logo Ming the Mechanic - Category: Diary
An old rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open, free and exciting is waking up.


Sunday, December 1, 2002day link 

 Material for my weblog
I was just about to 'complain' that there are too many things out there to write about, when I notice today that several of my sources are lamenting that it is a slow day with nothing to write about.

See, I started only recently to monitor a bunch of RSS feeds from the weblogs of other people I feel some connection with. For those who don't know, RSS is a standard protocol for gathering and aggregating regular feeds of posted items from various news sources. I use Radio Userland as the program to pick up those feeds, but I will, when I have a chance, build that feature into my own NewsLog program.

But I notice that there's a risk in just being reactive to what other people are saying or doing, and trying to keep up with it all. That's not what I have in mind. I'd like to be in touch with what is going on for others, but I'd like to not be stressed out if that happens to be a lot, and I'd like not to be bored if that happens to be only a little. I'd rather start right where I am, writing about what is on my mind, or on my desk, or in my life. And then, if I have extra steam, or I need inspiration, I might go out and look for what other people are getting themselves into. In other words, I want it to be driven by ME. I don't want to be a slave to RSS feeds any more than I want to be a slave to keeping up with my e-mail, or with the news in the newspaper. I just needed to state that.
[ | 2002-12-01 18:51 | 2 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Thursday, November 28, 2002day link 

 Wrong Number
picture My phone rings at 3AM. "Er det flyttemanden? Det er Torben ovre fra Gammel Holte GÃ¥rd..." I was confused for a moment, and thought it was some Danish friend of mine making fun. Until I finally remembered that I have a phone number in Denmark, and I had it forwarded to the phone on my desk in Los Angeles. It was the first wrong number. It was a guy trying to call a moving company to move some stuff. But it sounded like he was right there, and it connected me right away with a bunch of things, like the Danish joviality. And he happened to call from a place very close to where I lived when I grew up. For that matter, a place I was looking at every day while waiting for the bus to school. It is a stately manor which today is a museum, and which I paid absolutely no attention to while waiting for the bus. Just made the world a good deal smaller suddenly.
[ | 2002-11-28 14:07 | 0 comments | PermaLink ]

 Thanksgiving
picture I'm thankful that there is a little girl who will wake me up and take me by the hand to go outside in the wind and sit by the curb to watch the leaves blow off the trees. And who will hand me an instrument so we can march in a parade through the house. Somebody who will remember that it is always a good time for chocolate milk.

I am thankful for other people too. Thankful for love and loyalty, for being there no matter what, for caring, for trusting, for noticing and remembering things I forget. But mostly for waking me up to the preciousness of life in the moment. Making me breathe and making me smile.
[ | 2002-11-28 01:59 | 1 comment | PermaLink ]  More >


Sunday, November 24, 2002day link 

 A Capitalist Game
picture I have introduced a little capitalist experiment to my family in the form of a game. You know, capitalism is when you have some capital and you look around for what you can invest it in, in order to get it to grow as much as possible, so you get more back. That is as opposed to the worker / poor person / paycheck-to-paycheck mentality, which is that you look at what stuff you have, and you go work to get money so you can buy. some nicer stuff. Most of my life, including at this moment, I've been in that second category, spending all my money every month, or sooner, and I've had quite some disdain for the capitalist way of thinking. But, hey, I'm open to re-evaluating things once in a while. And what I do like is the idea that wealth is when you do more with less, and create big results with small means. So, here's the simple game:

Each of us, me, my wife Birgit, my son Zachery (16) and my daughter Marie (19), start with 100 dollars. The object of the game is to make it grow. We will check each week how we're doing. Since we all, me included, have very little idea on how to do it, we might support each other as to where to look for means that might work. But the idea is to develop some kind of business, preferably multiple streams of income, that will expand with as little work as possible, even while you sleep. And you'd be free to use no money at all, or to borrow money, and to involve other people's talents, etc.

