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 Richard Caetano is thinking about how we structure our thinking, and about how we represent truth. He believes that "Truth is Localized". Several apparently contradictory truths can exist because they apply to different branches of a logical tree. I might be opposed to using fossil fuel, but I might love my sports car. Those truths can co-exist if they're sort of attached in different places. Interesting discussion, but I wouldn't necessarily look at it like that. It is more a matter of how we abstract a more primal reality into symbolic form. If we forget that we're over-simplifying the process oriented reality into objects and then further into abstract labels and ideas, and further into our reactions to these, then we might run into logical problems at some point. It can sometimes be a philosophical trap to try to solve a problem logically at an abstract level, when the components don't really exist at that level. I can say "I like red!" when I'm shopping for Ferraris, and I can say "I hate red!" when I'm trying to drive it through stoplights in downtown L.A. If I just look at the words, and treat them as reality, it seems like I'm contradicting myself. It is simply two similar sentences that are being used about very different realities. They're abstracting very different things. Simply put: the context is different, and I'm not contradicting myself, because I'm talking about different things. The words don't tell you that.
Then Cass at ThoughtsOnThinking suggests that maybe perceptions, viewpoints, and opinions are "localized". Hm, I wouldn't say that either. It all depends on how far you abstract. Everything can be abstracted endlessly. I might make a very specific observation, expressed in a set of perceptions, checking my watch, writing down what I see and hear, and that might be very localized. Or, my mind might have some wires crossed and I have generalized certain perceptions, so they exist separately from anything to perceive. E.g. I might go around and see clearly that people are being mean to me, and they're whispering to each other about me, and they're getting ready to finish me off.
But all that does indeed throw some wrenches into a project of trying to invent universal data structures - ways of storing any kind of information in an ordered fashion. We can't just say that colors belong over here, and feelings belong over there. Because the meaning of any information depends ... on a lot of factors in the people who will use them, including their context, their intention, their modus operandi, and the level of abstraction involved.
Building Online Communities. Some good learnings from techie communities.
Oblivion awaits. Hilarious writeup of what the record industry's actions would sound like if discussed as strategies. "Their combined efforts have gone beyond killing their e-businesses and are close to destroying an entire industry."
Tomorrow morning I travel to Utah for a retreat with a small group of futurists. A couple of days of hiking and deep dialogue about big things. I might or might not get online.
"I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." --Jane Wagner
[ Diary | 2002-10-24 22:38 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Biomimicry is a fascinating subject. It is essentially that you look to nature for ways of building and manufacturing stuff more efficiently, from easily available materials, with no polluting byproducts. Nature is in no way primitive. Human engineering is a bit primitive. Even the smallest plants or animals can carry out manufacturing feats our most skilled engineers often can't accomplish. Look for example at one of our "advanced" high-tech materials, Kevlar, which is used for bulletproof vests. It is created from petroleum-derived molecules poured into pressurized vats of concentrated sulfuric acid, and boiled at several hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and the process wastes a lot of energy and produces toxic byproducts. Now hear what Janine Benyus says about nature:
"Nature takes a different approach. Because an organism makes materials like bone or collagen or silk right in its own body, it doesn't make sense to "heat, beat, and treat." A spider, for instance, produces a waterproof silk that beats the pants off Kevlar for toughness and elasticity. Ounce for ounce, it's five times stronger than steel! But the spider manufactures it in water, at room temperature, using no high heats, chemicals, or pressures. Best of all, it doesn't need to drill offshore for petroleum; it takes flies and crickets at one end and produces this miracle material at the other. In a pinch, the spider can even eat part of its old web to make a new one."
Janis Ian: Music industry spins falsehood "On the first day I posted downloadable music, my merchandise sales tripled, and they have stayed that way ever since." ..."Many artists now benefit greatly from the free-download systems the RIAA seeks to destroy."
MySQL AB is a successful open source business. "In our business model, we have an ecosystem around MySQL, which is huge worldwide. As a company, we are very small in the middle of it. This is very different from the traditional proprietary model. In the past, if you had a fantastic product like Lotus did with Lotus Notes, then you owned or controlled as much as 60% of the surrounding ecosystem, including services, books and education, yourself. We donÂ’t mind that our ecosystem is 200 times larger than our company is. ThatÂ’s why our cost level is ridiculously low. When it looks like weÂ’ve done something, itÂ’s usually someone else who did it."
EContent Magazine: The Siren Song of Structure: Heeding the Call of Reusability "Fusion executive editor Adam Gaffin is clear about the value of breaking down news stories into their atomic bits and sending those elements out to different places. He says, "Granularity is good; it helps us auto-generate syndication feeds, wireless editions, and email newsletters with embedded headlines." Granularity also enables you to put different elements of a page into separate workflows."
American Conservative: Iraq: The Case Against Preemptive War. "Administration's claim of right to overthrow regimes it considers hostile is extraordinary -- one the world will soon find intolerable..."
U.S. Ranks 17th in Freedom of the Press, behind Slovenia and Costa Rica. Doesn't say anything about whether the press is speaking the truth, though.
"You know, the press is free for those who own one." -- Lowell Bergman
[ Diary | 2002-10-24 00:09 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Marc Strassman wants to be Mayor of the San Fernando Valley, where I live. He runs his campaign online and he wants to be an E-mayor, really, promising universal broadband access, online voting, and open source software. But The Valley hasn't actually seceeded from Los Angeles yet. Might happen next year.
