Relevant History

Hitler finds out his subtitles are wrong

The whole re-subtitled Downfall thing reaches its logical endpoint here:

The kids will want one of these

The next generation Macbooks. Top this, Windows!

John Oliver on information technology

John Oliver, in the latest issue of The Bugle (the funniest thing in the world), talking about the use of information technology in Iranian protests:

John Oliver: The reinforcements of modern technology stepped to the front line: the twin soldiers of YouTube and Twitter answered their planet's calling. People in protests used their cellphones to shoot footage, and then put it on the Internet. All it took was a potential Iranian revolution to find a practical use for Internet video.

And so I would like to hereby issue a public apology to the piano-playing cat; to the teenage boy receiving a nut-shot from a whiffle bat; and to the fat lady falling off a table. All of your clumsy attempts at entertainment were in fact vital experiments in the development of this communications tool.

Andy Zaltzman: They were very much the John the Baptists to the Jesus of Iranian video.

Read it in the line for tickets to Maker Faire

My latest article, on tinkering and the future, has been published in the latest issue of Vodafone's Receiver Magazine. The piece is an effort to draw together a couple of my research and personal interests (though the boundaries between those two categories is pretty blurry), and to see the tinkering / DIY movement as one piece in an emerging strategy for creating better futures.

Almost forty years ago, the Whole Earth Catalog published its last issue. For the American counterculture, it was like the closing of a really great café: the Catalog had brought together the voices of contributors, readers and editors, all unified by a kind of tech-savvy, hands-on, thoughtful optimism. Don't reject technology, the Catalog urged: make it your own. Don't drop out of the world: change it, using the tools we and your fellow readers have found. Some technologies were environmentally destructive or made you stupid, others were empowering and trod softly on the earth; together we could learn which were which.

Millions found the Catalog's message inspirational. In promoting an attitude toward technology that emphasized experimentation, re-use and re-invention, seeing the deeper consequences of your choices, appreciating the power of learning to do it yourself and sharing your ideas, the Whole Earth Catalog helped create the modern tinkering movement. Today, tinkering is growing in importance as a social movement, as a way of relating to technology and as a source of innovation. Tinkering is about seizing the moment: it is about ad-hoc learning, getting things done, innovation and novelty, all in a highly social, networked environment.

What is interesting is that at its best, tinkering has an almost Zen-like sense of the present: its 'now' is timeless. It is neither heedless of the past or future, nor is it in headlong pursuit of immediate gratification. Tinkering offers a way of engaging with today's needs while also keeping an eye on the future consequences of our choices. And the same technological and social trends that have made tinkering appealing seem poised to make it even more pervasive and powerful in the future. Today we tinker with things; tomorrow, we will tinker with the world.

The piece is also an attempt to think more deeply about things we talked about at the conference on tinkering that Anne Balsamo organized last year (and I continued thinking about in other venues).

[To the tune of Elvis Costello, "I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down," from the album The Best of Elvis Costello and the Attractions (I give it 2 stars).]

Doug Engelbart and Vint Cerf

The keynote at the 6th Innovation Journalism conference. Just to the right of the podium is Doug Engelbart; beside him is Vint Cerf. Cerf is a VERY good speaker. Not a surprise.

Most random sponsored links ever

This is what Google's sponsored links showed with a conversation with a computer historian friend:

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St John Island
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Harness Racing Forum
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John Deere: Drive Green
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They're so totally guessing.

My friends are media geniuses

First I made it onto BoingBoing. Then Jess' Sad Guys on Trading Floors got nominated for a Webby. Then, I discovered that Princeton professor, Renaissance historian, fellow ex-American Scholar board member, and all-around nice guy Anthony Grafton has finally done something he can be proud of: his son Sam-- who I don't think is named after the character in Shane-- had a hilarious letter read on The Bugle, my favorite podcast of all time. (Bugle 70, near the end. It's the letter about penis-shaped helicopters. I've never heard John and Andy laugh so much at a letter.) Clearly our eventual collective dominance of all media is inevitable.

How's that defense of traditional marriage thing working out?

Indecision Forever points out

Remember that not-at-all ironically named "2 Million for Marriage" (2M4M) protest march being organized by the National Organization for Marriage?... Well, they never really got around to buying the rights to www.2M4M.org.

Hmmm, I wonder if anyone else might have bought it?

Passed Out Wookies

Jess just pointed me to Passed Out Wookies. These two from the Hall of Fame are extra special. Yet more proof that, as I've been arguing, experiments in collective intelligence show that the Hive Mind is really interested in only two things: cats and dogs doing cute things, and humans doing really stupid things.

TwitterSheep

Despite the name, I kind of like this: it generates a tag cloud of the interests of people who are following you on Twitter.