I'm tired of working myself into the ground, and having my family just sort of take that for granted. Both they and I need an education in how to work smarter rather than harder. As to my kids, they would otherwise be ready to just go out and join the job market, get a low-paying job, and spend it all every month on buying stuff on credit. That's not really a legacy I'd like to leave them with.
[ | 2002-11-24 15:02 | 4 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Saturday, November 23, 2002day link 

 Space Station 3D
picture My son and I watched the Imax Space Station 3D movie. Imax is this system with huge screens, and it is also in 3D now. So here with the International Space Station, it was very much like being there. It gives a feeling of virtual presence that can't be conveyed through regular film or video. And that whole space station thing presents an optimistic, collaborative, global view on things. Here are a group of astronauts and scientists from a number of different countries, looking down on an earth without borders, working on interesting projects for the benefit of humanity, and having fun doing it.

Now, one thing that always strikes me about our supposedly most advanced earth technology is all those messy wires. That space station is just stuffed with cables and wires and tubes and stuff, lots of it hanging loose, and I'm sure that bad things happen if you cut any one of them. It is so vulnerable. Same thing in an airplane, if you look out the window by the wings when they're moving the flaps. Just a lot of wires and tubes out in the open. Our most advanced electronics, like in computers and satellites, seems to be done the same kind of way. Lots of flimsy wires and copper conduits soldered together with little dots of metal. A tiny crack in any one of them will bring down the whole thing. Seems awfully primitive.
[ | 2002-11-23 23:59 | 3 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Thursday, November 21, 2002day link 

 Cr8
picture I have this domain cr8.com which I feel particularly attached to, but I haven't figured out what to do with it yet. And, if you don't get it, it is supposed to sound like "CREATE". First of all, 3 letter .com domain names are very desirable, but very hard to come by. Not everybody gets the Create thing at first glance, and some people argue that it should be cre8, but I don't think that's as cool. I have gotten quite a few inquiries from other people who thought it was cool, who wanted to acquire it from me. But I jumped through some hoops to get it myself, so I don't let go of it easily. I'm still searching for the right thing to put behind it. Something about creativity or creative endeavors, obviously. A creative portal of some kind. Or a creative company or organization. I have cr8.it and a few other variations as well. Anyway, I'm just fishing for good ideas. Btw, on the subject of useless trivia, my shortest domain is b9.bz and my longest is supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.org, closely followed by idontknowwhattodowithmyself.com
[ | 2002-11-21 21:58 | 4 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Tuesday, November 19, 2002day link 

 The end of e-mail
Kevin Werbach has an article on slate.com prophesizing that spam is juat about to kill e-mail as we know it. And I agree. E-mail stopped being useful to me already a couple of years ago, because the ratio of stuff I want to stuff I don't want had become just unacceptable. And now it is much worse. I get much more spam than mail from real people, and I do get a lot of real mail.

The only viable answer is going to be that people will accept mail only from people they specifically have allowed to send them mail. You will have a 'whitelist' in the form of, for example, your address book. There might be some mechanism for strangers to validate that indeed they are real people, but gone are the days where you can just get directly through to a stranger. Next I think we'll probably need that for phones too. I also get more phone calls from pushy telemarketers than from real people.
[ | 2002-11-19 23:22 | 2 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Sunday, November 17, 2002day link 

 Finite and Infinite Games
picture There are at least two kinds of games: finite and infinite.

A finite game is a game that has fixed rules and boundaries, that is played for the purpose of winning and thereby ending the game.

An infinite game has no fixed rules or boundaries. In an infinite game you play with the boundaries and the purpose is to continue the game.

Finite players are serious; infinite games are playful.

Finite players try to control the game, predict everything that will happen, and set the outcome in advance. They are serious and determined about getting that outcome. They try to fix the future based on the past.

Infinite players enjoy being surprised. Continuously running into something one didn't know will ensure that the game will go on. The meaning of the past changes depending on what happens in the future.
[ | 2002-11-17 20:03 | 7 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Thursday, November 7, 2002day link 

 Daydreaming
pictureI suddenly have this urge to move to Switzerland. I get very stimulated by big changes in scenery, like moving to a different continent. But my family is a lot more conservative, and with two kids almost grown it isn't easy to all agree on relocating anywhere. We all agree that it is time to move, but they're all more thinking it should be a few miles away, so the big culture shock will be that we'd have to shop in a different mall. But I'm thinking that Switzerland is nice and central to get to all sorts of places in Europe. So, how about Lausanne? Sounds both hip and idyllic. We'd have to brush up on our French, of course. I haven't been there. What I've seen of Switzerland reminds me of the Märklin model railroad catalogues I was often paging through as a kid.
[ | 2002-11-07 23:59 | 3 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Wednesday, November 6, 2002day link 

 PhotoReading
pictureMany years ago I took a class in speed reading. I could read a 150 page novel in about 20 minutes or so, and retain the content better than with normal reading. That was pretty cool, and would have been great if I had had a job of reviewing fiction books. For non-fiction I found that the technique screwed up my ability to actually understand and apply what I was reading. So I gave it up.