Hm, looks like some of the NCN NewsLogs have caught the attention of the WarBloggers. That's a very active faction of right-wing webloggers on the net who for one thing just LOVE The War, and who generally have a strangely homogenous ideology. I'm not sure if it is Rush Limbaugh's listeners or what. The above article describers them like this: "They also tend to have certain ideological characteristics: to a man (and woman) they are as scathingly intolerant of any and all dissent on the War question as they are vehement in their contempt for Arabs – all Arabs, as such – and blind support for the state of Israel. It's frightening, really, with so many sites – there must be hundreds of these little war-bots spawned in cyberspace, springing out of the psychic ether like Myrmidons and lunging at anyone who doesn't toe the Party Line." Indeed that's pretty much how it looks. They're out prowling for people they call "idiotarians", and a typical site of theirs is "The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler". "Idiotarians" seems to be the derogatory term for people with a different ideology, like peace activist, or people with a more balanced view of the middle east than George Bush has. And they do spend some time out looking for such people so they can sort of virtually lynch them. In different times it would be like "Let's go kill ourselves some niggers", or "..beat up some commies", or "hippies" or "faggots" or fill in your own slur. OK, this is the Internet, so all they can really do is to ridicule you in their own weblog, or leave nasty comments in yours, if you allow them to. Nothing much to worry about really.
I was talking the other day with a friend who moved to the U.S. from the Czech Republic just a few years ago. And he mentioned that one of the first surprised reactions he had when he got here was "Hey, this is just like Communism!" You know, lots of unfeeling bureaucracies, a government run by rich party bosses, a corrupt system where power is for sale, and lots of little people who can't really do much about it. The propaganda is just different here, and you have to work harder to survive.
Seems like Google comes and looks at my page here every single day. That's quite an honor. Obviously because it has noticed that I update it every day. I can't figure out, however, why it only goes one level deep. It indexes what is linked directly from right here, but it doesn't get the second level. Which means it hasn't yet picked up all articles in my NewsLog. I wonder if it is a question of time, or a question of how well other people link to the front page.
"Tardigrades are among the hardiest of multicelled animals, maybe the toughest little critters of all. Dry them out and they go into a state of suspended animation in which they can live for - well, no one knows. The can be frozen at temperatures near absolute zero, heated to 150 degrees, subjected to a high vacuum or to pressure greater than that of the deepest ocean, and zapped with deadly radiation." --Chet Raymo. A Little Reminder of Reality's Scale
[ Diary | 2002-10-23 01:46 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Look at the World Game Institute's What the World Wants chart. It shows the costs of globally eliminating certain major problems that are facing humanity, seen in relation to the global military spending. It suggests that one-third of the $780 billion spent every year on the military could ultimately: Eliminate Starvation and Malnourishment, Provide Health Care & AIDS Control, Provide Shelter for everyone in the world, Provide Clean Safe Water, Eliminate Illiteracy, Provide Clean Safe Energy through Efficiency and Renewables, Retire the Developing Nations' Debts, Stabilize Population, Prevent Soil Erosion, Stop Deforestation, Stop Ozone Depletion, Prevent Acid Rain, Prevent Global Warming, Remove Landmines, Provide Refugee Relief, Eliminate Nuclear Weapons, and Build Democracy. There are detailed plans and budgets as well.
A key breast cancer test can no longer be done in British Columbia, Canada, because a U.S. company, Myriad Genetics, holds a patent on the two genes tested. Myriad wants $3500 for each test, more than 3 times what it previously cost. Gene patents are evil.
My 3 year old daughter got an e-mail today from Broderbund Software advertising a program for preparing her last will and testament. The subject of the message was "Hurry Nadia! Only a FEW DAYS LEFT!" Excuse me?! I'm glad she can't read, or I would have to explain that to her. Mass marketing is stupid. Not to mention, frequently offensive, as it mostly hits the wrong people with stuff they don't want and didn't ask for.
Max and Alana came by today. They met each other online in NCN and really connected. She was in Minnesota, and he flew over from New Zealand to meet her, and they've found a special magic together and are very much in love and are going to get married. They've been driving around the states a bit, and will go together to New Zealand in a couple of days, to live a new life. It is always wonderful to meet people not only that I've only known virtually before, but who really have clicked with each other. And knowing that I had just a little bit to do with that. That alone makes it worth just about any amount of abuse from the few people who're angry that I didn't provide them what they were looking for.
"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be." --Douglas Adams
[ Diary | 2002-10-22 01:37 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Mitch Kapor is working on a new program which will be an open source Personal Information Manager in the spirit of Lotus Agenda, making it simple to keep track of and share email, appointments, contacts and tasks. It is well worth watching anything Mitch Kapor puts his mind to. In addition to Agenda, he earlier created Lotus 1-2-3, and he's one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Designing organizations for flow experiences: "There is a name for the experience when people are so focused that it amounts to absolute absorption in an activity, providing a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of pushing to higher levels of performance — into a new reality. The experience is called... flow!"