Turns out my Twitter network is pretty professionally-oriented. Though probably "media" and "social" (and probably "technology") are over-represented in most people's clouds.

Worst. Internet. Come-on. Ever

A little while ago an IM window opened with a note from someone I don't know. While I've got my IM set to reject connection requests from everyone but my buddies, these sometimes get through. (At least I really HOPE I don't know this person, because if I do, I've got poorer taste in friends than I thought.) The note read:

criticalcoho (3:24)
I hereby solicit Internet sex.

OMFG.

It's the use of the word "hereby" that first had me rolling on the floor. Is this a notarized solicitation? Maybe that makes it legal....

But really, what kind of sexual experience would you want that would make this appealing? Only if you have a fetish for clumsy, fumbling, awkward encounters-- the sort where you accidentally chip a tooth-- would you think to reply. "Feel like you're 17 again! But in all the wrong ways."

Kids and their crazy Google Earth hacks

Ah, youth:

Teenager Rory McInnes painted a giant phallus on the roof of his parents' West Berkshire mansion, apparently after watching a programme about Google Earth....

It is not the first time the stunt has been tried. In 2006 the Sun reported that "pranksters drew a willy on the roof of a top school" in Teesside that went ­unnoticed until it appeared on Google Earth.

Similarly for the benefit of Google Earth, pupils drew a 6m penis in weedkiller on school playing fields in Southampton in 2007.

Dad's reply when contacted by a newspaper: "It's an April Fool's joke, right? There's no way there's a 60ft phallus on top of my house."

First picture with the new camera

My camera died over the weekend-- I think I took too many pictures of my son feeding chickens, and I was using it in the rain. (The one before it died when I took the kids to the beach and dropped it in the ocean. I really should quit taking pictures of the kids.) So when I got back home, one of the first things I did was figure out what new camera to get.

The old camera, a Canon SD630, lasted about two and a half years, which for me is pretty impressive, because I took it everywhere and banged the heck out of it (and had it repaired once).

I went with another Canon, an SD880. It's got a wide-angle lens that I think I'll quite like. And I won't skip a beat irritating my kids with countless pictures of them.

Great literal moments in music video

My friend Jess made this "Great Moments in Literal Video," but will probably be too modest to talk it up (even though she's The Onion Girl and one of the geniuses behind Sad Guys on Trading Floors).

I'm especially gratified to see lots of bands that I recognize from my youth-- Tears for Fears, Billy Idol, a-ha. It warms my heart.

Though I have to confess it was only with the end of the Creed video, and the line "I need Bruce Willis" that I began to suspect it was a joke. Once we got to the Beatles I was clear, but it just goes to show how little I've listened to rock on the radio in the last, oh, fifteen or so years.

More on Facebook portraits

Kazys Varnelis comments on Facebook portraits:

The Facebook self-portrait makes everyone a superstar, famous for no particular reason, but notable for their embrace of fame. So it is that on Facebook, I see friends who I never thought of as self-conscious take photographs of remarkable humor, intelligence, and wry self-deprecation. The Facebook self-portrait insists upon mastery over one's self-image and the instant feedback of digital photography allows us this. Not happy? Well, try again.

Long ago, when I was in high school, I read a book on the Bloomsbury group. I remember that the caption underneath a group photograph in the book (whose title now escapes me) pointed out that even in this über-hip clique, only one member was relaxed, only one understood that the right pose for the camera was a calculated non-pose. Our idea of the self can be read through such images: from the stiff formality of the painted portrait to the relaxed pose of the photograph to the calculated self-consciousness of the Facebook digital image. Each time, the self becomes a more cunning manipulator of the media. Each time, the self becomes more conscious of being defined outside itself, in a flow of impulses rather than a notion of inner essence.

So it was that in reading the first article, I felt that the author missed his friend Caroline's point when she told him "You can never be too cool for your past." As your images catch up to you in network culture, you have to become the consummate manipulator of your image, imagery from the past being less an indictment of present flaws and more an indicator of your ability to remake yourself.

The end of privacy

Enabled by a combination of Bluetooth and incredible stupidity.

This afternoon I boarded a train from Washington bound for Penn Station.... I, along with all of the other passengers, were sitting quietly when the man directly behind me decided to make a phone call using his bluetooth. He was talking so loudly that I think most people in the car were able to hear him.

His conversation, though he stressed how necessary it was to be kept secret (ah, the irony), detailed the current plans of Pillsbury to lay off somewhere in the range of 15-20 attorneys from four offices by the end of March, including a few senior associates with low billable hours and two or three first-year associates. I wouldn't have believed it except for the fact that he identified himself to the call as Bob Robbins, who I learned is the leader of the firm's Corporate & Securities practice section, and was talking to Rick Donaldson, who I learned was COO. What's more, he was NAMING NAMES over the phone!

