Go. Right now I want you to watch the Loose Change 9/11 documentary. It is filled with more evidence & facts than speculation (at least through the first 1.5 parts). After that the author starts to derive reasonable conclusions based on the presented data. Even if you don’t believe the conclusions, you have to admit that the data provided does leave you somewhat scratching your head.
You can watch it on YouTube with the following links:
Ok. Today I wanted to see V for Vendetta today on the big screen. Right now I am willing to pay the $10 or so for the experience.
People in Austin have this sick adoration for cult movies, indy music, and the general hippie lifestyle. I know that there is an Austin Film Club or Society or something like that. Apparently “film” does not equal “movie” around here, because there is not a damn movie theater playing “big name” movies anywhere within (reasonable) walking distance of the downtown area or the damned university campus. I know that Austin prides itself on being “weird”. Because of that, they deliberately keep chain stores and the like away from the downtownish area. But movie theaters too? Why?
I do not want to spend more than an extra hour of additional time traveling to and from the theater. You would imagine that the local bus system would ferry moviegoers to and from the Big Name Theaters that are “so far” away. Ha! You’d be wrong.
I found a bus to take me to a “close” theater with local flair in the fall to see Serenity. My ticket was for the evening showing because it feels weird to be seeing a movie during the daytime. I wanted to see it at night and that’s what I did.
After the movie let out I discovered that the only bus servicing vicinity of the theater had stopped running for the evening, and that the nearest pickup spot was approximately 8-10 blocks away (and not in a straight line). After walking that far, I just gave up and walked the rest of the way home—you know, why the hell not?
I should point out that I do not have a car. I do not feel that it is financially wise to own a car living on a graduate student income. I would imagine that there are many people like me.
This is why people like in similiar low-income situations like me have a propensity for the less-legal methods of watching movies.
Right now I am sitting here wanting to spend my $10 to see a movie. The money is practically already spent. I want to see V on the big screen today and I don’t want to dick around getting to and from the theater. I live in a city and why can’t I do this? Something about this equation doesn’t add up. In movies depicting life in other cities like New York City you see happy people walking down the sidewalk to their local theater with box offices out front and then happily walking inside to see their movie. After it’s over sometimes they walk down the sidewalk to wherever. My point is why the hell does Austin have to be “special” and not have theaters like that? Especially around a university campus where I am sure that there are undergraduate students who are having the same dilemma as me. They know that downloading movies is bad, but they want to watch new releases, but if they can’t get to the theater the chances are much higher that they’ll just download a bootleg copy for free.
Not having a theater around a university is just stupid on so many levels.
Grr. I think I’ll just end up angrily programming tonight instead.
While shampooing my hair this morning, I got to thinking about hair. Specifically, why humans still have hair.
Originally I would imagine that the evolutionary gears “encouraged” hair traits over the entire body for combating colder climates. You can see this in pretty much any woodland mammal if you page through your A-Z kids picture book on zoos.
But humans are an interesting bunch, because we don’t just live with what environments we find—we shape our environments to suit what we want. Case in point: heating & air conditioning systems, hats, gloves, and coats.
With all of these post-genetic adaptations to the variance in thermal surroundings, humans don’t really need hair for its original “purpose”. I have this theory that perhaps this is why we really don’t have full-coats of thick body hair anymore. If you think about what purpose the remaining little bits of hair provide, they are secondary. Firstly in areas of skin-skin contact hair seems to act as a mediator for an air-cushion allowing trapped water-based liquids to evaporate freely and also allowing both patches of skin to freely move without sticking (hair reduces friction). Secondly, those sparsely distributed hairs on your extremedies seem to act as good vectoral indicators of gaseous fluid flow across the skin surface.
But neither of these two things is entanged with our survival anymore. Hair isn’t important in the natural-selection algorithm for us anymore. Because of our self-interaction and post-evolutionary adaptation it would seem that a lot of the quirky traits that we developed to keep us alive on this planet have become less-useful since we started setting our thermostats to 76°F, buying humidifiers, and locking our doors at night.
So my question is, how long will it take before random mutations and sexual reproduction start to take our non-useful traits on an evolutionary random walk? I think you can see this happening by looking at things like baldness.
I’d like to point out that I didn’t really research any of the biology around what I wrote, so I may be completely off-the-mark on some of it.
With the relative ease by which you can move large chunks of type back and forth between a source and a destination with keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V I’ve found myself frequently using a new verb mashup to describe the act: copypaste
I most frequently use the term while chatting on IM with two different—potentially time-shifted—people and I am telling a brief story about something that happened, but I don’t want to repeat myself like I would have to in real-life. I’ll just type out my explanation to Person 1 and then copypaste it to Person 2.
