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This is my dynamic, frequently updated homepage. This is a NewsLog, also known as a WebLog or Blog.
Everything is evolving, so don't assume too much.
People to watch:
Adina Levin
Andrius Kulikauskas
Britt Blaser
Catherine Austin Fitts
Chris Corrigan
Clay Shirky
Dan Gillmor
Dave Pollard
David Allen
David Weinberger
Dewayne Mikkelson
Dina Mehta
Doc Searls
Elisabet Sahtouris
Elizabeth Lawley
Euan Semple
Florian Brody
Frank Patrick
Gen Kenai
George Dafermos
George Por
Graham Hancock
Greg Elin
Hazel Henderson
Heiner Benking
Inspector Lohman
Jean Houston
Jerry Michalski
Jim McGee
Jim Moore
John Abbe
John Perry Barlow
John Robb
Joi Ito
Jon Husband
Jon Lebkowsky
Jon Udell
Jonathan Peterson
Judith Meskill
Julian Elvé
Julie Solheim
Kevin Marks
Lawrence Lessig
Leif Smith
Letecia Layson
Lilia Efimova
Lisa Rein
Marc Canter
Mark Oeltjenbruns
Mark Pilgrim
Mark Woods
Martin Dugage
Martin Roell
Mary Forest
Matt Mower
Max Sandor
Michael Fagan
Mike Owens
Mikel Maron
Mitch Kapor
Mitch Ratcliffe
Nathalie dArbeloff
Netron
Noam Chomsky
Paul Hughes
Peter Kaminski
Phil Wolff
Philippe Beaudoin
Ray Ozzie
Raymond Powers
Rebecca Blood
Roger Eaton
Roland Tanglao
Ross Mayfield
Scott Lemon
Sebastian Fiedler
Sebastien Paquet
Skip Lancaster
Spike Hall
Steven Johnson
Stuart Henshall
Thomas Burg
Thomas Madsen-Mygdal
Thomas Nicholls
Timothy Wilken
Todd Suomela
Tom Atlee
Tom Munnecke
Tom Tomorrow
Ton Zijlstra
Lionel Bruel
Loic Le Meur
Nancy White
Mark Frazier
Merlin Silk
Robert Paterson
Colby Stuart
Nova Spivack
Dan Brickley
Ariane Kiss
Vanessa Miemis
Bernd Nurnberger
Sites to watch:
Webcamorama
Space Collective
Rhizome
Openworld
NotThisBody
Junto
Escape Velocity
Emergent by Design
Do No Harm
Collective Web
Collective Intelligence
Absara
YES Magazine
WorldChanging
ThoughtsOnThinking
Smart Mobs
Nanodot
MetaFilter
Manufacturing Dissent
Independent Media
Imaginify
HeadMap
Greater Democracy
Global Ideas Bank
FutureHi
Friendly Favors
Free Expression Network
Forbidden Science
Explorers Foundation
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Edge
Disinformation
Disinfopedia
Disclosure Project
Co-intelligence Institute
BoingBoing
Action without borders
French:
Emmanuelle
Manur
Elanceur
Loeil de Mouche
IokanaaN
Blog d'Or
Le Petit Calepin
GeeBlog
Absara
Guillaume Beuvelot
Ming Chau
Serge Levan
Jean Michel Billaut
C'est pas Mécanique
I live in Toulouse, France where the time now is:
01:38
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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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 It occurred to me that there's some kind of philosophical point to be made by the fact that humans will often be most creative and successful when they can place something 'outside' themselves, at least temporarily. A couple of examples:
When I'm being a counselor, and a client needs to change something about their own behavior, it isn't going to happen before they're willing to put it 'outside' themselves and examine it. "Aha, I'm doing so-and-so, and that causes so-and-so, and that's not really what I want. I see now." That opens the door to them changing that aspect of themselves. And then they might re-integrate it back into themselves, so to speak.
In economic endeavors in a capitalist society, the people who are most successful tend to be those who think as businesspeople rather than as workers. I.e. you don't just work hard and try to do your job well. You work towards setting up a system, a machine, a racket, a company - something that 'automatically' will be making money for you. Ideally, even when you sleep.