The first rule of Fight Club, people....

From X2 to Signtific

The Institute's new future of science Web site is now live. For the last couple years we've been running the project under the name X2-- an historical reference to the X Club, a group I've long found fascinating-- but we've updated the name to Signtific, and rolled out a new, much more user-friendly Web site.

No time to stop and relax, though. We've also nearly finished development of a custom version of the online mapping tool that I started using last year (here are copies of my paper spaces and end of cyberspace maps, for example), which promises to be pretty amazing. So no rest for the wicked.

William Deresiewicz on brains, technology and solitude

I've been reading a lot of stuff on the edges of neuroscience-- it's hard to avoid these days-- and this William Deresiewicz essay in the Chronicle Review pointed out something I'd never realized: a link between our current fascination with models of the mind that emphasize the social nature of cognition, our use of technologies that eliminate the possibility of ever really being alone and recognizing the value of solitude.

[Today's youth] have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude.

And losing solitude, what have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct. Thoreau called it fishing "in the Walden Pond of [our] own natures," "bait[ing our] hooks with darkness." Lost, too, is the related propensity for sustained reading. The Internet brought text back into a televisual world, but it brought it back on terms dictated by that world — that is, by its remapping of our attention spans. Reading now means skipping and skimming; five minutes on the same Web page is considered an eternity. This is not reading as Marilynne Robinson described it: the encounter with a second self in the silence of mental solitude.

But we no longer believe in the solitary mind. If the Romantics had Hume and the modernists had Freud, the current psychological model — and this should come as no surprise — is that of the networked or social mind. Evolutionary psychology tells us that our brains developed to interpret complex social signals. According to David Brooks, that reliable index of the social-scientific zeitgeist, cognitive scientists tell us that "our decision-making is powerfully influenced by social context"; neuroscientists, that we have "permeable minds" that function in part through a process of "deep imitation"; psychologists, that "we are organized by our attachments"; sociologists, that our behavior is affected by "the power of social networks." The ultimate implication is that there is no mental space that is not social (contemporary social science dovetailing here with postmodern critical theory).

Empty computer center

One of the most striking things I saw during tonight's walk around Arizona State was this:

via flickr

It's a computer center. And it's empty. Because it's closed. At first, I literally couldn't believe it. After years around Stanford, seeing a computer cluster that's not surrounded by students, and open 24/7, didn't really register. Proof once again that neuroscience is right, and that we tend to see what we believe, not the other way around.

via flickr

If I were Tom Friedman, this would be the beginning of a piece about how this is an example of how American competitiveness is in decline, and how in China there would be 50,000 students using a facility like this. He'd talk about how in Berkeley a similar center-- which he saw while on his way to play golf with the head of Cisco, before heading to Dubai-- was filled with graduate students, but they were all Chinese.

25th Anniversary of the Mac

Happy birthday, computer. I talk about it in a CNN article.

No longer were computers viewed as toys with which to play primitive games or as untouchable tools reserved for degreed engineers. We began to think different.

"The Macintosh demonstrated that it was possible and profitable to create a machine to be used by millions and millions of people," said Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, research director for the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, California, think tank, and chief force behind "Making the Macintosh: Technology and Culture in Silicon Valley," an online historical exhibit. "The gold standard now for personal electronics is, 'Is it easy enough for my grandmother to use it?' People on the Macintosh project were the first people to talk about a product in that way."

Pang, 44, remembered being "mesmerized" by the computer when he first saw it up close in his college bookstore.

Maybe the ultimate DIY videos?

Doctor demonstrating (and narrating) a nasoendoscopy:

And a self-intubation (this is NOT as easy as it looks, so don't try it yourself):

Both via Scienceroll

Thoughts on design + futures

For the last few months, I've been thinking about the relationship between design and futures, and how they could draw on each other. (Of course, I'm hardly alone in this.) During the vacation, I spent some time working on an essay that lays out what I think the biggest opportunities are for collaboration between the two communities, and am posting the first draft here.

ON FUTURES AND DESIGN

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Draft 1.0
4 January 2009

1. Introduction

Over the last few years, a small but significant number of groups have done work at the intersection of design and futures. The Institute for the Future's Jason Tester, English designer John Thackara, American designers Joshua Kauffman and Gwendolyn Floyd (cofounders of Regional), ubiquitous computing researchers Julian Bleeker and Nicholas Nova (organizers of the LIFT conferences), and Danish futurists at the Innovation Lab-- along with many others-- have conducted projects on the future of design, or used design to describe possible futures. The purpose of this essay is to build on this early work, and describe how the relationship between design and futures could be deepened to the benefit of both communities. A closer collaboration, and even more important a hybrid practice that drew on each, would improve product design, profoundly change the way we interact with the future, and create the tools to deal with some of the most critical problems of the 21st century.

