| Sunday, December 1, 2002 |  |
| Dreamers and Stalkers |
 In Carlos Castaneda's stories about his apprenticeship into the world of sorcery, he describes that there are two main kinds of sorcerers: 'Dreamers' and 'Stalkers'.
A Stalker would be somebody who is a master at putting on or stepping into an existing reality. The term comes from a skill very useful in hunting of animals. The hunter would learn all the animal's ways, how it acts, how it thinks, when it does what, so that he would then be able to expect its moves. That would be equally useful to avoid dangerous animals. So, the stalker sorceror would be somebody who can step into different roles very easily, by being very attentive to detail, and able to morph himself into the required pattern, like a masterful actor. A Dreamer is somebody who can dream new realities so well that one can step into them. A designer of virtual realities, so to speak. That might start with the ability to be conscious and in control while one is asleep, dreaming. Lucid dreaming, astral traveling. So, instead of just being asleep and maybe remembering a dream when waking up, the dreamer remains in control of his faculties and can travel around in the dream and rearrange things. The dreaming ability translates into a fluid ability to create new things, and to go places where nobody has gone before. One reason I'm mentioning this here, is that there are many fields that need skills like these. The masterful ability to take in how something or someone works, so you can be in perfect rapport. The masterful ability to create something totally new, so well that you or somebody else can step directly into the experience, and proceed as if it is real. [ Patterns | 2002-12-01 17:16 | 1 comment | PermaLink ] More > |
| Material for my weblog |
| I was just about to 'complain' that there are too many things out there to write about, when I notice today that several of my sources are lamenting that it is a slow day with nothing to write about.
See, I started only recently to monitor a bunch of RSS feeds from the weblogs of other people I feel some connection with. For those who don't know, RSS is a standard protocol for gathering and aggregating regular feeds of posted items from various news sources. I use Radio Userland as the program to pick up those feeds, but I will, when I have a chance, build that feature into my own NewsLog program. But I notice that there's a risk in just being reactive to what other people are saying or doing, and trying to keep up with it all. That's not what I have in mind. I'd like to be in touch with what is going on for others, but I'd like to not be stressed out if that happens to be a lot, and I'd like not to be bored if that happens to be only a little. I'd rather start right where I am, writing about what is on my mind, or on my desk, or in my life. And then, if I have extra steam, or I need inspiration, I might go out and look for what other people are getting themselves into. In other words, I want it to be driven by ME. I don't want to be a slave to RSS feeds any more than I want to be a slave to keeping up with my e-mail, or with the news in the newspaper. I just needed to state that. [ Diary | 2002-12-01 18:51 | 2 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| No limits to spectrum |
 David Reed says in The Sky's No Longer the Limit that there is essentially no longer any reason to regard radio spectrum as limited. Lots of policies and procedures around the use of radio waves are based on the fundamental assumption that it is a very limited resource, and that governments need to assign different frequencies for specific different purposes. Or, worse, they sell part of the spectrum for huge sums to private enterprises. Anyway, the result is that most of it is unused, and that a few very popular uses of it (cellphones and wireless networking) have too little to work with. There are technologies, such as software-defined radio or UltraWideBand, that could use the spectrum in much more flexible ways. Reeds is very optimistic, and he is somebody worth listening to.[ Technology | 2002-12-01 19:41 | 0 comments | PermaLink ] |
| Resistance is Futile (for Big Media) |
Robert X. Cringely has excellent advice for the music, film and print industries. His column is always well researched and argued. Here he has some excellent analogies about how monopolies fight change, in part by pretending to deliver what people want, but doing it really poorly."My favorite historical example of this phenomenon comes from the oil business. In the 1920s, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had a monopoly on oil production in the Middle East, which they generally protected through the use of diplomatic -- and occasionally military -- force against the local monarchies. Then the Gulf Oil Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, literally sneaked into Kuwait and obtained from the Al-Sabah family (who still run the place) a license to search for oil. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company did not like Gulf's actions, but they were even more dismayed to learn that Gulf couldn't be told to just go to hell. Andrew Mellon, of the Pittsburgh Mellons, was the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and he wasn't about to let his oil company be pushed around by the British Foreign Office. So Anglo-Persian and the Foreign Office did their best to delay Gulf, which worked for several years. They lied a little, lost a few maps, failed to read a telegram or two, and when Gulf still didn't go away, they turned to acting stupid. As the absolute regional experts on oil exploration, they offered to do Gulf's job, to save the Americans the bother of searching for oil in Kuwait by searching for them. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company searched for oil in Kuwait for 22 years without finding a single drop."So, likewise, the music or movie companies are likely to come up with their own peer-to-peer solutions for media distribution. They will be expensive and they won't work very well, but they might slow their own demise. [ Technology | 2002-12-01 20:53 | 1 comment | PermaLink ] More > |