Sure you could just say “copy and paste” instead of “copypaste” but that phraseology gives the impression that the action is actually composed of two components. In this context, however, the two actions are never executed in a decoupled manner so the “and” is understood and is therefore redundant information. I classify copypaste’s evolution in the same category as the term “prolly” (which is a pronounciation shortcut for “probably”).
I hope that The Internet decides to start using this new word.
Copypaste.
People in the tech arena are talking about the possibility of the rise of a new Bubble. It sounds like the general theory is that if and when the Bubble breaks, it won’t be as messy as the first tech Bubble:
The dot-com model was inherently flawed: a vast number of companies all had the same business plan of monopolizing their respective sectors through network effects, and it was clear that even if the plan was sound, there could only be at most one network-effects winner in each sector, and therefore that most companies with this business plan would fail. In fact, many sectors could not support even one company powered entirely by network effects. [src]
So if we’re in the era of a new tech Bubble, what is the inflationary concept at the root? In my opinion it’s a proper understanding of a new buzzword: web2.0.
I hate this term, and other people are of a similar mind about it. Unfortunately for us all, people who drink the marketing Kool-aid think it’s wonderful. For them, it’s an easy sell. The 2.0 makes it feel new and a necessary thing to go after. I think it imposes some sort of discrete evolutionary concept to the web. Does this mean what we used to surf around on and waste time with was in some way inferior as Web1.0?
All this and I haven’t even gotten to explaining what it is.
The problem with describing web2.0 is that it doesn’t really have a fixed meaning per se. Web2.0 is like this fuzzy bundle of philosophies, feelings, technologies, and business practices. I’ll summarize my own personal idea of web2.0:
chmod 777 webFlickr and Del.icio.us are two very prominent examples of these web2.0 attributes.
People use the sites to organize and tag their own photos and bookmarks in a way that makes sense to them personally. It’s only as an aftereffect can you choose to examine the Global quality of these Local decisions by looking up a global tag page. Flickr offers a forum area where they can directly interact with their users. Both del.icio.us and Flickr are free services at first. Of the two, only Flickr requires you to pay a subscription fee to make complete use of the site. But since Flickr has such high value as a service, a great many users eventually decide to pay for their services.
Interestingly enough, of the companies that survived the first tech Bubble, most of the big ones were already thinking in this new web2.0 mindset:
Since I read both Emergence and Linked back to back, I’ll just say that a majority of this section comes from those two books (wonderful books by the way).
Ant colonies are cool. Individual ants tend to do their own thing. While they walk, they tend to emit certain types of pheremones that linger behind them. Other ants, upon recognizing these pheremone trails will tend to follow them. Pheremones are how ants communicate. The more ants follow the same trail, then the stronger the scent will be and that path will become popular. Somehow what emerges from this collection of pheremones and ants in the dirt is a functional system of interconnected tunnels arranged in a logical fashion that no single ant could sit down and plan out down at the local city planning office. In one controlled case where ants were confined to a large boxed region of dirt:
“Look at what actually happened here: they’ve built the cemetery at exactly the point that’s furthest away from the colony. And the midden [trash-dump area] is even more interesting: they’ve put it at precisely the point that maximzes its distance from both the colony and the cemetery. It’s like there’s a rule they’re following: put the dead ants as far away as possible, and put the midden as far away as possible without putting it near the dead ants.” (Emergence, p.33)
There’s no central control issuing orders to do this, it’s just an emergent behavior from each ant following a very small set of rules and “listening” to the pheremone trails of his fellow ants.
So was the Web (circa 2002-2003) a macroscopic version of humanity’s colony with the links between pages being “pheremones”? The answer is: not quite. The reason is that only a small group of people (webmasters) were actually making the majority of the linkages between pages. Most people who used the web were doing so in a read-only manner. That being said, it still had some significant information hidden in that link structure (i.e. Google’s pride and joy: PageRank).
The point behind “chmod 777 web” (for non-geeks that roughly translates to making the web a read AND write environment that also lets you run programs) is that web2.0 encourages letting the average user contribute to the structure and content of the web itself. Whether it be by blogging, posting photos online, keeping track of your bookmarks online, or a myriad of other things, the trend is that every “ant” on the web finally has the chance to leave his own “pheremone trail”. This can only mean that the web is going to slowly accumulate more interesting emergent behaviors and statistics.
To close out this segment of my observations about the current state of the web, I’m going to answer a question that was bothering me after the Blogger, Keyhole, Writely, Flickr, and del.icio.us acquisitions: Who will win? Google or Yahoo?
My answer: Google and Yahoo aren’t even in the same business (if you discount their search engines). In my model of the web, I think Yahoo is trying to monetize the ants and Google is trying to monetize the pheremone trails.
Yahoo’s acquisitions seem to center around people and community. Google seems to have always distrusted people as providers of metadata and content preferring to just trust the data that’s already on the web.