But today I could really use some kind of technique for digesting large amounts of information. I have stacks of books I haven't read, because there aren't enough hours in the day. I'm considering PhotoReading. I've read the book, but it seems like I probably need to take a seminar to really get it. Anyway, it is different from the traditional speed reading approach, where one forces one's eyes over the text in a certain rhythm. In speed reading one reads a line at a time. In photo reading one does a page at a time, and the point is apparently to just be very relaxed and quickly glance at each page. And then using certain techniques for being prepared to take in the content, and for retrieving it from one's subconscious mind afterwards.
[ | 2002-11-06 21:15 | 42 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

 Tuesday, November 5, 2002
picture
  • Steve Barth, Editor of Knowledge Management: "How do we balance conversation and contemplation? Is there a difference between the interactive creation of knowledge and the internal processes? It isn't knowledge until it has been integrated with our existing knowledge and beliefs, right? So as our daily intake of ideas and information increases, do we need more "quiet time" for processing input?"

    Yeah, I guess. Or we need ways of making our incoming information less confusing and disjointed. The reason we're overloaded with information and we need time to process it is that it is mostly a badly structured mess. We don't have good ways of sharing information, or of having a conversation in a *structured* way. So it is mostly just a lot of words, and then you need to afterwards go and figure out what it all *means*.

  • Dave Winer: "An idea is in the air in blogging land, a global identity system so you don't have to re-enter your name, email address and weblog url in every comment system you visit. Of course the idea has been around for a while, but perhaps there's a will to implement it now."

    Hm, doesn't have to be global. A site just needs to know which other sites it is willing to accept logins from. E.g. NCN could happily accept a statement of identity from Friendly Favors. But a common protocol for carrying this out would be nice.

  • Recently, a bunch of small companies with online stores were being sued by a company called PanIP, which claims to have a patent covering pretty much all automated commerce, and which successfully has extorted money from these companies. Well, they do indeed have such a patent, which shows how screwed up the patent system is. If they went after somebody with significant resources, the patent would quickly be invalidated. But they go after small people that they can scam into paying them a few thousand dollars, but who can't afford to defend themselves. One small company, however, a little chocolate manufacturer named DeBrand, is figthing back and is organizing people for that purpose. The website is youmaybenext.com. Help them if you can. Or buy some of their chocolates, so they can afford to defend themselves. PanIP on the other hand is owned by some guy named Lawrence Lockwood. Remember the name, so you can avoid ever doing business with him.
    [ | 2002-11-05 23:35 | 4 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

  •  Monday, November 4, 2002
    picture
  • Jon Husband at Wirearchy talks about Knowledge Management (KM):
    "There's a core issue in KM - that of the gulf separating Tacit Knowledge (TK) and Explicit Knowledge (EK), with proponents arguing that TK is only really shareable ("manageable" ??) via conversation, dialogue, communitites of practice, and so on."

    "[...] Knowledge Management will never be fully addressed by having an integrated information system that makes whatever you need accessible when you need it - context, questioning, interpretation and fit-for-purpose will always have an essential role to play, and so what better than a Knowledge Buddy - a collaborator - with whom to have an argument, or with whom you can share a major breakthrough."

    "What about looking to the dynamics of effective friendships to inform this dialogue further?"
    Hm, yeah. I happen to be looking for an integrated information system that makes knowledge a more widely sharable commodity. But, yes, there are many things we will only become aware of by having a good conversation, by having a very specific problem to solve, or by having somebody who knows us well prod us in the right way. So maybe we can't solve the problem of knowledge sharing without being very aware of what relationships people have. Maybe we need to provide better tools for dialogue at the same time as we're thinking about sharing knowledge. Maybe knowledge can't be shared at all before it is known what it will be used for. Maybe there IS no knowledge before we know who will be using it, in what context, in relation to which other people. Until then we might only have information. Then, the moment a specific person takes on a specific job, he will need to get available information quickly re-configured into knowledge that is helpful in that situation.

  • Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) is a new kind of transportation system, where passenger capsules move very fast through airless tubes. Apparently it would use less energy and space than existing approaches, and it would be cheaper. ...I guess I would be more optimistic about this if I hadn't been eagerly reading about the imminent construction of ultra-fast tube trains back when I was a kid, more than 30 years ago, and it obviously didn't happen. But maybe the circumstances are right now. See some pictures here.

  • Google decided from one day to the next to index all links pointing to my newslog here. So, I must have increased in status somehow. I'm now Flemming # 3.

    "Let he who would move the world, first move himself." --Socrates
    [ | 2002-11-04 22:01 | 0 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

  •  Sunday, November 3, 2002
    picture
  • Designer Bruce Mau wrote An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth. Some wonderful points about creativity and process.
    "Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications."
  • Dead But Awake. There are many recorded cases of people remaining conscious even while clinically dead, and able to recount details they couldn't otherwise have known, once they're resuscitated. A pair of researchers are planning a study that should prove this more conclusively.

  • Science News has a good article about the math of different voting methods. The U.S. has probably the worst possible voting scheme - plurality - which is essentially that one only looks at the voter's first choice, and the winner takes all. That will easily give results that don't match the will of the people. George W. Bush is a good example, even though it took a bit of additional cheating to get him where he is.

  • Only technology revolution can save the Earth. Scientists are looking for technologies that might provide sufficiently massive amounts of carbon emission-free energy. Nuclear fusion, solar power satellites, wind, biomass, hydrogen, super-conducting electricity grids, etc. Regulation and incremental improvements aren't going to stop global warming, it seems.
  • "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." -- Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love, 1973

  • [ | 2002-11-03 16:12 | 4 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

  •  Saturday, November 2, 2002
    picture
  • I'm working on various changes in the NewsLog program. Not as easy as I thought it was. First of all I'm trying to better accommodate the format I'm trying to use myself here, of posting many little stories that add up to one daily issue published to my log. That's how most other weblogs, like Radio Userland, tend to be working. But it is a different underlying structure. And I'm trying not to break the way most people use this program right now, creating less frequent, but bigger, stand-alone articles.

  • Various U.S. news media had to run corrections of their reporting of the anti-war protest rallies last weekend. They had at first tried to pretend that it wasn't much at all. Just a few thousand scattered people. But they were barraged with complaints about their deceptive reporting. So, now, for example, the New York Times wrote:
    "The demonstration on Saturday in Washington drew 100,000 by police estimates and 200,000 by organizers', forming a two-mile wall of marchers around the White House. The turnout startled even organizers, who had taken out permits for 20,000 marchers. They expected 30 buses, and were surprised by about 650, coming from as far as Nebraska and Florida. A companion demonstration in San Francisco attracted 42,000 protesters, city police there said, and smaller groups demonstrated in other cities, including about 800 in Austin, Tex., and 2,500 in Augusta, Me."
  • I saw "Bowling for Columbine", a feature film documentary by Michael Moore. Powerful, excellent movie making about America's obsession with guns. Very provocative and direct. See it! It doesn't really give the answers, but mostly it adds up to the fear that is being promoted 24/7 in the U.S. media, and how it pervades the system from the top down.

  • When asked "Why is it so difficult for us westerners to understand the earth as a living system?", Elisabet Sahtouris answered:
    "It goes back to the Cartesian worldview, I think, in which Descartes proposed that God was a great engineer and his creations were mechanisms. That meant that all nature was an array of mechanisms created by God, the engineer, who then put a piece of his God-mind into his favorite robot -- man -- so that he, too, could create machinery. Now, whether you like it or not, that was a rather complete worldview that accounted for everything.

