Relevant History

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Andy: I'm sure this pledge of allegiance will achieve this far more effectively than such outdated and unproven methods as an all-around education, and specifically the proper teaching of history.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!