findin.gs/johnb

>Never use while sleeping.
> > -Instruction on Conair hair dryer

Most of all we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total
improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the
options, as we have in the past.
. .
Joined together, the great mass of human minds around the earth seem to
behave like a coherent living system. The trouble is that the flow of
information is mostly one-way. We are all obsessed by the need to feed
information in as fast as we can, but we lack sensing mechanisms for
getting anything much back.

Lewis Thomas. Lives of a Cell

“The only complete reading is that which transforms the book into a simultaneous network of reciprocal relations.”

J. Rousset

http://www.nous.org.uk/BFMAP.html

“We are not really at home in our interpreted world” Rilke

And as I’ve said so often, it’s your in-box that tends to distract you. And to the extent you spent all day working on your in-box instead of fashioning an out-box that then others read and react off of, then you’re reactive and your decisions are ad hoc and therefore random.

Unless you have a longer perspective in a leadership post and plant some standards way down the road, so that the daily in-box items can be tested against those things, you’re going to be like the fellow in the sailboat where the rudder doesn’t work. You’re just going to be milling around.

Rummy?!

Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react. Notice also how often your attention is in the past or future. Don’t judge or analyze what you observe. Watch the thought, feel the emotion, observe the reaction. Don’t make a personal problem out of them.

- Eckhart Tolle
(1948 – )
German mystic

“Well gentlemen – here we are.”

Harold Macmillan

“Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these.” – Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) American reformer

Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world.

Difference between top down ontologogical view vs bottom up-commons based view of the world — tagging vs. dewy decimal, google vs. old yahoo directory. This plays and replays itself out in services — as the web becomes integrated or at least associated.

4 freedoms
Free to access content
Free to access apps
Free to attach devices
Free to access metering (?)

Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 22:38:32 -0700
To: farber@central.cis.upenn.edu
From: Earle Jones

The “at” sign, as it is known in the US, has other names in other
countries. That little “a” with a circle around it has a history!

Made famous by Ray Tomlinson, a researcher at BBN in Boston who, in 1971,
selected this sign as the separator between an email name and email
location. Since that time, it has become our standard.

Today’s San Francisco Chronicle (Oct. 23, 1996–page B1) reports the story
of the beginnings of email and where the “@” sign came from.

Included in the article is a list of names for the sign in other languages:

Italian: *chiocciolina* = little snail
French: *petit escargot* = little snail
German: *klammeraffe* = spider monkey
Netherlands: *api* = short for apestaart (monkey’s tail)
Norweigian: *kanel-bolle* = spiral-shaped cinnamon cake
Danish: *snabel* = an “A” with a trunk
Israeli: *shtrudel* = a pastry
Finnish: *miau* = cat tail
Spanish: *un arroba* = a unit of about 25 pounds

(source: gathered by Ray Tomlinson)

Now you know.

regards,

earle

A better man by you by far was Patroclus
but still death did not spare him

Iliad

(note http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_the_Great)

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. Pascal / Penses (1670)

Therefore, the world machine will have, one might say, its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere, for its circumference and center is God, who is everywhere and nowhere.
Nicholas of Cusa, 1464

” … the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.” St. Augustine

God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.
Voltaire (1694 – 1778)

The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere. ~Empedocles

Alain de Lille, a French theologian of the twelfth century, discovered a text attributed to Hermes Tirsmegistus from the Asclepius which stated “God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. “

“It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors” (192). Borges

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.

– Albert Einstein, quoted in H. Eves Mathematical Circles Adieu (Boston 1977)

“I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc magic”

Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow

All people dream but not equally. They who dream by the night in the dark recesses of their minds awake in the day to find it is but vanity.

But the dreamers of the day are the dangerous people, for they live their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible

T.E. Lawrence

Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only
when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him.
Epictetus (55 – 135 AD)
Roman Philosopher

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. Pablo Picasso

“Anyone willing to give up liberty in exchange for security deserves neither.”

