Relevant History

The strangest thing I've ever seen in my entire life

This is truly astounding: a Japanese reenactment of "We Are the World."

via wonkette

Tags: music, humor, Japan

Closing doors

This (via Lifehacker) is an interesting game, and an interesting experiment.

Look out Amy Winehouse

This Japanese McDonalds commercial, featuring what looks like a Japanese girls' do-wop group that watched Memoirs of a Geisha once too many times, seems weird in so many ways....

This kind of thing is pretty much all my brain is good for tonight.

[To the tune of Miles Davis, "Shhh / Peaceful," from the album "The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions [Disc 2]".]

Technorati Tags: Japan

On my way to Irvine

I'm on my way to southern California tonight. I'll be there for a couple meetings at the National Academies.

I'm in San Jose airport, which I think is the most business-oriented airport I travel through. San Francisco has lots of tourists, as well as business people; Oakland I only see late at night when I'm doing the redeye to DC, and everyone looks the same at 11 PM. San Jose, in contrast, seems like it's 90% lawyers, Intel and Cisco people, and other high-tech types. Of course there are some tourists or families, but the proportion of people checking their Blackberries and talking on their Bluetooth headsets is much higher than SFO or OAK.

My flight is seriously delayed, but that just means I'm working on my talk in the airport rather my hotel room. Business travel is an odd combination of going somewhere, and ignoring your surroundings.

I don't think I'll be able to get to Disneyland, except possibly on evening between the first and second meetings. This is a shame, as I'm very fond of Tomorrowland, and consider it an essential destination for any futurist. There's nowhere else quite like it-- and certainly the future shows no sign of being like it.

[To the tune of Bruce Hornsby, "Every Little Kiss," from the album "The Way It Is".]

Technorati Tags: IFTF, Irvine, National Academy, work

Why is the best dystopian fiction British?

My wife and I have Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on in the background as we work this evening. I'm really impressed by their rendering of the Ministry of Magic, which is an interesting mix of Gothic revival, 1920s Art Deco (particularly all the dark tile), and Brazil. It's wonderfully dark and dsytopian-- equal parts George Edmund Street and Terry Gilliam-- and it makes me wonder: why does the best dystopian fiction come out of Britain?

Of course, the Russians did some damn good stuff too, but it seems to me that the British work-- including Koestler, Orwell, Burgess, Huxley, et al-- is incomparable.

ah, the future

From 41 Hilarious Science Fair Experiments:

It's like a cross between I Can Has Cheezeburger and Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Lady Blue

This evening, while browsing the iTunes store, I rediscovered a song I once loved and probably haven't heard in about 30 years: Leon Russell's "Lady Blue."

There are some songs from that period that I've pretty much had access to constantly, either because they've never gone out of circulation or fashion (you can always find Elton John, the Beatles, Doobie Brothers, Yes, Billy Joel, and David Bowie), or because for some strange reason I always managed to have their albums (Sea Level's "Cats on the Coast" isn't exactly a household name, nor is the 3-disc ELP live album, but I don't think I've ever been without either of them since I was 13). But the long tail of my musical adolescence, the songs that I never owned and which didn't become fixtures on the radio, eventually disappeared.

Forgetting these songs is tough because the most powerful memories of my childhood aren't of places or people: they're of music. I can only vaguely recall  several of the houses (or apartments or trailers) I lived in, and only a few more of the people I went to school with. But I can vividly recall a lot of the music from my adolescent years, and I find that I listen to those songs with the same intensity that I did when I was a kid. So rediscovering a song that I haven't heard is like getting back a little bit of memory.

For me, that's been the brilliant thing about iTunes: the catalog and pricing scheme (and the search functionality) have let me reconnect with a lot of those songs, in a way that would have been otherwise inconceivable.

And Leon Russell's work in the 1970s was pretty amazing, by the way.

[To the tune of Leon Russell, "Lady Blue," from the album "Will o' the Wisp".]

Technorati Tags: itunes, memory, music

Reprints!

Got a pleasant surprise today: a package of reprints for my latest article, a piece on "The Industrialization of Vision in Victorian Astronomy" in Bildwelten des Wissens. It's always nice to get these. I'll have to send them off to various academic friends, for whom the ritual of receiving reprints holds some cultural meaning.