I occasionally look in search engines for the main websites I maintain, and also for my own name. Maybe because I'm a little vain, but also to measure what effect I have on the Internet world. I'm Flemming #5 in Google. And then I run into a cute little piece like this. My French is not very good, but I think it says that the guy is happy about having met a very good friend through NCN, and then he quotes a piece I wrote about "Learning". I'm not sure where I wrote that, but, hm, it's kind of nice. It is hard to appreciate my own writing, other than when I run into it years later, or somebody else quotes it.
I once ran into a fellow who was fond of making mini-books out of short texts that he liked. Something like 2" x 1.5" and with 8-20 pages in each. Very unusual format, which he created on a normal printer, by printing many of the little pages double-sided on a regular size paper, and then cutting them out, folding them and stapling them together, like a magazine. And it was actually really nice to read a short text that way, and it was a very handy thing to give to people when you meet them. He had made a couple of my articles into those mini-books, and there too I had that experience, of being able to appreciate something I had written, because it was repackaged in a very digestible way. Now, if I could just remember his name ...
"Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last you create what you will." -- George Bernard Shaw
[ Diary | 2002-10-21 01:48 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 "The resolution before us today is not only a product of haste; it is also a product of presidential hubris. This resolution is breathtaking in its scope. It redefines the nature of defense, and reinterprets the Constitution to suit the will of the Executive Branch. It would give the President blanket authority to launch a unilateral preemptive attack on a sovereign nation that is perceived to be a threat to the United States. This is an unprecedented and unfounded interpretation of the President's authority under the Constitution, not to mention the fact that it stands the charter of the United Nations on its head." --Senator Robert Byrd to the U.S. Senate, October 3, 2002
John Perry Barlow: The American Republic is dead. Hail the American Empire. Or else. Excellent commentary on George Bush's coup and the Orwellian media manipulation. "Today, as he signed his coronation decree, he lied, "I have not ordered the use of force. I hope the use of force will not become necessary." But, folks, he *has* ordered the use of force and began doing so shortly after seizing office. Though you'd scarcely know it to read the papers, we've been bombing the crap out of Southern Iraq since February 16, 2001, when we hit five radar installations in the vicinity of Baghdad. Since then, the bombing has been increasing steadily. There have been 48 bombing raids south of the "no-fly zone" so far this year. Iraq claims that 1300 civilians have been killed in these bombings - and, while I doubt that number, many of these casualties have been confirmed by international observers. I'll bet the last thing those innocent wretches saw looked a lot like force to them.
"It is not simply that we have made a Caesar of Bush, we have, in effect, assented to allowing him the entire world as his Empire. What this resolution is truly about is the elimination of all sovereignty but our own. This is about our becoming the Dad of the World. Having declared ourselves immune from international prosecution for war crimes, we have proposed our right to disregard the sovereignty of any country that, in our opinion, doesn't deserve it."
George Orwell, "1984":
"War is Peace"
"Freedom is Slavery"
"Ignorance is Strength"
Wikipedia: Doublespeak, William Lutz: Doublespeak, Quarterly Review: Doublespeak
[ Diary | 2002-10-19 23:47 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Woody Harrelson: I'm an American tired of American lies: "I am a father, and no amount of propaganda can convince me that half a million dead children is acceptable "collateral damage". The fact is that Saddam Hussein was our boy. The CIA helped him to power, as they did the Shah of Iran and Noriega and Marcos and the Taliban and countless other brutal tyrants. The fact is that George Bush Sr continued to supply nerve gas and technology to Saddam even after he used it on Iran and then the Kurds in Iraq."
On what he would do if he were in Bush's shoes: "I'd honour Kyoto. Join the world court. I'd stop subsidising earth rapers like Monsanto, Dupont and Exxon. I'd shut down the nuclear power plants. So I already have $200bn saved from corporate welfare. I'd save another $100bn by stopping the war on non-corporate drugs. And I'd cut the defence budget in half so they'd have to get by on a measly $200bn a year. I've already saved half a trillion bucks by saying no to polluters and warmongers. Then I'd give $300bn back to the taxpayers. I'd take the rest and pay the people teaching our children what they deserve. I'd put $100bn into alternative fuels and renewable energy. I'd revive the Chemurgy movement, which made the farmer the root of the economy, and make paper and fuel from wheat straw, rice straw and hemp. Not only would I attend, I'd sponsor the next Earth Summit. And, of course, I'd give myself a fat raise."
A Wired reporter has his DNA scanned, to look for predisposition to disease. And his genetic ancestry examined. Interesting first-person account. We're getting close to Gattaca.
The ACLU has started a Media Campaign to challenge the U.S. Patriot Act.
Pravda has been publishing more and more UFO stories. Whitley Strieber thinks the Russians might be getting ready to take the veils off of what they know. It is probably more likely to come from there, even though there apparently is motion towards disclosure in the U.S. as well.
Paul Ray suggests a new political compass. Mainly he identifies a group of "new progressives". Hm, ok, maybe. Maybe there's such a group, but I'm not sure how much that helps. Really I think the political "spectrum" is totally bogus, and it takes a lot more than drawing the lines a little differently. The political left-right spectrum is just a way of giving people the same thing no matter which direction they turn, just with different flavors. A clever application of Hegelian Dialectism. It is centralized authority, no matter which direction you look. The left wants to control the money up front, so they can give it away; the right wants to control your mind, so that you'll give your money to their corporations and religions. I think it all needs to be rejected as a big scam. Or a Communist Plot if you will. I want freedom to think and talk and act like I feel is right, and I want to collaborate in community with other people to make our civilization work. There's no place on the political spectrum for that.