Benjamin Franklin

GELERNTER ON THE BEAUTY OF SOFTWARE

“Most computer technologists don’t like to discuss it, but the importance of
beauty is a consistent (if sometimes inconspicuous) thread in the software
literature. Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in
technology… Beauty is important in engineering terms because software is
so complicated… Beauty is our most reliable guide to achieving software’s
ultimate goal: to break free of the computer, to break free conceptually.
Software is stuff unlike any other… Software’s goal is to escape this
gravity field, and every key step in software history has been a step away
from the computer, toward forgetting about the machine and its physical
structure and limitations — forgetting that it can hold only so many bytes,
that its memory is made of fixed size cells, that you refer to each cell by
a numerical address. Software needn’t accept those rules and limitations.
But as we throw off the limits, what guides us? How do we know where to
head? Beauty is the best guide we have.” (Adapted from “Machine Beauty:
Elegance and the Heart of Computing,” by David Gelernter, Discover Sep 97)

somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Source: ee cummings

“Faraday never patented anything … Faraday saw his role as reading the ‘book of nature’ … the worlds electrical industry is founded on the laws Faraday discovered and tabulated … they have been added to but never superseded.”

Bragg, 12 books (p 221)

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.   (Margaret Mead)

Man is not the creature of circumstances; circumstances are the creatures of
men.

Disraeli

1. It ain’t as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning
2. Get mad and then get over it.
3. Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.
4. It can be done!
5. Be careful what you choose, you may get it
6. Dont let adverse facts stand in the way of a good decision.
7. You cant make someone else’s choices. You shouldn’t let someone make yours.
8. Check the small things.
9. Share credit.
10. Remain calm. Be kind.
11. Have a vision. Be demanding.
12. Dont take counsel of your fears or nay-sayers
13. Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier

(from AOL session w/ Powell, Sept 2000), also see ppt

Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than
you think. Benjamin Disraeli (1804 – 1881) British Prime Minister

Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.
- Marcus Aurelius (AD 121 – 180) Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher

If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to
patient attention than to any other talent.
Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727) English scientist, mathematician

So here’s a Zen riddle: How does a fly trapped in a box with tape fully covering it securely and tightly get out of the box? Answer: It just decides…

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”
Calvin Coolidge

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory, nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt

History is like a horse galloping past your window, and you have to decide whether to jump on or not
Shimon Peres

Brother stand the pain; Escape the poison of your impulses. The sky will bow
to your beauty, if you do. Learn to light the candle. Rise with the sun. Turn
away from the cave of your sleeping. That way a thorn expands to a rose. A
particular glows with the universal.
Jalalud-din Rumi, Persian saint and mystic, Sufi poet.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time…
Quick now, here, now, always –
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
- T.S. Elliot

>”The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings…lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”

>~Carl Sagan

Navajo say, “It’s impossible to awaken a man who is
pretending to be asleep.”

“We are not really at home in our interpreted world” Rilke

Source: Selfish Gene

“Natural selection favors individuals who successfully manipulate other individuals — whether or not this is the advantage of the manipulated individuals. Selection will also work on an individuals to make them resist manipulation. But actors do sometimes succeed in subverting the nervous systems of reactors. Adaption to do this are the phenomena we see as animal communication”

Dawkins reframing communication as self interested manipulation

My life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. (George Bernard Shaw)

“Madman, you’re mistaken. I say there is no darkness except ignorance”

WS (london)

We must not let daylight in upon magic.

Walter Bagehot

“I had a bad day, i had to subvert my principles and cowtow an idiot. Television makes these daily sacrifices possible. It deadens the inner core of my being.

“We’ll move away then.”

“They have Television everywhere there is no escape
Trust

“I think it is time for Deep Blue to prove this was not a single
event. I personally assure you that, if it starts to play competitive chess
[in a regular chess match with a number of top chess players], put it in a
fair contest and I personally guarantee you I will tear it to pieces.” In a
less defiant statement, Kasparov explained his defeat by saying: “I lost my
fighting spirit. I was not in the mood of playing at all… I’m a human
being. When I see something that is well beyond my understanding, I’m
afraid.”

New York Times 12 May 97

I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found
how to serve. (Albert Schweitzer)

“The Greeks never wrote obituaries – they asked one question
whenever a man died. ‘Did he have passion?’”

All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.  (Spinoza)

Notes from Drucker talk / 2003, Wharton

“It is in your job that you will develop and express your values and principles — appreciate the power of language — believe in the dignity and worth of every single person”

New corp is:

- Structured yet fluid
- Least amount of structure possible (with transaction costs contained)
- Decentralized

The leader as a servant, learning how to be a leader, not how to do it .. the act of, in the experience, not theory

Lead people, dont contain them

ONE SHOULD always be drunk. That’s the great thing; the only question. Not
to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing
you to earth, you should be drunk without respite. Drunk with what? With
wine, with poetry, or with virtue as you please. But get drunk.