The article is one I wrote a while ago, but never quite got around to publishing; so when the chance came last year to contribute to this issue, I figured, why not make good use of it? I'm not doing much work on Victorian science now, but still it's a subject that never ceases to be interesting.

And in an ironic twist, last night I was up late answering queries from an editor who's working on a piece of mine on mobility and the end of cyberspace. My old and new intellectual lives overlapping.... Though actually I think that's not quite correct: you don't really have old and new intellectual lives, unless you completely change fields and go from, say, string theory to eschatology; you just mobilize your interests and intellectual skills around different subjects.

[To the tune of Ben Folds & William Shatner, "In Love," from the album "Fear of Pop, Vol. 1".]

Technorati Tags: academia, history of science, postacademic

It's funny because it's so true

Spotted on The Neurocritic:

[To the tune of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, "Tank," from the album "Works Live".]

Technorati Tags: humor

Quotes

We do not remember the days, we remember the moments. (Cesare Pavese)

The chief cause of problems is solutions. (Eric Sevareid, 1970)

[To the tune of Miles Davis, "It's About That Time," from the album "The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions [Disc 2]".]

Technorati Tags: quotation

My legacy

My wife points out a recent blog post that talks about the Britannica interactive timelines. I spent a couple intense months working on those about ten years ago. It's nice to see they've survived.

[To the tune of Mono, "The Flames Beyond the Cold Mountain," from the album "Live at Lee's Palace, Toronto, June 14, 2006".]

Technorati Tags: Britannica

Mouse with iPod

Another ho a long line of my daughter's iPod creations.

Words to live by

 

Words to live by

The kind of thing futurists love

One must have an appreciation of the absurd in this business.

[To the tune of Miles Davis, "Conchita/Lament," from the album "Siesta".]

Technorati Tags: future, humor

Pankaj Mishra on the "politique de civilisation"

Writer Pankaj Mishra has a piece in the Guardian on Nicolas Sarkozy's proposals to create a new "politique de civilisation," and what it tells us about how Western politicians are reacting to the shifting balance of global power:

Last month Nicolas Sarkozy floated a raft of policies under a flag of "politique de civilisation". Borrowing the title from a 2002 book by the leftwing philosopher Edgar Morin, the French president argued that "we must fight the blunders and excesses of our own civilisation", which is apparently threatened by "global environmental destruction" and "the mistakes of finance capitalism"....

So what does the French president mean by politique de civilisation? There are some hints in Morin's writings, which broadly state that materialism and individualism have shattered older forms of community, replacing them with soulless anonymity; and that to reform itself, modern civilisation should seek quality of life rather than mere quantity, the mindless accumulation of things....

Sarkozy's rhetoric about remaking our planet was most likely provoked by the dramatic changes the rise of China and India have forced on the political and economic architecture built by the US and Europe in the postwar era.... In less than a year [thanks to the sub-prime debacle, China's growth, and the West's continued reliance on Mideast oil], as the Wall Street Journal noted, "power and wealth have shifted from west to east, from major oil companies to petro-governments, and from US banks and hedge funds to the state-controlled investment funds of the Middle East and Asia".

This transformation has been in the making for a while. But excesses of greed and hubris - such as the invasion of Iraq, the sub-prime crisis and the environmental disaster precipitated by a recklessly globalised model of consumer capitalism - have accelerated the decline of western power. They have made harder, too, the task of the west's political elites: to tell their restless electorates that immigration ought to be restricted even when they know that the economy needs more of it; that globalisation is not all bad even though it has caused job losses; that climate change is an urgent problem even as they promise to enhance consumer purchasing power.

Above all, there is the unspoken fear that Europe could be reduced to what, as the French poet and essayist Paul Valéry speculated in 1919, "it is in reality - a little promontory on the continent of Asia".

[To the tune of Fleetwood Mac, "Go Your Own Way," from the album "The Very Best Of Fleetwood Mac (Disc 1)".]

Technorati Tags: globalization, politics

Big Building, Friday night

Fri 02/08/2008 17:23 02082008931

Cool tech

Fri 02/08/2008 15:54 02082008929

Jaron Lanier on closed-source software

I know it came out in December, but I'm just getting to Jaron Lanier's rather intriguing song in praise of closed-source software.

When Richard [Stallman] told me his plan [for GNU], I was intrigued but sad. I thought that code was important in more ways than politics can ever be. If politically correct code was going to amount to endless replays of dull stuff like Unix instead of bold projects like the LISP Machine, what was the point? Would mere humans have enough energy to carry both kinds of idealism?