    "When the scientists decided that they didn't need God in their worldview, they eliminated God from their Cartesian worldview but kept the idea of an array of mechanisms. Now how do you explain the origin of mechanisms without a creator? By definition, a machine cannot exist without a creator. If they are there and couldn't have been assembled on purpose by an intentional creator, the only alternative is to say they came together by accident. So you got these bizarre theories that literally say that if enough parts of a Boeing 747 blow around in a whirlwind in a junkyard eventually one will assemble itself. This is going to appear to us as perhaps the most bizarre and perhaps harebrained concepts of how things work that has ever been proposed in the history of the world. And I think it will be seen that way in the very near future, because it is fundamentally an illogical point of view. The problem was that they thought you had to choose between God, the purposeful inventor, and accident. We had no theory of self-creation as a perfectly natural, biological, universal event. Now we do, so we don't have to invoke either hypothesis."
    Right on! The idea that everything in the universe sort of sprung into existence randomly and accidentally is just as wacky as the idea that some ornery guy with a grey beard commanded it all into existence. I think the idea of a self-creating, living universe is more simple and useful and satisfying than any of those. And if we all understood that a little better, there would be much less reason for us to fight each other.

  • Picture is by Burningbird
    [ | 2002-11-02 16:44 | 3 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

  •  Friday, November 1, 2002
    picture
  • Gaia Theory: Science of the Living Earth - an excellent introduction to Gaia theory. It is the idea that the Earth is essentially a living organism. It was championed mostly by James Lovelock and then by Lynn Margulis. There is a lot of evidence for how the Earth regulates itself, to keep the contents of the atmosphere, the saltyness of the oceans, and many other things stable enough to support other life forms. Dead rocks don't do such things.
    James Lovelock: "For me, the personal revelation of Gaia came quite suddenly - like a flash of enlightenment. I was in a small room on the top floor of a building at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. It was the autumn of 1965 ... and I was talking with a colleague, Dian Hitchcock, about a paper we were preparing ... It was at that moment that I glimpsed Gaia. An awesome thought came to me. The Earth's atmosphere was an extraordinary and unstable mixture of gases, yet I knew that it was constant in composition over quite long periods of time. Could it be that life on Earth not only made the atmosphere, but also regulated it - keeping it at a constant composition, and at a level favourable for organisms?"
    See good interview with Elisabet Sahtouris. Life is recognized by a quality of autopoiesis:
    "Autopoiesis is a Greek word, of course, meaning literally "self-creation." The definition goes: A living entity is any entity that constantly creates itself. This really distinguishes it from a mechanism, because a machine is not constantly creating itself. In fact, if it changes itself at all it's probably broken and you would rather it didn't do that; while a living thing is always changing, or it's dead."
  • Cass says "Real quick, a book Ming might like: Leadership and the New Science". Yes, he's right, I like it very much. Meg Wheatley is great. Well, actually I've only listened to the audio book version, but several times.

  • That brings up: How do I know if somebody says something about me or to me in their weblog? I do seem to have a sixth sense about it, but I probably can't rely on that. There is a proposed standard approach to that, which might tell me automatically, called Trackback Ping, developed by Movable Type, one of the major weblog designers. Note to self: I need to implement that in this program.

  • A number of years ago, before there was anything called search engines, there was an all-knowing being known as Kibo. The web hardly existed yet, but 100's of thousands of messages were posted every day on thousands of different UseNet Newsgroups. And it was said that no matter where you posted a message, if you said anything at all about Kibo, he would instantly know. I didn't quite believe, so I tested it. I mentioned his name in some obscure newsgroup. And, indeed, before long there was an answer from him. He seemed to be able to have an off-the-wall conversation about anything anytime. At the time it seemed quite magical that he would know everything anybody said about him, and a whole wacky religion, called Kibology sprung up around him. Well, all that went on was that he had a program that searched the UseNet feed going into some particular server for the word "Kibo". That was a novel idea at the time. Nowadays anybody can do the same in Google Groups any time they want.

  • Consumers Shun Copy-Protected CDs. Study finds music fans support copying for personal use, backup.