And if sometimes you should happen to awake, on the stairs of a
palace, on the green grass of a ditch, in the dreary solitude of your own
room, and find that your drunkenness is ebbing or has vanished, ask the wind
and the wave, ask star, bird or clock, ask everything that flies, everything
that moans, everything that flows, everything that sings, everything that
speaks, ask them the time; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird and
the clock will all reply: “It is time to get drunk! If you are not the
martyred slaves of Time, be perpetually drunk! With wine, with poetry, or
with virtue, as you please.”

Charles Baudelaire

Edge: A MADMAN DREAMS OF TURING MACHINES by Janna Levin
“Gödel didn’t believe that truth would elude us. He proved it would. He didn’t invent a myth to conform to his prejudice of the world ­ at least not when it came to mathematics. He discovered his theorem as surely as if it was a rock he had dug up from the ground. He could pass it around the table and it would be as real as that rock. If anyone cared to, they could dig it up where he buried it and find it just the same. Look for it and you’ll find it where he said it is, just off center from where you’re staring. There are faint stars in the night sky that you can see but only if you look to the side of where they shine. They burn too weakly or are too far to be seen directly, even if you stare. But you can see them out of the corner of your eye because the cells on the periphery of your retina are more sensitive to light. Maybe truth is just like that. You can see it, but only out of the corner of your eye.“

Edge; DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier

A core belief of the wiki world is that whatever problems exist in the wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds. This is analogous to the claims of Hyper-Libertarians who put infinite faith in a free market, or the Hyper-Lefties who are somehow able to sit through consensus decision-making processes. In all these cases, it seems to me that empirical evidence has yielded mixed results. Sometimes loosely structured collective activities yield continuous improvements and sometimes they don’t. Often we don’t live long enough to find out. Later in this essay I’ll point out what constraints make a collective smart. But first, it’s important to not lose sight of values just because the question of whether a collective can be smart is so fascinating. Accuracy in a text is not enough. A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality.

Edge; DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier
There is a pedagogical connection between the culture of Artificial Intelligence and the strange allure of anonymous collectivism online. Google’s vast servers and the Wikipedia are both mentioned frequently as being the startup memory for Artificial Intelligences to come. Larry Page is quoted via a link presented to me by popurls this morning (who knows if it’s accurate) as speculating that an AI might appear within Google within a few years. George Dyson has wondered if such an entity already exists on the Net, perhaps perched within Google. My point here is not to argue about the existence of Metaphysical entities, but just to emphasize how premature and dangerous it is to lower the expectations we hold for individual human intellects.

The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we’re devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.

Edge; DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier
I’ve participated in a number of elite, well-paid wikis and Meta-surveys lately and have had a chance to observe the results. I have even been part of a wiki about wikis. What I’ve seen is a loss of insight and subtlety, a disregard for the nuances of considered opinions, and an increased tendency to enshrine the official or normative beliefs of an organization. Why isn’t everyone screaming about the recent epidemic of inappropriate uses of the collective? It seems to me the reason is that bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology.

Edge; DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier
The collective rises around us in multifarious ways. What afflicts big institutions also afflicts pop culture. For instance, it has become notoriously difficult to introduce a new pop star in the music business. Even the most successful entrants have hardly ever made it past the first album in the last decade or so. The exception is American Idol. As with the Wikipedia, there’s nothing wrong with it. The problem is its centrality.

More people appear to vote in this pop competition than in presidential elections, and one reason for this is the instant convenience of information technology. The collective can vote by phone or by texting, and some vote more than once. The collective is flattered and it responds. The winners are likable, almost by definition.

But John Lennon wouldn’t have won. He wouldn’t have made it to the finals. Or if he had, he would have ended up a different sort of person and artist. The same could be said about Jimi Hendrix, Elvis, Joni Mitchell, Duke Ellington, David Byrne, Grandmaster Flash, Bob Dylan (please!), and almost anyone else who has been vastly influential in creating pop music.

As below, so above. The New York Times, of all places, has recently published op-ed pieces supporting the pseudo-idea of intelligent design. This is astonishing. The Times has become the paper of averaging opinions. Something is lost when American Idol becomes a leader instead of a follower of pop music. But when intelligent design shares the stage with real science in the paper of record, everything is lost.

How could the Times have fallen so far? I don’t know, but I would imagine the process was similar to what I’ve seen in the consulting world of late. It’s safer to be the aggregator of the collective. You get to include all sorts of material without committing to anything. You can be superficially interesting without having to worry about the possibility of being wrong.

Except when intelligent thought really matters. In that case the average idea can be quite wrong, and only the best ideas have lasting value. Science is like that.