"Nobody gives you power. You just take it." --Roseanne
[ Diary | 2002-10-17 22:46 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Open Space is one of my favorite modes of having a conference, or of organizing things. Michael Herman has an excellent page with lots of resources about Open Space Technology. Harrison Owen is the guy who called it that, and is considered the originator. Open Space is essentially that the participants create the structure, and they choose the topics to work on. Typically it starts with individuals standing up to suggest topics to focus on, which they're also willing to lead, and they put a sign up on a board, or something similar. Then people gravitate towards the topics they want to work on, and groups form. People are free to choose where they belong. If they change their mind, they can go somewhere else. Whoever shows up, its the right thing, even if nobody shows up for a certain topic. It is an organic free market of human interaction. When it works, it is extremely powerful and effective. I love Open Space.
From one of Michael Herman's pages: "When he looked back on the first handful of years of practicing Open Space Technology, Harrison concluded that Open Space works best when four key conditions are present: when the the tasks to be done are highly complex, when the people who are needed to do them are personally, professionally, or simply geographically diverse, when there is real or potential conflict, and when the decision time was yesterday."
Hm, interesting. It works best when the tasks at hand are complex, and the people are diverse. Makes sense. The more complex the situation and the players are, and the more we're in a hurry, the more we need to just let them get down to it, to work things out organically. Because nobody is really qualified to come along and pretend that they know in advance how it is all supposed to be played out. The truest answer to what to do in complex situations is: "It depends".
The above page was mentioning Angeles Arrien's "The Four-Fold Way", which boils down to: "Show up, pay attention to what has heart and meaning, speak your truth, and let it go." I like that. Well, actually, there are several versions of this kind of universal, simple, powerful advice. I think my favorite version, which I don't know where comes from, is:
Show up
Pay attention
Speak your truth
Do your best
Don't be attached to the outcome |
Wow, weird, I just discovered a Russian webpage about me. I don't know what it says. But it is part of a site I found first, which has the Russian translation of my Transformational Processing books. First one here. I'm really happy that somebody went to the trouble of putting them up on the net, and that they're apparently useful to some people, whom I can't all speak with. ...Ah, I get it. It is Dimitri in Kiev, who translated the books in the first place. Thanks Dimitri!
[ Diary | 2002-10-17 04:43 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 The Royal Society: Earth depends on creepy-crawlies. Important thoughts on biodiversity. "We don't know, possibly to a factor of ten, how many species there are on Earth," says professor John Lawton of the Natural Environment Research Council. "But if the better-known ones are reasonably typical, we're looking at an extinction rate a thousand times faster than in the fossil record -- and it's accelerating." Lord May says "Arguably it's the little things that run the world, things like soil microbes. They're the least-known species of all."
Thanksgiving Coffee is now the first private company in California to commit to using 100% bio-diesel in their fleet of trucks. Apparently more than 200 public and government agencies already use biodiesel in their cars and trucks, but this is the first private company.
Kevin Barbieux is homeless. He sleeps in abandoned buildings and shelters. He is also an articulate person who maintains a weblog from the public library.
The Free State Project calls for 20,000 activists to move to one of the U.S. states and peacefully liberate it. I.e. take over its government, through normal elections, and then systematically restore the personal freedoms that gradually have been eroded.
Tinderbox is a program that keeps track of notes in clever ways. One can link them together and assign attributes to them in various ways, and 'agents' are maintaining certain queries on the data. I've gotta try it. Runs in MacOSX.
And somebody mentioned Lotus Agenda. It was a Personal Information Manager from the days of DOS. Which I guess I hadn't paid much attention to at the time. But I was just reading an overview written by its design team. And, wow, it is absolutely brilliant. To me in particular. I've thought long and hard about many of the same things, and those guess express it very clearly. Brilliant people. It was primarily Mitch Kapor's baby, but a large team of people worked on it for 2 1/2 years to create the first release. And it didn't sell much more than 100,000 copies, because people had a hard time understanding what it did. But still today there are enthusiasts who keep it alive. Because it seems that nobody else has been quite able to create a program that lives up to what Agenda's vision was. Anyway, I just downloaded the old program, so let's see if I can get it to work.
I still think that the answer to the question of how to store information with an arbitrary number of categorizations or dimensions, must be inherently simple. There has gotta be some basic form of data structure that is so flexible and universal that all other ways of organizing data - hierarchies, networks, mind maps, relational databases, spreadsheets - will just be subsets or special cases of it. Isn't there some branch of mathematics that has principles that fits the bill? Graph Theory?
"Challenges are what make life interesting; overcoming them is what makes life meaningful." -- Joshua J. Marine
[ Diary | 2002-10-16 01:54 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Dave Winer is thinking about thinking. That's a good thing. So is some unknown person at Thoughts on Thinking. The people at Minciu Sodas in Lithuania think about thinking too.