    "The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get the old ones out." Dee Hock
    [ | 2002-11-01 14:54 | 4 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

  •  Thursday, October 31, 2002
    picture
  • Years ago, when I had a job where I didn't have much to do, I developed the habit to sit down and meditate at regular intervals. To be precise, I set my watch to beep every hour on the hour, and then I would just close my eyes and sit there for five minutes or so, trying to just be there, attentive, but without thinking. I did that for years. It accomplished that I would always be both calm and acutely attentive. It also accomplished that I didn't lose touch with my spiritual existence, and any difficulties in the material world had much less strength. Anyway, I need to do something like that again. Particularly since I haven't been smoking for quite a while, I otherwise tend to get overly caught up in the stress of the day's work. I'm setting the beeper on my watch now.

  • Chris Locke, aka RageBoy, is a crazy guy and a creative genius. One of the three authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto. He has a very irreverant and very visually interesting weblog. "... And to the engineers I said, no corporation has ever fallen in love. But they had no idea what I was talking about. I said, what is happening on the net is people falling in love with the world again. Listen..."

  • A small company is working on an elevator to space. It is no longer science fiction. It is now possible to manufacture a material that is strong enough, carbon nanotubes, to consider making a 62,000 mile long cable, leading from a floating platform straight up to geo-stationary orbit.
    [ | 2002-10-31 12:30 | 0 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

  •  Wednesday, October 30, 2002
    picture
  • Elisabet Sahtouris presents these lessons from nature:

    1. All living systems self-organize and maintain themselves by the same biological principles

    2. Among the principles essential to the health of living systems are:
      a) empowered participation of all parts, and
      b) continual negotiation of self-interest at all levels of organization

    3. Humanity constitutes a living system within the larger living system of our Earth.

    4. Therefore essential to the health of humanity are:
      a) empowered participation of all humans, and
      b) negotiated self-interest among individual, local & global economies


  • Real Networks has released the source code for their audio and video players, and their server software will follow. May the Force be with them.

  • In an experiment today, a scientist in London and one in Boston were able to lift an object, by providing a finger each, through a system providing sophisticated tactile feedback for virtual experiences. I.e. they can feel pressure and movement and the texture of surfaces. So they can virtually shake hands. That's a bigger deal than it might sound. They've found that it requires feedback about 1000 times per second in order to be practical. And you can't do that over the normal Internet.

  • Caine Learning has an excellent wheel of Brain/Mind Learning Principles. An excellent foundation for thinking about how we learn.

    "An emerging field in cognitive science called theory theory deals with our innate propensities to act as scientists. For example, Gopnick and Melztoff (1997) argue convincingly that infants are born with the capacity to develop theories and hypotheses about how the world works. Even before they acquire language [they form] their hypotheses and make predictions. Gopnick and Melztoff give one example of very young infants watching a ball moving along a trajectory, then disappearing behind a screen. By following the infants' eye movements, the researchers note that the infants make predictions about where the ball will emerge, and seem surprised and confused when the ball emerges somewhere else. (Incidentally, this experiment contributed to evidence that many of the capacities that Piaget spoke about seem to be present at birth, or develop much earlier and in different ways from the ways in which he described)."

  • Thich Nhat Hanh (1976): "'mindfulness' refers to 'keeping one's consciousness alive to the present reality'"
    [ | 2002-10-30 01:53 | 2 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

  •  Tuesday, October 29, 2002
    picture
  • John McPhee: "The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone." You know, 'marine' as in 'under water'.

  • Chris Corrigan is posting lots of great stuff about self-organization and open space principles. He quotes a friend who writes about the book Education on the Edge of Possibility: "... They hypothesize that the reason most educational reforms don't foster much real change is because the underlying beliefs/rules aren't changing. They posit the idea that self-organization is happening all the time, AND that we naturally self-organize around those beliefs/rules that we hold to be true. (This last part is new to me. Can't quite get my mind completely around it. Don't know if I agree with it. Is that what we mean by self-organization as we use the term here?) One example is hierarchical beliefs self-organizing into hierarchical social structures. ..." Hmm, very interesting. There's obviously something to that. That's not the self-organization I'm looking for either, but of course it is true. People organize into hierarchies because they believe that's how things are. So, minds need to change. We of course can't just order people to self-organize in a networked pattern, if they don't believe in it.