I approach this from two directions. First, I describe how design can improve futures. In particular, I argue, research techniques developed by designers-- particularly their close attention to human-device interaction-- could sharpen thinking about, and forecasting of, the future of technology. Second, I describe the contribution futures can make to design. A combination of new technologies and challenges, I contend, are creating an opportunity to design products that can guide people to make better-informed choices about how they can be used, to reinforce behaviors that help users reach long-term goals, and to create a heightened awareness of the future.

This could have profound implications for futures. It would shift the profession from one that communicates through texts, mainly influences leaders and elites, and influences strategic processes, to one that communicates through things, influences large number of people, and informs everyday decision-making. But this is an essential transformation, as it would give us the ability to help solve the critical problems of the 21st century-- problems that, I contend, futures as it currently is practiced is ill-equipped to confront.

New Year's Eve Surprise: Appearing on the Wall Street Journal

This morning, I got a call from Andy Jordan, a technology reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Could I talk about the cultural significance of the Zune problem for an online video piece?

Of course, I had no idea what he was talking about. Zune problem? Who gives a damn about the Zune?

But if there's one thing I've learned, it's that if you want to be a talking head, the first thing you have to do is answer the phone. The second thing you have to do is always, always say, "Sure! I can talk about that!"

I guess that's two things. Still.

So, we talked for a minute-- journalists always want to hear what you're going to say before they ask you on-camera to say it, particularly for these kinds of background pieces-- and I passed muster. I don't know if I sounded good, if I just said what he needed someone to say, or I was the only person he could find on New Year's Eve. It pays to not ask too many questions. Andy asked if I could go up to the San Francisco Wall Street Journal studio and do a video. He e-mailed me the questions he wanted to ask, and the address of the studio. I had just enough time to change clothes, hit Google News on the iPhone, get a sense of what was going on with the Zune, and formulate some answers to his questions as my wife drove us up 280.

Once we got up to the studio, the engineer gave us a quick tour, the kids retreated to one side to watch, and I got settled and miked. I read over the questions a couple more times, switched my iPhone to airplane mode, turned over the answers in my mind, then we started recording. We didn't have a connection to New York, so I had to pretend I was the interviewer and read the questions, then pretend I was listening to them, then answer them. Very DIY.

letting them adjust the camera height, via flickr

For the kids, the most interesting thing was that they could project images on the green screen behind me. What I was saying wasn't that interesting. It was just a bunch of what my daughter dismissively calls "grown-up talky-talky."

practicing looking thoughtful, via flickr

The interview was generally all right. I'm definitely getting better at them. But I need to learn to say what I'm trying to say in about half as much time. Sound bites are harder than they look, especially when you're trying to craft the verbal equivalent of tuna sashimi rather than cheez puffs.

Here's the finished segment:

Thanks folks, I'll be playing the Green Room all week. I'm also available for weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Quote of the day

From the great Donald Knuth:

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.

Via Edward Vielmetti and his Twitter Zero manifesto.

Hey, I quoted this Knuth line in a post four years ago. I thought it seemed familiar.

Obligatory occasional YouTube cat video

As someone who has two cats, I had to post this.

It gets really funny from 0:30.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Reflections on tinkering

I spent a really stimulating day yesterday at the Tinkering as a Mode of Knowledge conference, listening and talking to people like Dale Dougherty (founder of Make Magazine, the Maker Faire, etc.), Mitch Resnik (MIT Media Lab), Rick Prelinger (the Prelinger Library and online film collection), Anne Balsamo, and others. We're meeting for part of today, but I wanted to start reflecting on yesterday's discussion; and in particular, I want to get at the question of what tinkering is. Is it a unified body of practices? Is it a distinct set of skills? is it an historical moment? Is it just a trendy name? This is something we spent a fair amount of time discussing, either formally or informally, and the answer is: It's all of those. I also thinking there are a couple other important things that define tinkering.

What is Tinkering?

You can define tinkering in part in contrast to other activities. Mitch Resnick, for example, talks about how traditional technology-related planning is top-down, linear, structured, abstract, and rules-based, while tinkering is bottom-up, iterative, experimental, concrete, and object-oriented. (Resnick is very big on creating toys that invite tinkering.)

Anne Balsamo and Perry Hoberman have looked at a wide variety of tinkering activities, ranging from circuit bending to paper prototyping to open source to blogging. They argue that these varied activities are unified by a common set of principles or practices. (The following are just highlights.)