Does the parallel between those scenarios make sense? Well, it does to me. When we can see something a little bit at a distance, we can use a lot of our human intellectual faculties better. We can be more 'rational'. Which is useful when we're trying to fix something or plan something or make it work in an optimum way.
[ Thoughts | 2002-10-14 16:34 | | 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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 It would be valuable for people in any profession or activity to have an awareness of how we simplify our experience in order to make sense of it. That might allow you to stay more sane within a confusing world. General Semantics is a discipline that goes deeply into that. Here are a few tips ..
To any experience we're having, there are several levels to it, which could be described like this:
Event (process) level
Object level
Descriptive level
Inference level(s)
If you're not aware of which levels you're currently focusing on, you might easily get in trouble.
[ Patterns | 2002-10-12 15:20 | | 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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 Some more thoughts and hints about recognizing false or misleading information.
So much information is passing through our lives that we most of the time have to rely on the word of somebody else in deciding what is true or false. Often it is relative strangers talking to us about events and people far away. Journalists, scientists, public officials telling us about what goes on in Iraq, on the moon, in laboratories, or many other places where we can't easily go and verify the story. And we usually wouldn't know how to verify it.
So, what we do is:
We examine the story itself, to figure out if it is internally consistent. I.e. does it agree with itself? We look at the presented credentials of the people who present the story to us. I.e. does their position or qualifications seem to match the story they're telling us?
We look for any claims of endorsenment or verification from people we might know or trust. I.e. who else says this is true? We assess the presentation of the material. Body language, writing style, tone of voice. Is it consistent with somebody telling the truth?
None of that is really any evidence of whether we're being told the truth or not. But they act as initial, superficial steps of due dilligence in trying to verify whether something is real or not. In many cases we don't have time to do anything more than that.
[ Patterns | 2002-10-11 14:06 | | 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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 The Explorers Foundation is the brainchild of my good friend Leif Smith. Leif is a Weaver, someone who sees patterns and who is good at creating connections where none existed previously. We always have very fruitful and long conversations. He is often able to precisely express something I had been struggling with. Below is a fresh piece from him on what The Explorers Foundation is about...
"The purpose of the Explorers Foundation is to build a world fit for explorers and to inspire a people fit to live in such a world.
Exploration consists of passionate interest in problems, and truthful, determined, persistent search for solutions. Some think this is the best of life, the foundation of all possible happiness. We are in business to learn from such people and to serve them, and we believe that enterprise devoted to finding, inventing, presenting, and distributing tools for explorers will change the world.
[ Projects | 2002-10-10 13:19 | | 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 have a persistent vision of a multi-dimensional information storage system. It flashes before my eyes frequently. I dream about it at night. I'm missing it many times each day. The world needs it.
In my dream vision it seems rather simple. A virtual space with an arbitrary number of dimensions. There is always an obvious place to put something, or you just make the place on the fly, and you can find it again along any of the available dimensions. You can add a new dimension whenever you need one. A dimension can be regarded as a storage bin, a category, a trait, a degree of freedom, whatever suits you at the moment. It all seems simple and obvious. You just make connections between the things that ought to be connected.
But if I sit down and try to make a computer program to implement it, or even if I just try to diagram it really well, I quickly get lost, and it suddenly seems to be an impossible problem to wrap one's mind around. A universal database structure that will represent any kind of structure at any scale, in an efficient manner.
[ Projects | 2002-10-07 20:51 | | 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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 A simple concept that can be useful in trying to understand people is what we could call "capaciousness".
Capaciousness is simply how much "room" somebody has for new or different ideas in their mind. Or, more precisely, it is how able one is to contain multiple, possibly conflicting, views in one's mind.
A person with a lot of capaciousness is able to listen to and consider several very different ideas at the same time, without feeling compelled to accept or reject any of them.
[ Articles | 2002-10-05 16:58 | | 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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This is a collage of things that catch my eye, things that need to be said, and stuff I really care about
TRUTH
BEAUTY
FREEDOM
LOVE
TECHNOLOGY
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