Dave thinks his mind is hierarchical. I don't think mine is. If it were, I wouldn't have so much trouble keeping track of things. I think my mind is a network, with connections criss-crossing all around. And I think my mind has a helluva lot of dimensions, but the outside world seems to be telling me that everything has 1, 2 or 3 dimensions, and that the way of organizing things is hierarchical. I don't think so. I think that's what's screwed up about the world. I want to store and find things whichever way inspires me at the moment. Where I think something fits at one point in time doesn't match where I think it fits a week later. See my OrgSpace vision. But, I admit, what I'm talking about here is *information*. My real world stuff is pretty much hierarchical, and each thing has one right place. My screwdriver goes in that cup on the table, which is in my office, and my keys are in my right pocket, of my jacket, which is on that hook on the door. But my mind no longer matches the physical world. A desktop or a window or a bulletin board or the pocket of my jacket is no longer a good metaphor for how I organize information.
Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman has been awarded the Nobel prize in economics. His work in socalled "behavioral economics" punches some holes in one of the fundamental principles of classical economics - the expectation that the market will behave rationally, based on the available information. People don't always make rational, self-interested decisions. We behave "irrationally" all the time. Most ordinary people could tell you that. But for an economist that idea is apparently a bit of a blow. Jerry Michalski is thinking about that.
There was another rocket in the sky this evening over Southern California. This time I actually saw it when it was flying, rather than just catching the trail of the fuel afterwards. I just happened to be looking out the window at the time, and this very bright moving light appeared. And within a few minutes it was gone, but left the colorful trail, which I've seen before. Apparently it was another ICBM, which later on was shot down by another missile over the Marshall Islands. I suppose they're rattling their sabers a bit.
"Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat." -- Theodore Roosevelt
[ Diary | 2002-10-15 02:17 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Oh, actually it wasn't Ray Ozzie, but my fellow Dane, Thomas Madsen-Mygdal who said: "Why do we take for granted that everything should be closed? What if we started taking for granted that everything should be open? Instead of asking: "why should we be open?" started asking: "why should we be closed?"... This goes for software, information, organizations, etc. I'm not suggesting that everything should be open - just that we considered everything to be open as default and take the discussion from there".
I find the idea of doing one's work out in the open very intriguing. "Working Publically" as Andrius Kulikauskas of the Minciu Sodas Laboratory has called it.
Love is the Killer App says Tim Sanders, Yahoo Senior Exec. Wow! Chris Corrigan says this about it: "Sanders draws a very solid connection between being motivated by love and structuring your operations in a non-hierarchical way to facilitate those values. In fact the case is so compelling that one could even look at highly structured hierarcies and draw the conclusion that love has no place there." Indeed.
Note to self: I need to start committing to using the current web standards for my sites. In particular, structuring the content of pages in XHTML and using CSS to manipulate the look of them. Structure of the Content separate from the Visual Presentation. Wired just did it. I'm embarrassed to notice that my HTML code mostly looks like it did 6 year ago. ..Oh, I discovered Style Master. It is going to be easier than I thought.
If you have a lot of bandwidth and want to see some stunning Flash eye candy, check out Who'sWe. Very talented people. I'm very attracted to Flash. I just don't yet know how it really is going to be congruent with consistent, userfriendly websites.
Andy Oram: Why Human Rights Requires Free Software
"Out of abundance he took abundance and still abundance remains." -- The Upanishads
[ Diary | 2002-10-14 00:57 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 What makes people self-organize? Well, when I ask people, the successful examples I hear are when people have a well-defined shared purpose, and most particularly when there is a common threat. Like, someone just reminded me that when my favorite TV show Farscape got cancelled by the sci-fi channel recently, the loyal fans very quickly organized a huge Save Farscape campaign, involving coordinated letter writing, faxing, phone calls, petitions, t-shirts, demonstrations, media coverage, etc., to try to change it. And we're talking about "just" a tv-show. Nobody's physically threatened or anything. It is not about life or death, or money or jobs or personal security. Just a bunch of people who happen to agree on something. That's a powerful thing.
Greg Smith is 13 years old and a senior in college. He's a genius. And he's an activist for world peace. He's getting peace schools built in Kenya, libraries in Rwanda, centers for children at risk in Brazil.
A fun essay about the Leidenfrost Effect (in PDF format) describes the scientific principle that makes it possible to put one's hand into molten lead, pour liquid nitrogen into one's mouth, or walk with bare feet over burning coals. I've tried the latter, but the author is crazy enough to attempt the first two as well, in the name of science, and he ended up with some scars, burned feet and damaged teeth from all three, from when he got too casual about it. Most fun is his final suggestion that physics students should be required to walk across burning coals at the final exam. If their belief in physics is big enough, they will be unharmed. If not, they will have badly burned feet.
This just in: Terror bombing in Bali. My friend Vila who lives there writes: "An explosion occurred and people died, and on one hand it is terrible what has happened, there is compassion here and alot of feelings of sadness and others. We each react to what happens in our lives in our own individual ways depending on where we are at, thats it. There is no judgment about the reaction. There are no rules and no wrong choices, from my point of view. Sometimes stepping back and sometimes fighting back is of the highest order, only you can know whats true for you in each moment."
