managed to get a few pictures. That's pretty neat.

He wants to go back next summer and do some camping after the scheduled tour ends. We'll see how that shapes up.

It's good to have him back.

Spongeworthy?

Mothers, daughters, learned behavior, sponges.

Interesting.

Probably only faintly amusing if you remember the "spongeworthy" episode of Seinfeld.

The Rich Get Richer (And what else is new?)

plutocracy

• a country or society governed in this way.
• an elite or ruling class of people whose power derives from their wealth.

Intel It Will Be

Apple has announced it will be moving the Mac to the Intel x86 processor.

I think it's a pretty bold move for Apple, and one that's not without some risk. I think they'll likely take a hit in revenues this year while people hold their breath and their wallets waiting to see what new machines will be forthcoming. But I'm also confident that Apple will have at least a couple of consumer electronics devices to keep the cash registers ringing.

Personally, as soon as I feel I can afford one, I'll probably buy an iMac G5 because I like the design and I'd welcome the ability to host multi-person video chats with my family. I'll hold off on getting another tower until we see what Apple has in mind with the new Intel designs, which will probably be among the last to roll out. As long as they aren't required to display that cheesy "intel inside" logo, I'll be happy. If they do, I'll be strongly inclined to fly to Cupertino and personally kick Steve Jobs' ass. I don't think either of us has anything to worry about though. Steve's got excellent taste, and he's pretty adamant about how something's going to look. I don't see him making a deal with Intel that has him defacing his art with their marketing crap.

The discussion of cpu performance per watt of power was reminiscent of the design decisions that went into choosing the ARM processor for the Newton Messagepad. Interestingly, Intel ended up owning the rights to ARM's RISC designs about the time Steve was canceling the Newton. I think many of Apple's more innovative designs are probably hamstrung by power and heat management issues, certainly in the Powerbooks with the nonexistent G5, and I think we're seeing that to some extent in the problems with the first version of the iMac G5.

Some of those ever-vigilant, civil rights activists of the "blogosphere" are wondering, mostly rhetorically, where the lawsuit is against C|Net for running the story on Friday. It probably is a little early, but even so, you wouldn't expect to see one if it was an authorized leak, released over the weekend to give the market a chance to chew on it a bit before the announcement. But hey, that never stopped anyone from making an obvious if totally illegitimate point.

All Charged Up

This weekend I made sure all the lithium ion batteries to the various gadgets that make my modern life so much more convenient were fully charged. This included the iBook, the Gameboy Advance SP, the iPod Shuffle, the 40GB 3G iPod is usually its dock all the time anyway, both batteries for my Kodak DX6490, my Sony Clié TG50, my Nokia 3660, and my Logitech Bluetooth wireless headset adapter. I think the only one I missed was the camcorder.

So far, I've had pretty good luck with battery life in my portables. With Li-ION batteries, the key is never to fully discharge them. They prefer lots of shallow charges. I'd left the Shuffle on in my bag and even though it was sleeping, it was pretty dead. I have an automobile accessory power (remember when they were called "cigarette lighters?") adapter for the Nokia, and that usually charges on my daily commutes. The Clié usually charges in its dock connected to the big Mac, but I've got an accessory power adapter for it as well.

I connected up the Lexmark P915, dropped in the ink cartridges and printed a bunch of 4x6 snapshots this weekend; both through the printer with no computer attached, and with the iBook via iPhoto (4.0.x). The pictures printed from the computer seemed to look better than the ones straight from the printer, I think. The media card reader seemed a little flakey. The first time I tried it, iPhoto was able to import images from it, though it seemed rather slow for a USB 2.0 device. May have been the fact that it was an MMC card, vice Secure Digital, which is faster at data transfer. The second time was with my SD card, and iPhoto recognized a card, but never managed to import the pictures. ImageCapture was able to grab them with no problem though. Finder saw the cards in both cases with no problems.