I’ve got more to say on tagging, feedback loops, and the Semantic Web, but those topics will have to wait—this post is already long enough as it is.
Bruce Sterling delivered a speech titled “The State of the World” at SXSW. Even though it is about 48 minutes long it is well worth your time to listen to it.
It’s already inspired thepeopleyes. If you really, truly do not have the time to listen to it, you could listen to small segments of the full speech or read a rough transcript. But I recommend the full listen.
I have to admit, I don’t follow the political Blogspace much (I don’t like the term Blogosphere much either). It’s full of people posting volumes of political opinions that reference each other and current events. I’d have to incorporate a huge collection of new feeds into my daily reading to even try and keep pace. Most of the backlogs are fleeting as context, causality, and policy in the world change from day-to-day and what was opined two days ago may just be rubbish because the context has evolved so quickly. I did try to get “in on the action” and added a few A-list political bloggers to my reading and quickly gave up. They post so incredibly frequently. It’s insane.
The one thing that continually pokes my conscious mind when I think about the political blogs is that the concept seems so familiar to me.
It’s because I read about them in high school…before they came to life. The political Blogspace bears a striking resemblance to the concept of “the nets” from Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game. These nets are described as a distributed collection of forums where most of the serious global political discourse occurs. Peter and Val—both children—discuss them in a conversation:
“Val, we can say the words that everyone else will be saying two weeks later. We can do that. We don’t have to wait until we’re grown up and safetly put away in some career.”
“Peter, you’re twelve.”
“Not on the nets I’m not. On the nets I can came myself anything I want, and so can you.”
They didn’t need money. They needed respect, and that they could earn… All that anyone would see were their words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets.
That description seems like an eerily perfect description of the way blogs and comments work in today’s world. Anyone can start a blog, and there are enough free services out there that you can blog anonymously if you so desire. It doesn’t really matter who you are, as long as you know what you’re talking about and you don’t go around blatantly falsifying “factual” information, I can see how you’d grow a following of people who respect you and trust what you have to say.
If you’re familiar with the ending of Ender’s Game, then this fledgling collection of “nets” may have some potentially significant political impact in the future.
I know a biologist-in-training, and last night we were chatting on AIM about genetics and M. relayed the following little blurbs of information to me, and I thought I’d like to share them:
Think of all the new definitions of “family” you could cook up now!
I guess my lego-whoring skills are pretty good because the photo of my brick version of Howdy the new-user Flickr icon was just featured on the FlickrBlog. This is so awesome!
A big conference just wrapped in Austin, TX on Tuesday: South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW or SXSWi for short). Loads of geeks, designers, bloggers, vendors, and curious people swarm into Austin to gorge themselves on the latest in the field of interactive web technologies and related areas. As someone who is interested in this field, but not actively pursuing any career related to it, I was torn between buying a badge (expensive in grad student dollars) and not buying a badge. I chickened out and just decided I’d “stalk” the Austin Convention Center for a day and see if I could grab any paparazzi shots of Important People if they strayed outside the building.
I took my camera and sneakers and leisurely walked in a most arcane random attractor pattern in the vicinity of the convention center. I was able to grab zero photos of Important People, though I did snap a shot of the Podcast Pickle and the venue for the Yahoo/Flickr/upcoming.org/Del.icio.us party scheduled for later that very same day. It was rather hot outside and I recall that I was wearing one of my (many) black shirts, so I went home and did the rest of my stalking by monitoring the “sxsw2006” Flickr tag page for photos taken by actual badge-holders.
Back in my apartment, I turned on the television to some local news channel and within 5 minutes of watching I hear this, “And the SXSWi tradeshow is open to the public, just go the following URL and fill out a brief survey and print out your free one-day admission ticket.” Sweet! For exactly zero dollars I was granted access to the tradeshow floor and the Adobe Day Stage. It’s not much, but it’s way better than but it’s way better than stalking (in the best possible sense of the word) in the Austin heat outside.
Wow. The Austin Convention Center is a hell of a large place—and cold too. After about two hours indoors, the air conditioning started to get to me. It was probably around 74°F indoors and 84°F outdoors.
Oddly, the tradeshow had a lot of vendors for digital video cameras and CD/DVD duping equipment. Throughout the area there were a bunch of nice couches in the vendor areas where you could sit down, rest….and talk about their product. I snapped a photo of my first Important Person of the day: Chris Pirillo. He was interviewing someone on the spot with a microphone plugged into some small digital recorder of sorts.
Over in the day stage area there was a place to buy lunch-type food and tables to sit at to consume this McSpensive food. Even here at least a third to a half of the people at these tables had laptops that were out and on. Of the eight outlets I could see along a single wall, 66% of them were taken up by laptop power supplies. Yep. It was definitely a geeky crowd.