Where your talents and the needs of the world cross lies your calling. -- Aristotle
[ Diary | 2002-10-12 22:44 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 At the monthly L.A. Futurists meeting I was listening to Kevin Mitnick speak. Kevin is probably the world's most notorious computer hacker. The guy who inspired the movie Wargames. The Feds put him jail for years, in an isolation cell. In part for some things he did, like break into various companies computers, and also for some things that were a bit exaggerated, like breaking into NORAD. They tried to keep him away from any phone or computer equipment, and they seemed to believe that he would be able to whistle tones into a telephone handset and set off the third world war. Really he's a very nice guy. Needless to say, very bright too. He just published the book "The Art of Deception", which reveals a large number of clever human engineering tricks to watch out for. You know, ways of getting people to divulge information that they otherwise are trying to keep secret.
The crowd that comes to these meetings is always fascinating. Like, scientists working in bioinformatics, neural networks, artificial intelligence. People from companies that make wearable computers, special effects studios, cryogenics companies, etc.
The European Parliament has reached an agreement on the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive. It sets recycling and recovery targets for electronic and electrical equipment and bans the use of hazardous substances in the manufacture of electrical or electronic goods. That is one step in direction of implenting a "Take Back" principle. Good article here. In short, the idea is that the manufacturers of products need to take responsibility for having manufactured the products. I.e. they need to be willing to take them back and recycle them when they have gone through their life cycle. That is kind of simple and obvious, and it changes everything. If companies actually end up being stuck with the products they produced earlier, and they're not allowed to just dump them somewhere out of sight, they will rather quickly and naturally come up with ways of making products that ARE easily and economically recyclable.
Jimmy Carter got the Nobel Peace Price. BBC News. Well deserved, I think. He appears to be a very decent man who is working hard for peace and democracy in the world, often on the front lines.
"It is better to believe than to disbelieve. In so doing you bring everything to the realm of possibility." --Albert Einstein
[ Diary | 2002-10-12 01:58 | 0 comments | PermaLink ] More >
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 I'm tired of communications that go wrong because there's no two-way handshake, no good way of checking whether the intended recipient actually got it. Lots of stuff is communicated in a one-way sort of fashion that is increasingly likely to fail. I get many hundreds of e-mails each day. I also get a lot of paper junkmail through the post office. In both areas I easily miss things I should have seen, in the volume of stuff I don't care about. I just noticed my dental insurance had gotten cancelled without me noticing before. I suppose I missed paying a bill at some point. And I missed them telling me about it. When I call them, they tell me of course that they already told me they would cancel my insurance if I didn't pay. All very reasonable, except for that I didn't get the communication. Oh, legally that's probably my fault. The letter could have gotten lost in the mail, blown away, eaten by wild wolves, or maybe it just looked like a phoney sweepstake contest and I threw it away. My point is that it doesn't work to count on that people have gotten your message just because you sort of sent it in that general direction. Even more so with e-mail. E-mail can get lost along the way in a number of ways. And e-mails can most particularly be lost in my inbox, which contains thousands of messages. Most messages I get are either spam or some sort of automatic monitoring messages from programs I've written. Often people will get really disappointed or concerned that I haven't answered their letters. Because they implicitly assume that I got their message, and I just somehow am unwilling to respond to them. No. It isn't communication unless somebody actually gets what was sent. Just like Schrodinger's Cat might be dead or alive, depending on whether somebody checks or not. In our busy modern world we need two-way communication for important stuff. Simply that you send something, and you hear back somehow whether people got it or not. Not whether their mailbox got it, but whether THEY got it. And if you don't get such an acknowledgement back, then they didn't get it. There's a feature built into standard e-mail formats, for returning a receipt to the sender, to let them know that the message was opened. I've just never seen it actually work in any e-mail program I use.
Donald Rumsfeld got along well with Saddam Hussein when he visited him in Baghdad in December, 1983. He got along just as well with Tariq Aziz, his foreign minister, when he met with him in March, 1984, on the same day that the U.N. released a damning report about Saddam's use of poison gas against Iran. Then, in 1988, while Saddam was using poison gas against the Kurds, George Bush Sr. sent him (Hussein) $500 million in subsidies, to buy American products. And the following year, after Saddam was done with the Kurds, President Bush senior doubled this subsidy to $1 billion, and also supplied germ seed for anthrax, helicopters, "dual-use" material for chemical and biological weapons, and other good stuff. Hm, seems like all those folks have quite some history with each other. Did Saddam not gas the right people, or where did the friendship go sour? article
Ray Ozzie: "Why do we take for granted that everything should be closed? What if we started taking for granted that everything should be open? Instead of asking: "why should we be open?" started asking: "why should we be closed?"... This goes for software, information, organizations, etc. I'm not suggesting that everything should be open - just that we considered everything to be open as default and take the discussion from there" (later correction: it was actually Thomas Madsen-Mygdal who said that)
"New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not common." — John Locke, 17th-century English philosopher
[ Diary | 2002-10-11 02:01 | 0 comments | PermaLink ] More >
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 EarthDance - the global dance party for world peace - is happening on Saturday the 12th in 100 cities across the planet, including ... Baghdad, Iraq. Peace Troubadour James Twyman will be there, despite threats that he'll be arrested when he comes back to the U.S. He has quite a remarkable record, of showing up consistently in particularly challenged regions of our world, ..and then things tend to get better.
Great piece from comedian George Carlyn: Rockets and Penises in the Persian Gulf. Raunchy as usual, but spot on.