  • Shawn Murphy is working on Nooron, which is a self-organizing knowledge management system. I'm excited about what he is working on. I met Shawn in Utah over the weekend and we have much in common in terms of what we see needs to be done. But he's probably smarter than I am. Nooron is in part based on PyOKBC, which is a Python implementation of Open Knowledge Base Connectivity, a standard proposed by Stanford Research Institute's Artificial Intelligence Center. So, this is about a fundamental approach for defining and storing any kind of knowledge. The details are probably hard to explain to people who haven't been looking for such a thing.

  • Shawn has some thoughts on Goodness is Not Enough. We're talking about ratings there. Most things you can rate on the net gives you some kind of 1-10 scale that doesn't really tell you what it is you're rating. But, to be general about it, what you're rating is the "goodness" of some resource. But that isn't really all that useful. We need much more flexibility. People should be able to rate resources based on whatever they have an opinion on. They should be able to self-organize, rather than being limited by too few, too general options.

  • Future Form is a project of designing the Workplace of the Future. You can contribute to some degree, by leaving online comments. I'm not sure what that will do.

  • The U.S. Army is planning to use NanoPaint to cover vehicles within just a few years. It would change color or paint scheme with the push of a button, or might even make a vehicle appear invisible.

  • Hillary Rosen, representative for RIAA, the music industry's organ made a pathetic case in a debate against free music. You know, listening to music for free is essentially a threat to the future of music itself. Not!

    "Hydrogen is an odorless, colorless gas that after 13 billion years produces people." --Carl Sagan
    [ | 2002-10-29 04:02 | 0 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

  •  Monday, October 28, 2002
    picture
  • Another great day yesterday of hiking in beautiful nature in Utah while talking about big subjects. And a rather long drive back.

  • Singularity Watchers are futurists who pay attention to accelerating technological change. Particularly to the growing idea that many accelerating technological trends, such as processing power, artificial intelligence, and nano-technology are heading for a point where advances are practically instantanous, and we humans potentially can no longer keep pace with what we created. There are many different ideas about that, of course. My friend John Smart is very up on these things. Ray Kurzweil wrote The Age of Spiritual Machines. Many smart people are talking about it. I don't know. No doubt that things are accelerating, and most likely that leads towards a point of profound transformation. But somehow I can't get worried about computers becoming smarter than me and taking control. Because I don't think *I* am a computer, for one thing.

  • Extropians are people I usually get along well with, and there are many fascinating things to discuss. But I don't think I'm an extropian exactly. Extropians tend to be techno-geeks who are very interested in and optimistic about the future, and who usually are very into cryogenics, artificial intelligence, life extension, enhancement of the human body and mind, and quite a number of other things that might allow humans to transcend themselves, primarily in a material kind of way. And I guess it is the material part that I look somewhat differently at. I'm not very concerned about dying and then disappearing. I don't particularly want to download my mind to a computer, other than in the form of a personal organizer, and I certainly wouldn't want to have my body frozen down so I can get it back in a hundred years. I'd rather have a new one next time, and I'd rather be free to be a somewhat different person next time, rather than getting the same personality back. That would be a bit boring. I mean, I'm not THAT great.

  • I wouldn't mind enhancing my mind and my body with technology, though. I'd like a personal organizer that automatically keeps track of all information in my life. Infrared or X-ray vision would be nice. Shooting out spiderwebs from my hands so I can swing between tall buildings - that could come in handy too.

    "The Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades" --Timbuk 3
    [ | 2002-10-28 14:59 | 0 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

  •  Saturday, October 26, 2002
    picture
  • I've been spending the day hiking in Utah, and having fascinating discussions with a bunch of great people. Futurists, scientists, geeks. A six mile hike today through Bell Canyon, and a trip to Goblin Valley, with bizarre rock formations. And now lucky that I'm here with some serious technogeeks, as one of them installed a wireless network in the motel so I can be online.

  • I think I have a renewed understanding of how important it is for me to assist people in more fully living out their dream in the moment, doing what they're here to do. That's to a large degree what NCN is about, for me at least: helping people be more actualized, as individuals and groups, doing their thing. And I'd like to highlight and celebrate when it happens.
    [ | 2002-10-26 22:10 | 7 comments | PermaLink ]  More >



  • << Newer stories  Page: 1 ... 9 10 11 12 13 ... 15   Older stories >>