On a projector screen up front, there was an IRC channel being displayed. I was lucky to have arrived when I did because I witnessed the Sixth Annual Weblog Awards (almost no winners were present to accept their awards though). Accepting awards on behalf of Boing Boing was David Pescovitz. Upon receiving the lifetime achievement award he said, “lifetime achievement…does this i should go die now?” Ha.
Back over on the tradeshow floor, Studio SX (presented by current.tv) was conducting video interviews with Important People, so I scuttled over there to catch some of the ones with folks that I recognized by name. Theoretically all of the Studio SX interviews will end up on the video coverage page on the SXSW website.
The first was when Heather Gold interviewed George Oates, the designer over at Flickr (BTW: if you didn’t know and didn’t clickthrough at all, George is very much a bearer of two X chromosomes). George talked about bits and pieces of Australian versus American culture, the origins of Flickr, and why Flickr’s community loves it so much (answer: “because we listen to our users”).
I attempted to snap a photo during the interview, but I sadly left my camera on “auto-focus” mode instead of “infinite focal length” mode so the people in the booth are fuzzy while the rear of Heather Champ’s head is very clear. Incidentally Heather Champ is Community Manager over at Flickr.
The next interview I caught was of Molly Steenson interviewing Jory Des Jardins. They talked about BlogHer and a female approach to technology, interaction, and communication. Jory said one thing which I thought was funny, mainly because it’s so true:
With online stuff it’s like dog years.
Later that night I filled out that same form online and scored myself another free day pass for Tuesday.
On my way into my designated areas of the convention center, I had one of those latent-brain-processing-lag moments. Some guy with a beard power-walked past me, and my brain said to me, you have seen this person’s face before. After about 2-3 seconds the light bulb went on and I realized that Gus Sorola (the voice of Dick Simmons on Red Vs Blue) had just walked past me. The very next thing my brain said was, damn! you didn’t get a picture!
It turns out that there was a booth for SCO. I checked out their website and sure enough, it’s those same litigious bastards that we all have grown to hate so much. I went to their day stage presentation about “Me Inc.” (I won’t link to them to give them Google Juice). I almost laughed out loud when they were having technical issues trying to demo some crappy “one-to-many” cellphone audio messaging equipment. I ducked out before my brain started to melt.
Next on my agenda was to swing by Studio SX again. This time Daniel Terdiman was interviewing danah boyd. The first thing I noticed was that danah is very talkative. The second thing I noticed was that she really knows her field of cultural anthropology & ethnography (as applied to digitally mediated contexts); she was referencing stuff off the top of her head while she discussed her research into Myspace. At the end of the interview, Daniel suggested that they do some “culture jamming” so they both took a couple of hits of helium from a balloon and tried to discuss serious things in high-pitched squeaky voices. It was a totally random finish.
After the interview I tooled around the tradeshow floor again, grabbed a few more free samples of some very tasty power-bar-like items, and donated $15 to the EFF. For my donation I received a small metal plate that has the bill of rights printed on both sides. The idea is to keep it in your pocket (or bag) when you go through a metal detector. When it sets the device off your supposed to literally “hand over your rights” to the security personnel.
The last thing I saw upstairs before hitting the escalator was the MusicIP booth. They had a program demoing that looked similar to Apple’s iTunes in the interface (free for windows/mac/linux, though you pay for “bonus features”). It’s main “selling” point was really interesting to me. The program will recommend songs in your collection related to the one you are currently listening to. It does this without analyzing human-added metadata or collective statistics from a central server—it compares the waveforms of the songs themselves using some algorithm. It also offers you songs to purchase that you do not own but that share similar features to your current music. Even though this is cross-platform and the technology is neat, I don’t think I’ll be using the software because it seems like too much of a hassle for someone who doesn’t listen to music much at all.
Right beside my exit from the building was the Interactive Playpen. It was literally filled with a hell of a lot of legos. The object was to just play around, make something interesting, take a picture of it, post it to Flickr, and tag it with the phrase “interactive playpen”. After SXSWi concludes, all of the toys will be donated to a local children’s related charity. The funniest thing I saw while building something was a small (4-5 year-old) kid walking over the lego rubble pile like it wasn’t even there. I couldn’t think of anything to make out of legos so I whored out my creative skills in the hopes that someone else would take a photo of it (and I’d get 2 seconds of an attention-related-high). I put together a recreation of the new user icon from Flickr.
I can definitely see why someone would bother to pay the full badge-fee for SXSWi. The whole time I was wondering around my “containment area” I could just tell that there were Cool People talking about Interesting Things just a few doors down and that I was missing out. I am certain that I’m going to pay for a badge for next year’s convention.
Update: The video of the George Oates interview has been posted to the SXSW website.
copyright © 1998-2008
by Richard Boyer III.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