Article in The Economist: First will be Last about the myth that it has great economic advantage to be the first to do something on the Internet. Stan Liebowitz, a professor in economics, makes a good case for dispelling the myth of "lock-in". You know, that the first company that becomes known for doing something will tend to own the market, even if somebody comes along and does it better later. There seems to be no great evidence for that. And for that matter, the fact that most of the "first mover" companies in the Internet economy have gone under, backs that up. But there is inertia in the market. If people need to change to something new, whether from the same company or another, the new product has to be considerably better than the old. Not just a little better, or the pain of the transition is not worth it. People will stay with Microsoft as long as the alternatives are only 10% better, or 50% better. But if somebody provided alternatives that were 3 times as fast, 3 times as easy, with 3 times as many features, and it was free - of course people would drop Microsoft in a matter of months.
I caught the last part of an interview with Jamie Lee Curtis where she imparted this advice about life: Whenever you find yourself thinking "I have to ...", exchange it with "I get to ...". And whenever you would say "I can't ...", replace it with "I'm unwilling to ...". Oh, I'm sure she wasn't the first person to say that. It is good, simple, self-help advice. The kind of stuff people easily gloss over. Yeah, yeah, nice new agey kind of stuff to think about. But, actually, the most powerful changes you can make in your life are little reversals of orientation like that. Change your mind and realize that life is an opportunity, not a burden. You are in charge. If something isn't happening, it is because you aren't doing it. That's not just a nice positive affirmation. It is something huge, if you get it.
"What we do today, right now, will have an accumulated effect on all our tomorrows." -- Alexandra Stoddard
[ Diary | 2002-10-10 02:25 | 0 comments | PermaLink ] More >
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 The poetic manifesto "We are the New Civilization" has now been translated into Finnish, thanks to Liisa Jääskeläinen in Helsinki. Thank you Liisa! That brings it to 12 different languages: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Hebrew, Danish, German, Russian, Croatian, Slovenian, Esperanto, Interlingua and now Finnish. Anybody else who speaks a different language?
The U.S. Department of Defense could not account for how they spent 1.1 trillion dollars in 2000. That is 1,100,000,000,000 dollars. That they "lost". In 1999 the amount was apparently 2.3 trillion. That could easily feed every last person on the planet. Of course they didn't lose it. The question is what it paid for that we're not supposed to know about. See stories: Kelly O'Meara:Wasted Riches, Catherine Austin Fitts:Pockets Picked. But how can they lose more than their yearly budget? I don't entirely get it.
Bertelsman is one of the biggest media companies on the planet: BMG Music, Random House, etc. They bought up and closed down Napster. They were also one of the biggest producers of Nazi literature, pumping out 20 million volumes. They were a big supporter of the Nazi party, and they used Jewish slave labor in the Baltic states. And so far they've denied it. See article. Oh, they're not alone. Deutche Bank financed the construction of Auschwitz. Siemens and Daimler were also using slave labor. Those companies have at least acknowledged it and apologized, for whatever that's worth.
One of the most underrated household products I own is a flashlight that uses LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) instead of bulbs. It uses 3 ordinary "C" batteries. Mine came with a set of batteries when I bought it about two years ago, and there has never been any need for changing them. It runs hundreds of hours on a set of batteries. Much, much longer than if one was using a lightbulb. And there is no bulb that can burn out. I don't know why it is such a well-kept secret, other than that it is rather expensive for a flashlight. But I hate throwing away batteries. I bought mine at C.Crane company here.
"Every man is born into the world to do something unique and something distinctive, and if he or she does not do it, it will never be done." -- Benjamin Mays
[ Diary | 2002-10-09 01:29 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Yesterday there were large anti-war demonstrations in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and other places.
Apparently a new planet has been found in our solar system, called "Quaoar" (pronounced kwa-whar). Why the weird name? It is 800 miles across and a billion miles further out than Pluto.
I just realized that I've completely forgotten that word processors justify lines in both sides when they get printed out, so that everything is flush. That used to be a subject that was important in my mind, and that particular feature seemed rather magical when one moved from the world of typewriters into the world of word processors. But I realize that I've paid no attention to that for years. And webpages don't do that. The right side of the text in my webpages is all jagged. Why? That shouldn't be too hard to do for webpages too.
Come to think of it, a bunch of things used to fill a big portion of my mind space that today are very, very unimportant. Like, when I was a kid my grandfather had carefully explained to me the procedure to follow if you're inside a car that accidentally ends up under water. You know, you open the window slightly, let the water slowly fill up the car, and when it is beginning to be full of water, you're then able to open a door, without the water pressure forcing it in. I would think about that a LOT, imagining the whole thing in great detail, trying to be prepared so I'd know what to do. It all got reinforced by seeing street signs around town in Copenhagen that shows a car driving off into the water, to warn people about canals and stuff. So I knew it was really important. And I was, like, 5 years old, and couldn't even swim.
"always make new mistakes" --Esther Dyson
[ Diary | 2002-10-08 02:57 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 I fixed a few minor things in the NewsLog program. The mechanism for notifying weblogs.com of site changes hadn't been working, but it works now. And I put in the foundation for keeping track of the number of unique readers, and the referring sites that people come from. I'm also still trying to sanitize the links to articles so they're acceptable for search engines to traverse and index. It seems to work, although Google sofar has only indexed my log one level deep - whatever is linked directly from the front page. I think that has something to do with their algorithms, though, and I'm sure they'll come around and pick up the rest before too long.