It took me a few tries to get the pictures to print properly. Despite having "auto-sensing" for what type of paper is loaded in the printer, it doesn't "auto-size" the Page Setup. Once I told iPhoto I was using 4x6 paper, all was well. I printed out a couple of of the same pictures I had previously printed on the Lexmark Z52 without the photo cartridge. I'd say the P915 pictures were a little "richer." The metallic highlights from Caitie's braces in one outdoor shot seemed more metallic from the P915 than from the Z52. The blond highlights in her hair seemed a little brighter too. But, side by side, nothing really leapt out at me. This wasn't a very scientific test, the Z52 was connected to the big Mac, which is running iPhoto 5.0.x, while the iBook is still running iPhoto 4.x. I'd say I'm quite happy with the results from both printers. The P915 is much quieter though, and the color display of the estimated ink levels is interesting, though it remains to be seen if they're accurate. According to the reported level of the color cartridge, we may know soon!

I don't know how much better a Canon, Epson or an HP printer would do, but for $50.00, the P915 seems like a pretty good deal. Probably a good deal at $99.00 too, which seems to be the going rate these days.

"It pegged me as a player."

Okay, I lied. I'm back because this article in the NY Times is too good to ignore for another 24 hours, because then you might miss it.

Competition for rank in the hierarchy scales well. It's fractal. It's self-similar at any scale or sub-set of human activity you care to look at. This happens to be Silicon Valley. It could just as well be the "blogosphere," or your high school. Some quotations, not in their original order, mixed in with a little bit of Emerson you're already familiar with:

''Everyone's watching everyone else. Like Hollywood, there's this pecking order, and everyone is fundamentally aware of where they stand in the pecking order. They may pretend like they don't, but they know it.''

Emerson: "The power men possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity."

Then again, maybe it was a "smart mob."

''They tracked SocialNet as modestly interesting,'' Hoffman said of his fellow entrepreneurs, but ''PayPal was my induction into the circuit. It pegged me as legit; it pegged me as a player.'' As if by magic, folks like Andreessen were now taking his calls and returning his e-mail messages.

There's been some concern shared with me that I might be angling to become a "player." I'm not. Not in this game, anyway.

He is one of a band of restless Wunderkinder who, despite considerable success during the 1990's at an improbably young age, seem to possess everything except peace of mind.

Emerson: "A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles."

And yet, despite his accomplishments -- and the relatively majestic size of his bank account -- Pincus suffers from something of an inferiority complex. ''There's an A-list here, and then there's everyone else,'' he says. ''And I'm not A-list.''

Every community has its haves and its have-nots, but in Silicon Valley, it's the additional deep divisions and steep hierarchies among the haves that is unique: the haves and the have-everythings.

A little more than "faintly" ridiculous, I think.

This remains the most disappointing thing.

Emerson again: "All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves."

"Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken."

This "changing the world" view is the same shallow, superficial, vain view of "the world" that Robert Scoble is always championing. What's depressing is that this activity is what occupies the attention of so many of our "smartest," most energetic, most creative people. Maybe they're not the smartest, most energetic, most creative, but they're definitely among the most competitive. They become the authorities that so many monkeys like to watch. To include yours truly. But then I like to throw shit.

All this competition for rank in the hierarchy has brought about some unquestionably wonderful things, and I'm not suggesting that all this competition stop, or that we forego advancements and innovation in science and technology. I'm suggesting that we might be well served if we understood more about ourselves, the limits to what competition for rank in the hierarchy can achieve, and to think about what effort we might make toward achieving those things we all seem to say we want in the world, which all our technology and all our competition have failed to give us.

I think it's possible we may be in the relatively early stages of the process of doing this. I have little doubt that some of that effort itself will be turned into a type of competition for authority, though we might be able to factor that into our efforts this time around, to some extent. I have serious reservations about how successful we might be. China and India are now coming on strong in their competition for rank in the hierarchy, and they won't be deterred from their efforts by thoughts of introspection and reflection. Technology will continue to shrink the world and expand our capacity for both good and ill.

Most days, I kind of think it's pointless to think about people creating a "better world." I suspect it's mostly enough to worry about trying to create one better person, the only person I'm truly responsible for, and that's me. We're not here to change "the world." The world is here so that we may learn how we might change ourselves. Maybe that's the point.