• Tinkerers improvise, iterate, and improve constantly.
• Tinkerers use materials at hand, combining heterogeneous parts and components (e.g., raw and finished materials, handmade and industrial objects, customized and personalized consumer products) in ways that push beyond the boundaries of their original contexts. As a result, tinkered objects tend to be collages, appropriations, and montages. Tinkering is bricolage.
• Tinkerers are also social animals. Their success depends in part on being able to tap into porous and ad-hoc communities. For most of what they do the manual is useless; other tinkerers are the only ones who are likely to have the information you need.

Tinkering isn't so much a specific set of technical skills: there tends to be a pretty instrumental view of knowledge. You pick up just enough knowledge about electronics, textiles, metals, programming, or paper-folding to figure out how to do what you want. It certainly respects skill, but skills are a means, not an end: mastery isn't the point, as it is for professionals. Competence and completion are.

Is Tinkering Shallow or Deep?

One of the things I talked with several people (Mike Kuniavsky in particular) about was how historically specific tinkering is. The deeper question is, is this just a flash in the pan, a trendy name without any substance underneath? The answer we came up with is that this is like a musical style, both the product of specific historical forces, and an expression of something deeper and more fundamental. (Think of jazz: you can talk about how it emerges in the early 20th century out of blues, ragtime, and other previous musical forms, reflects particular sociological and historical trends, and is guided by certain assumptions about beauty and what music is; but at the same time, it definitely expresses a deeper impulse to create music.)

Think of the historically contingent forces shaping tinkering first. I see several things influencing it:

• The counterculture. Around here, countercultural attitudes towards technology-- explored by John Markoff in What the Dormouse Said (here's my review of it), Theodore Roszak (his Satori to Silicon Valley is still one of the best essays on the historical relationship between the counterculture and personal computing) are still very strong, and the assumption that technologies should be used by people for personal empowerment. Tinkering bears a family resemblance to the activities embodied in the Whole Earth Catalog.
• Agile software. Mike sees some similarities between agile software development and tinkering; in particular, both are attempts to break out of traditional, hard-to-scale ways of creating things.
• The EULA rebellion. The fact that you're forbidden from opening a box, that some software companies insist that you're just renting their products, and that hardware makers intentionally cripple their devices, is a challenge to hackers and tinkerers. Tinkering is defined in part in terms of a resistance to consumer culture and the restrictive policies of corporations.
• Users as Innovators. The fundamental assumption that users can do cool, worthwhile, inspiring, innovative things is a huge driver. Tinkering is partly an answer to the traditional assumption that people who buy things are "consumers"-- passive, thoughtless, and reactive, people whose needs are not only served by companies, but are defined by them as well. When you tinker, you don't just take control of your stuff; you begin to take control of yourself. (John Thackara talks about user innovation wonderfully in his book In the Bubble. As C. K. Prahalad argues, this isn't a phenomenon restricted to users who are high-tech geeks: companies serving the base of the pyramid see the poor as innovators.)
• Open source. Pretty obvious. This is an ideological inspiration, and a social one: open source software development is a highly collective process that has created some interesting mechanisms for incorporating individual work into a larger system, while still providing credit and social capital for developers.
• The shift from means to meaning. This is a term that my Innovation Lab friends came up with a few years ago. Tinkering is a way of investing new meanings in things, or creating objects that mean something: by putting yourself into a device, or customizing it to better suit your needs, you're making that thing more meaningful. (Daniel Pink also talks about it in his book A Whole New Mind, on the shift from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. The geodesic dome is a great example of a technology whose meaning was defined-- and redefined-- by users.)
• From manual labor to manual leisure. Finally, I wouldn't discount the fact that you can see breaking open devices as a leisure activity, rather than something you do out of economic necessity, as influencing the movement. Two hundred years ago, tinkering as a social activity-- as something that you did as an act of resistance, curiosity, participation in a social movement, expression of a desire to invest things with meaning-- just didn't exist: it's what you did with stuff in order to survive the winter. Even fifty years ago, there was an assumption that "working with your hands" defined you as lower class: "My son won't work with his hands" was an aspiration declaration. Today, though, when many of us work in offices or stores, and lift things or run for leisure, manual labor can become a form of entertainment.

No doubt there are other sources you could point to-- microentrepreneurship or the growth of "jobbies," the presence of an infrastructure that supports the sharing and tracking of unique handmade things (from eBay to ThingLink).

Does Tinkering Matter?

That's a pretty varied list. And it suggests that tinkering is more than a local, Valley, geek leisure thing.

First, tinkering is a powerful form of learning. Even if it doesn't stress mastery of skills, tinkering does emphasize learning how to use your hands, learning how to use materials, and to engage with the physical world rather than the world of software or Second Life-- though tinkering does share a sensibility toward the world that lots of kids demonstrate to programs and virtual worlds: you just get in there, hit buttons, and see what happens.

