Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Good old-fashioned coverup story for a winter night (free reg required): Bush recently spoke in front of a pile of cardboard boxes stamped “Made in China.” Since this image didn’t square with the image his staff wanted to project that day, aides taped over the labels, then:
Bush spoke in front of a printed canvas backdrop of faux cardboard boxes, which featured “Made in America” in large black letters.
‘Twas ever thus.
J.D. Lasica of New Media Musings has written a comprehensive overview of the RSS phenomenon for Annenberg’s Online Journalism Review. J.D. sent interview questions to take pulse of my RSS habits a while ago, and quotes me in the article (I didn’t realize at the time that he’d also be running our comments in uncut form).
I disagree with J.D.’s statement that RSS won’t be the next big thing. I predict RSS aggregating capabilities being built into major browsers inside of six months. Within two years, any news site that doesn’t publish to RSS is going to start slipping off people’s radars.
Dylan Tweney has posted an excellent interview with Cory Doctorow on the release of “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.” His thoughts on “the tragedy of the commons” and how the situation is reversed in the digital age are especially interesting.
If it’s valuable, it needs to be managed, because the supply of it will dwindle. You need to avert the tragedy of the commons [the notion that self-interested individuals, such as sheepherders, will always use as much of a common resource as possible, such as a grassy pasture, until that resource is totally depleted]. Today, with things that can be represented digitally, we have the opposite. In the Napster universe, everyone who downloads a file makes a copy of it available. This isn’t a tragedy of the commons, this is a commons where the sheep s*** grass — where the more you graze, the more commons you get.
He goes on:
The other side of it is this notion that you never really run out of scarcity. There are always limits on your time and attention, there are only so many people who can fit in a restaurant, only so many people who can converse at once. When you are beset on all sides by entertainment, figuring out which bits are worthwhile requires a level of attention that quickly burns all your idle cycles. When everyone watched Jackie Gleason on Thursdays at 9:30, it was a lot easier — television watching required a lot less effort than whipping out your TiVo and figuring out which shows you want to prerecord.
The beeb is running a piece on the virtually unknown pioneer of electronic music and soundscapes Daphne Oram, who hooked up with BBC radio in the early 1940s and immediately began finding creative ways to hook up tape decks and other equipment to create sounds no one had ever heard before. Her job eventually brought her into contact with modernist / experimental composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. Later, Oram pushed the envelope of the audio-visual bridge with “Oramics” :
Daphne continued composing and developed a system to convert pictures into sounds. It involved drawing on 10 strips of 35mm film, which were then read by photo-electric cells and converted into sound, and became known as Oramics.
Discussions of early electronic pioneers usually center around people like Robert Moog, Raymond Scott, Clara Rockmore, and the like. Interesting to see how far back this stuff goes.
Just received email from the editorial director of the O’Reilly Network informing me that the content of my ORA blog has been placed under one of the new Creative Commons licenses. I happen to be a big fan of Lessig’s Creative Commons as a result of last semester’s work in the bIPlog class, and I’m happy to have sundry mind belches released under the Share Alike deed.
Miles is getting out a lot more in his 3rd month, and has experienced many firsts recently: Rolled over from his back to his tummy and back again, experienced his first Christmas and first snow, first time in a movie theater, first visit to a protest rally, first art opening and first time at an art museum (Gerhard Richter exhibit). Tonight will be his first time sleeping in his crib rather than in bed with mom and dad, which is a big one (for all three of us).
He’s been doing a lot of gurgling and cooing experiments, which are part of the reason we think it’s time for him to move out of our bed and into the crib (we can’t sleep for all the talking;). The rolling over bit is the really exciting one, since it means he’s on the brink of becoming motile. He’s grabbing anything that comes within reaching distance — hair, fingers, forks full of food en route to daddy’s mouth, toys, diapers, fish pellets … He’s fascinated by talking people, TV, screensavers, and above all fish tanks. Pictures of Miles in his 3rd month:
What’s that fuel-efficient frying smell? … Throw your senses of scale and proportion out the window and succumb to the powers of 10 … SWAT team needed to contain dude screaming obscenities at his computer … What if it really is just turtles all the way down after all? … Learn how to write like a wanker … Appears the U.S. government has been using the Internet as a propaganda medium … You can help decide the fate of a college girl’s chest … Who would buy that? … More than you ever wanted to know about that scar on Tina Fey’s face … Read up on the endangered state of the modern banana … How beautiful, how depressing … You sure you want to sell that hard drive? … Apple’s new 17″ laptop is already being called the iSUV … The problem with metadata … You need a cigarette lighter for your PC … Here’s a woman who nursed puppies with her own breast milk … Fried tofu kamakazi and other incredible recipes … Nice 1st-person account by the dude who airbrushed the original Star Trek Enterprise … Don’t miss the Prime Number Shitting Bear … Webmasters, read the case against crawler918 … Forget mini-keyboards and soft rubber rollup keyboards — you need need a virtual keyboard forged of pure light … I believe there are some sounds worth saving … The design of the California quarter has not yet been decided upon — you can vote to help keep it from being some stupid Hollywood or Golden Gate emblem … If you don’t feel like implementing a full-blown web polling system, try setting up the inline Micropoll … Capitonyms controvert my earlier capitulation to the sensibility of the case-respecting but case insensitive filesystem (HFS+) … Seriously sad for the hermit sculptor killed by oil spill … Modern Drunkard Index offers these signs for when talking is impossible … Think you know Dr. Seuss? Check out his early advertising work …
Amy, Miles and I went Saturday morning to SF to march on City Hall in protest of the United States’ almost certain imminent invasion of Iraq – a country that presents (as far as anyone can tell) no immediate threat to us, and that has nothing but oil to interest us. As British author John Le Carre has said about the present build-up, “… the administration’s policies are madness on a scale surpassing McCarthyism and the Vietnam War.” Speaking of LeCarre, The United States of America has gone mad is a must-read.
I suspect that one day we’ll look back on this period and be amazed that Bush was able to convince so much of the country that he was even competent to lead the country (“Anyone can drop bombs – it takes leadership to find actual solutions to actual problems.: –Barbara Lee). There are few things that we as a family (well, Amy and I) feel as sure about as the fact that this war plan is morally wrong. Evil is about to be committed in our name. Our love for America and for freedom is challenged by Bush’s warped vision of what America stands for.
Amazing variety of people at the SF march, expressing themselves in an amazing variety of ways – some of them sober and logical, others completely out there, some borderline looney. But all joined behind the common conviction that a war plan this wrong must not be committed in our name. Here are some of my pictures of the event. See also IndyMedia’s Helicopter shots – how we looked from the air.
Just finished watching Dogtown and Z-Boys, a documentary about the invention of modern skateboarding in Santa Monica in the 1970s. I didn’t grow up in LA, but did surf and skate the 70s away, worked in a surf shop throughout my teens, and spent a lot of time reading Surfer and Skateboarder magazines (and later Thrasher). The scene was so different than it is now, and that’s a hard thing to communicate – the zen and the style and the pure inventiveness of everything that was going on in the skate world at that time. Skating is more radical today, but the pioneering part of it is mostly gone. This movie communicates the vibe of the time period so well, it’s eerie. It’s a look at a part of the 70s that never really gets talked about, but that pretty much was my life. Amy didn’t skate a lick, but totally loved it. You just want to grow your hair out, cut an oak deck out of a desk drawer, glom on some urethane Cadillac wheels, and drain a pool. The soundtrack is absolutely righteous.
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