Twenty-five years later, that concern seems to have been justified. Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven’t promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they’ve been hindrances. Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it....

[A] politically correct dogma holds that open source is automatically the best path to creativity and innovation, and that claim is not borne out by the facts.

Why are so many of the more sophisticated examples of code in the online world—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or like Adobe’s Flash—the results of proprietary development? Why did the adored iPhone come out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth? An honest empiricist must conclude that while the open approach has been able to create lovely, polished copies, it hasn’t been so good at creating notable originals. Even though the open-source movement has a stinging countercultural rhetoric, it has in practice been a conservative force.

[To the tune of Duran Duran, "Ordinary World," from the album "Duran Duran 2 (The Wedding Album)".]

Technorati Tags: open source, software

In the Mercury News

John Boudreau, unable to get anyone credible to comment on the Deep Meaning of the Microsoft! bid for Yahoo!, quotes me! in today's Mercury News!:

After just 14 years in which it helped launch the Internet age, Yahoo has hit "middle age" and faces the fate of many other iconic Silicon Valley companies - takeover bait.

Microsoft's $44.6 billion unsolicited bid for Yahoo is yet another indication of a common valley axiom: Innovate or face unwanted suitors.

"Yahoo may join the long list of distinguished companies going back to Fairchild Semiconductor known in their time for doing great stuff that couldn't keep up with the times," said Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a research director for the non-profit Institute for the Future.

Actually, I love you John-- you do great work, and help me look more impressive to my in-laws.

[To the tune of Ella Fitzgerald, "It's Only A Paper Moon," from the album "Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook".]

Technorati Tags: history of science, Silicon Valley

The fleischgest

Via thepHtest, the blog of former Britannica president (and my former boss) Paul Hoffman, I found out about Meatpaper, a new magazine about... well, here's what it's about:

Meatpaper is the only magazine about the idea of meat — what we call the fleischgeist — defined here, for the first time:

Fleisch•geist (flish'gist') n. From the German, Fleisch “meat” + Geist “spirit.” Spirit of the meat. From Zeitgeist, “spirit of the times.”

Sure, you might get a whiff of the fleischgeist between the pages of Goat Rancher, but it’s more likely you’ll find it at a friend’s house over dinner, while taking a spin through your neighborhood grocery store, waiting for the bus, or in an art gallery. Fleischgeist refers to the growing cultural trend of meat consciousness, a new curiosity about not just what’s inside that hotdog, but how it got there, and what it means to be eating it.

Given that for many of us cooking is just about the only serious creative/productive work we do in our houses any more-- how many of us ever make any of our own clothes or furniture, or do any more repairs more sophisticated than nailing something shut?-- it makes sense to see a magazine that's part Michael Pollan, part Make.

[To the tune of Duran Duran, "Skin Trade," from the album "Notorious".]

Technorati Tags: Britannica, DIY

Quote of the day

"When a country is well governed, poverty and a mean condition are things to be ashamed of. When a country is ill governed, riches and honors are things to be ashamed of." Confucius

Saturday afternoon

My son and a friend of his are having a playdate at my house this afternoon.

I'm taking this as an occasion to try out the new USB headset that just arrived, and to do some work on my article on paper spaces. I'm not quite as negligent as, say, Homer Simpson in "Treehouse of Horror," and I figure that so long as no one is crying and nothing is breaking, I probably don't need to involve or concern myself with what's going on.

[Blogged with Flock]

Technorati Tags: work, parenting

Re-enrolling everyone

A couple mornings ago, I took the kids to school, then dropped off a form and a massive check to reserve their place in next years' Peninsula class. Of course there's no question about them staying, and the money's for a good cause, but I never like writing checks that are so big you don't really have enough space on it to write all the words.

Still, it's the sort of place where the parents eventually become as a part of the school's life as the children. As I was walking back to the car, a parent with a child in one of the lower grades came up to me. "Hey, I just discovered your blog last night!" she said. We chatted for a couple seconds, and as the children pulled her through the gate to their class, she added, "I'm going to recommend your blog to people who are curious about the school."

So, we're here for another year.

Technorati Tags: menlo park, Peninsula School

Sarah Silverman... um, duet with Matt Damon

I'm not a huge Sarah Silverman fan, but I love this.

Technorati Tags: humor