This really matters because you can be creative with stuff in ways you can't with bits, and that the more you understand the possibilities and limitations or materials-- or more abstractly, if you learn how to develop that knowledge-- the smarter you become. In this respect, it dovetails with "a little-noticed movement in the world of professional design and engineering" that Gregg Zachary wrote about a few weeks ago: "a renewed appreciation for manual labor, or innovating with the aid of human hands." (I write about this at greater length on End of Cyberspace.)

Second, tinkering is forward-looking. It's partly about how we'll use and interact with technologies in the future. As much as any loose movement can be described this way, tinkering is a set of anticipatory practices, aimed at developing a sensibility about the future. It's a way to develop skills that are going to matter in the Conceptual Age, in the ubiquitous computing world. As we move into a world in which we can manufacture things as cheaply as we print them, the skills that tinkerers develop-- not just their ability to play with stuff, or to use particular tools, but to share their ideas and improve on the ideas of others-- will be huge. (I talk about this some in an article in Samsung's DigitAll Magazine.)

Finally, tinkering is an expression of the nature of our engagement with technology. If you buy the argument of Andy Clark that we are natural-born cyborgs, you can see tinkering as a form of co-evolution with technology, or a kind of symbiotic activity.

[Update 5/29/2009: I just published a new piece on tinkering and the future in Vodafone's Receiver Magazine. Check it out!]

The Power Point from Hell

This presentation by Sequoia Capital, a VC firm here in the Valley, is pretty terrifying. But the first slide really tells you everything you need to know:

Silicon Valley, Silicon_Valley

My friends are geniuses

Sad Guys on Trading Floors. The one upside to the downturn.

business, humor

Geek 2.0

Brilliant. Check it out.

Turned off troublesome Twitter notification

It turns out that my blog about my kids was sending notifications to my Twitter feed. Since the kids' blog is password protected, this was causing some consternation. I think I've got it fixed.

Something you'd think would come from the Onion, but...

Instead, this amazing story comes from Projection, Lights and Staging News:

Russian Laser Show Leaves 61 Partially Blind

MOSCOW — At least 61 cases of permanent vision loss have been confirmed after lasers for an open-air event were used indoors instead. The organizers for the Aquamarine Open Air Festival moved the festivities under tents to shelter attendees from a driving rainstorm, and powerful lasers designed for outdoor use were used under the tent.

Instead of streaming out into the open sky, the rays from the lasers bounced off the tent’s interior, with a level of visual intensity that was enough to cause permanent vision loss. Some victims lost up to 80 percent of their vision, with visible retinal scarring.

The all-night dance party took place in Kirzhach, outside Moscow. Cosmic Connection, the group that organized the event, has not commented on the incident.

Machines of Loving Grace

Richard Brautigan's 1968 poem.

Technology transfer breakfast

Had breakfast with an SBS student who's doing a summer project on technology and IP transfer. It was a good time: I find the SBS students interesting to talk to, both because they're working on cool stuff, and because they're useful informants about the local culture of the business school.

One of the things we talked about was the degree to which you could think about intellectual property as something akin to a manufactured object, or something that's inherently social. If it's the first, the challenge people who want to facilitate intellectual property have to deal with involve reducing transaction costs and asymmetries, because IP is something that you could move as easily as an iPod moves from the factory floor in China to your door. If it's the second, though, and if the transfer of intellectual property is more a process of social negotiation in which creators and users of IP create a common understanding around pieces of IP, then you need to design a very different system: one that facilitates relationships between creators and users, rather than facilitates transactions between anonymous buyers and sellers.

I've finished packing, and now I'm going to go check out, walk around for a while, then take the bus from Oxford to Heathrow Terminal 5. I'm going to leave ont he early side, to make sure I get there with plenty of time; then I figure if I have a long wait, i can wander around T5 and take pictures, while my clothing disappears into some strange black hole.

England, innovation, Oxford, Oxford University, Said Business School, technology, travel

Possibly the most dangerout thing on the Internet

Massive Music Quiz. Be very afraid.

Recovering my digital life

Sunday night, as I was putting my son to bed, my hard drive died. We were listening to Dobie Gray's classic "Drift Away" (my children are strangely familiar with classic rock) when my computer suddenly froze. When I tried to restart, instead of the happy Mac face, the screen displayed a folder with a question mark.

Not good.

The next day at work, our IT guy confirmed the problem: there had a been a hardware failure in my hard drive, and it was now toast. He could put back some of the lost data, but I was going to be on the hook for whatever software I'd put on the machine, as well as my music.