The first website ever built was info.cern.ch maintained by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). Tim is essentially the guy who invented the web. That page listed all the new sites that came online. An old copy is here. Imagine that - it was pointing to ALL new sites on the web.
The Internet Archive Bookmobile is driving across the U.S. It has access to around 1 million public domain books. You can get any one of them printed out and bound right on the spot. Alice in Wonderland would be printed in about 10 minutes for about $1 in materials.
And now for the winners of the 2002 Ig Nobel Awards. This is an award ceremony organized by and for scientists, and the awards are given for actual scientific projects. But, rather funny ones, and the typical ceremony is rather wacky. Among this years winners: a comprehensive survey of human belly button lint and the report on "Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches Towards Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain", which was a popular entry in volume 39 of "British Poultry Science".
[ Diary | 2002-10-06 00:05 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Today I've been married for 22 years. Hm, that zipped by kind of fast. She was 17, I was 20, disco was the thing.
Demonstrations against war this Sunday all over the U.S. Details here.
A U.S. No-fly blacklist intended for suspected terrorists is also snaring peace activists. Apparently nobody will reveal who's responsible for putting people on the list, or who's maintaining it.
The world's biggest oil bonanza in recent memory may be just around the corner, giving U.S. oil companies huge profits and American consumers cheap gasoline for decades to come. What makes that happen? The war on Iraq of course.
Try this principle on for size: "The purpose of an action is the result it gets". It makes particular sense for agencies that think their actions through thoroughly and who have access to plenty of information and manpower for analyzing it. The results of a war in Iraq is the deaths of a few hundred thousand people, greatly increased unrest and dissentment in the region, and a huge supply of cheap oil. Now see it with the eyes of a capitalist with only one bottom line (dollars) in mind, and you can leave out the first couple of results as irrelevant.
From Lisa Rein: President Bush (when asked to compare Al Queda and Saddam Hussein): "And so uh, uh, a comparison that uh, uh, is uh, well I can't make because I can't distinguish between the two, because they're both equally as bad, and equally as evil, and equally as destructive."
To which Jon Stewart replied during his Daily Show report: "You can't? You know what? I'm gonna try. Al Queda is an ideologically-driven underground ultra-Islamic terrorist network and Saddam Hussein is the dictator of a secular middle eastern nation that seeks mild regional dominance. I did it! They said it couldn't be done!" (Enter confetti and horn blower noises.) "I did it! I've done it!"
"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." -- James Madison (while a United States Congressman)
[ Diary | 2002-10-05 00:31 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 My friend Paul Hersey has one of the most enjoyable user interfaces I know on his home page. Meet Electric Liz. He did both the body painting and the Flash animation himself. Click on the bullets and different things happen for each one.
So, what is good design for webpages? Jakob Nielsen is the guru on web usability. Much interesting stuff there. Like Don't Listen to Users. I.e. watch what people do and see what works and doesn't work for them - don't just ask them what they want. Hm, that does bring to mind a very similar principle I was evangelizing when leading a group of programmers developing a big insurance claim processing system years ago. Listen to what people do and what they're trying to accomplish, watch what they actually do, and then go off and figure out how best to serve them. How about the Eyetracking Study of Web Readers. People's eyes jump around, look at headings, graphics. People often have several windows open and jump back and forth between them. Users don't just "visit a site". They are likely to jump around between sites, and be in several sites at once. Good design must accommodate that people come and go frequently, and must make it quick and easy to reorient oneself.
The Internet will eventually change everything about how companies do business. But it is unfortunately still possible to trick and bully people into buying overpriced mediocre products from dishonest people. Slashdot reports how Robert Novak, the owner of Pets Warehouse, has filed a $15 mill lawsuit against some individuals who commented about his company's poor service on a mailing list. And several little people unable to mount the legal defense have been forced to settle and pay the guy money or give him their websites. Just to let you know. Shop somewhere else.
I noticed in my server logs that there are people coming to my personal page from The Useless Wackos site, which lists the worst wackos the guy could find on the net. Well, the list is a couple of years old, but he obviously thought I was a good candidate. I bet I know a few of the other guys too. At least I've been a member of all the three top-rated wacko religions he lists, and the creator of one of them came to one of my events once. ... Geez, and its not the only one, I'm also one of the weirdest sites on the net.
Well, Hahah, I don't care, because I'm the number one authority on Transformation on the Internet, according to Google. #1 out of 4,370,000 websites that say anything about it. That's actually more scary than being one of the worst kooks. I'm not sure I believe my website is really the best place in the world to go and study transformation. For one thing, most of it hasn't been updated for years. But in Google's algorithms, what makes a big difference is how many other sites are linking to a certain site, and how many other sites are linking to them. And around 900 other sites, many of them very popular, have links pointing to mine.
Do you remember, when you were a child, the sun was yellow? Have you noticed that now it is white?
Dialtones - A Telesymphony was a concert performed entirely by the audience's ringing cellphones. Through an elaborate system of hardware and software the result became something rather remarkable.
[ Diary | 2002-10-04 02:47 | | PermaLink ] More >
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