So I've spent a fair amount of this week reconstructing my life, and making sure that the next time this happens, I'm better prepared. Hours downloading software, trying to remember passwords to countless Web 2.0 accounts, configuring things so they look familiar. Some things weren't hard, but I still haven't gotten some things worked out. Didn't Ecto have a button that showed what music you were listening? If it's in the new version of Ecto, I can't find it.

Reconstructing my music collection has been hardest. Part of the problem is that it's just so big: 6000+ songs, over 30 GB of material, and of course many of the songs I listen to most are things I bought on the iTunes store. I've been pretty good at backing things up, but it had been a month or so since I'd last saved my purchases, so there was that gap to deal with.

The iTunes music import process is okay, but not great. Most important, when I reimported music from my backup drive, my ratings and play count were stripped out. This may sound trivial, but most of my smart playlists sort music based either on my ratings or the popularity of songs; so losing this information was a big thing.

Tonight, though, I discovered a program that seems able to restore that missing information: something called Senuti. It lets you copy music from your iPod to your computer, and it handles metadata much better than anything else I've tried (even Apple's own process).

This may be the first case where losing my ability to do data-mining on myself really hurt. Normally we think of the data we've created, or the programs we use, as the most valuable parts of out digital archive; but for my music, having information about what and how I've listened really matters.

itunes, music, software

New post

The blog is inexplicably missing. I thought a new post would wake it up.

Because everyone loves encephalopod robot dirigibles

Via Alex Halavais, the Festo Air Jelly:

The Bugle

I'm a big fan of John Oliver's work on The Daily Show. Recently I ran across a reference to a podcast he does for the Times of London, and I downloaded a couple to my iPod, and listened to one in the car this morning, as I was driving up to the city.

I put on an episode in which Oliver and Andy Zaltzman talk about a proposal for a pledge of allegiance in Britain, as a way to boost national pride. John Oliver's take on the idea:

John: There is no national pride in Britain any more, and with good reason. We've lost everything. We are the shell-shocked man walking away from the casino at five in the morning, rehearsing what he's going tell his wife. We collectively have lost our shirts; there's nothing left.

Andy: I'm sure this pledge of allegiance will achieve this far more effectively than such outdated and unproven methods as an all-around education, and specifically the proper teaching of history. Lord Goldsmith... said, "Yeah, I figure what this country's errant youth need is some half-assed ******** like this. That'll get them on the straight and narrow." So good work, everyone involved!

John suggested another idea: swearing at the Queen.

We'd be good at it; it would be fun; it would engender a sense of community; and it would be an energetic piece of punctuation to start the day. Besides, it's basically taking the Magna Carta to its natural conclusion. Turn to face the Queen, and say, "YOU %($*%^^) #*^!#@!!"

Apparently teachers have been among the most vocal critics of the proposal-- which only proves that it isn't necessary, because as John explains,

that is the last bastion of Britishness: sneering at things. That will be the last thing to go. The day that we can't scoff at other nations, we've arranged for France to put a pillow over our face, and hold it there until the twitching stops. If their wrists are strong enough, that is. It's like the fact that we mock Americans for whooping and cheering at things. We now ridicule the very concept of enthusiasm. That is how cynical we've become as a nation-- we find positivity laughable....

National pride in un-British. The only time we can collectively justify facing a flag and listening to the national anthem is when we've just won an Olympic bronze medal in the women's two-person dinghy....

Andy: I think the immigrants who are made to make these pledges might see the irony in pledging allegiance to a nation that was largely responsible for destabilizing the place they've just run away from.

After about ten minutes, I had to turn it off. I was laughing so hard, it was unsafe. I thought I was going to drive off the road.

[To the tune of Times Online, "The Bugle - Episode 21 - Swearing at the Queen," from the album "The Bugle - Audio Newspaper For A Visual World".]

Technorati Tags: humor, UK

Robot parade

Interesting article about how people come to develop emotional attachments to robots. I blogged about it on End of Cyberspace, if it's behind a subscription firewall.

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, robotics

Just trying out Grand Central

Not long ago I got a Grand Central number. It's basically a universal phone number, which you can set up to ring different phones (home, cell, etc.) depending on various rules; it's also got some cool voice mail functionality.

One of the other things you can do is let other people leave voice mail by clicking on the above badge. I have no idea if it'll just be a magnet for spam, or might be genuinely useful; we'll see.

It's certainly an interesting service in theory; I particularly like the idea of being able to check voice messages from my computer, which would make it easier for friends and family to leave me messages when I'm on the road. (Not that they don't all spend a lot of time doing e-mail already, anyway.) I tried creating a couple greetings, but they were from my cell phone and don't sound great.

It strikes me as a little odd that you can't record greetings from your computer. I know they're focused on phone connections, but I'm just saying.

Reconnect

I've gotten a slew of Facebook and LinkedIn requests these last few days, from people I've not been in touch with for a while. These come now and then, but what's unusual right now is how many of them are from people I haven't been in touch with for a long time.

This past weekend I got a friend request on Facebook from a high school classmate who I haven't seen since graduation, more than 25 years ago. He's now a pastor, and from what I hear a pretty good one.

I also reconnected with one of my high school music teachers. This is someone I haven't spoken to in a couple decades, but she was one of my favorite teachers. It turns out that she was also of the most influential. I've not sung in any organized venue since college, but I think singing gave me a valuable familiarity with public performance and an awareness (in a good way) of the craft and artifice of self-presentation.

This is not an impact either of us could have predicted, and it illustrates two things.

The first is that education is rarely wasted... but its doesn't always pay off where you expect. When my children were babies and waking up in the middle of the night, I was getting very little sustained sleep, and often thought to myself, this is like studying for my orals. I didn't read all that Joseph Ben-David, Margaret Rossiter and Andy Pickering in order to be more effective at baby-wrangling; but it turns out that the experience of having to plow through vast amounts of stuff, and not having enough hours to both read and sleep, paid off in unexpected ways. Nor did I study STS to become a futurist; but the value of STS as a conceptual toolkit and way of thinking is pretty self-evident to my colleagues.

The second is that if it's hard for us to predict how what we learn will pay off, it's almost impossible for our teachers to know. For me, one of the hardest things about teaching was the sense that I didn't know-- indeed, couldn't know-- what kind of impact I was having on my students, or would have on them. It might be that the enthusiastic ones would never find a use for anything I taught them, or that the smart but slightly jaded one would have a career-defining moment that turned on something she learned in class. All of that was unknowable to me, and I would have to take on faith that, after all was said and done, my impact would be more positive than negative (or maybe neutral was the worst you could reasonably expect-- a history teacher is going to have a hard time ruining anyone's life).

Of course, there are a few students you hear about, and if you're old enough you might merit some kind of formal recognition, which is an occasion for people to come and say nice things about you. But those kinds of events are pretty scripted, and come pretty late in one's professional life.

I wonder, though, if in the future teachers will find it a little easier to know how their former students are doing, and what kind of effect they might have had on them. My wife, who teaches eighth graders, is connected to some of her former students through Facebook; and while they may not talk regularly, those weak ties are easier to maintain than my connections to my teachers, and it's probably a little harder for them to decay to the point of being useless. (After a couple moves, I found that not only had I shed myself of things I wanted to get rid of, I'd also inadvertently thrown out things like address books, old letters, and the like. So much for going home again.) I suspect that in the future these links may make it easier for teachers to have a sense of how they've affected students. Which would be nice for everyone.

[To the tune of Perpetual Groove, "March of Gibbles Army," from the album "Live at The Music Farm, 31 December 2006".]

Technorati Tags: education, henrico, memory

RFID-equipped passports made in... Thailand?

I just got a new passport, and reluctantly accepted the fact that it was going to have an RFID tag in it. I'm generally not particularly worried about having RFID on consumer products, but RFID-tagged passports are a different situation (Bruce Schneier has made the argument against them very well). Now I see this on Daily Kos:

Your RFID-Chipped Passport Is Made In Thailand and China 'Stole' the Chip Tech

Terrific.

[To the tune of Perpetual Groove, "Gorilla Monsoon," from the album "Live at the Langerado Music Festival, 6 March 2008".]

Technorati Tags: RFID, security

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

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

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

Who would David Bowie vote for?

Via Sadly, No!

History of the signal board?

Has anyone written about the history of those boards that stock exchanges use to show information to traders-- the ones that in the movies always have guys running around them, frantically updating prices?

[To the tune of Ratatat, "Wildcat," from the album "Classics".]

I would have so won this

Proving that half of my brain is also filled with game memories.

"Tron Contest Framed," from the fantastic Retro Arcade set on Flickr.

Tags: arcade, videogames, tron

The last surviving blink tag...

...has been found. I remember back in the day these were the stuff of considerable derision by real Web designers-- but that was before pop-ups, little Javascript thingies that followed you around, and many other bits of distraction.

Update: Oops-- I had put the actual blink tag in the title, and so the word "tag" was blinking. Fixed.

[To the tune of The Blue Nile, "From A Late Night Train," from the album "Hats".]

MoodBlast

In the course of trying to figure out how to have my Twitter status update to Skype, I discovered MoodBlast, a little Cocoa app that will send updates to Adium, iChat, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, and various things I don't actually have.

I've only been using it for about 5 minutes, but it seems pretty cool.

[To the tune of Genesis, "Abacab," from the album "Turn It On Again: The Hits".]

Technorati Tags: social software, Web 2.0