The collective isn’t always stupid. In some special cases the collective can be brilliant. For instance, there’s a demonstrative ritual often presented to incoming students at business schools. In one version of the ritual, a large jar of jellybeans is placed in the front of a classroom. Each student guesses how many beans there are. While the guesses vary widely, the average is usually accurate to an uncanny degree.

This is an example of the special kind of intelligence offered by a collective. It is that peculiar trait that has been celebrated as the “Wisdom of Crowds,” though I think the word “wisdom” is misleading. It is part of what makes Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand clever, and is connected to the reasons Google’s page rank algorithms work. It was long ago adapted to futurism, where it was known as the Delphi technique. The phenomenon is real, and immensely useful.

But it is not infinitely useful. The collective can be stupid, too. Witness tulip crazes and stock bubbles. Hysteria over fictitious satanic cult child abductions. Y2K mania.

The reason the collective can be valuable is precisely that its peaks of intelligence and stupidity are not the same as the ones usually displayed by individuals. Both kinds of intelligence are essential.

What makes a market work, for instance, is the marriage of collective and individual intelligence. A marketplace can’t exist only on the basis of having prices determined by competition. It also needs entrepreneurs to come up with the products that are competing in the first place.

Fantastic interview with Eno from 1995, wired. Talking about interactivity and the unfinished nature of new media

3.05: Gossip is Philosophy
In a blinding flash of inspiration, the other day I realized that “interactive” anything is the wrong word. Interactive makes you imagine people sitting with their hands on controls, some kind of gamelike thing. The right word is “unfinished.” Think of cultural products, or art works, or the people who use them even, as being unfinished. Permanently unfinished. We come from a cultural heritage that says things have a “nature,” and that this nature is fixed and describable. We find more and more that this idea is insupportable – the “nature” of something is not by any means singular, and depends on where and when you find it, and what you want it for. The functional identity of things is a product of our interaction with them. And our own identities are products of our interaction with everything else. Now a lot of cultures far more “primitive” than ours take this entirely for granted – surely it is the whole basis of animism that the universe is a living, changing, changeable place. Does this make clearer why I welcome that African thing? It’s not nostalgia or admiration of the exotic – it’s saying, Here is a bundle of ideas that we would do well to learn from.

Finishing implies interactive: your job is to complete something for that moment in time. A very clear example of this is hypertext. It’s not pleasant to use – because it happens on computer screens – but it is a far-reaching revolution in thinking. The transition from the idea of text as a line to the idea of text as a web is just about as big a change of consciousness as we are capable of. I can imagine the hypertext consciousness spreading to things we take in, not only things we read. I am very keen on this unfinished idea because it co-opts things like screen savers and games and models and even archives, which are basically unfinished pieces of work.

Other clips:

Can you imagine what music will be like 20 years from now?
What people are going to be selling more of in the future is not pieces of music, but systems by which people can customize listening experiences for themselves. Change some of the parameters and see what you get. So, in that sense, musicians would be offering unfinished pieces of music – pieces of raw material, but highly evolved raw material, that has a strong flavor to it already. I can also feel something evolving on the cusp between “music,” “game,” and “demonstration” – I imagine a musical experience equivalent to watching John Conway’s computer game of Life or playing SimEarth, for example, in which you are at once thrilled by the patterns and the knowledge of how they are made and the metaphorical resonances of such a system. Such an experience falls in a nice new place – between art and science and playing. This is where I expect artists to be working more and more in the future.
So a screen saver would be the visual equivalent of an Eno music machine?
I’ve been working on my own mutations of an After Dark screen saver called Stained Glass. If you set up the initial conditions slightly differently, you see a completely different sequence of events. All your interaction with the program is right at the beginning, when you set it up. But I think this should certainly be called interactive, as the whole process of what then happens depends on what you’ve set up at the beginning.

Besides being in an unfinished state, do you have any other notions of what music will be like in 20 years?
In the last 15 years, music has ceased to be the center of people’s cultural life. We both come from a generation in which music was where it all got acted out. The other arts were somewhat in the rear. Music has had its day. A lot of music now doesn’t really have an independent existence separate from the places it’s played in. For instance, a lot of rave music and ambient and trance and so on has very much to do with clubs and lots of people being together and so on. It’s very context-linked. And quite often on records it sounds rather dull. I read recently that a survey revealed that the average CD was listened to two and a quarter times.

Doesn’t that make things out of control?
People tend to think that it’s total control or no control. But the interesting place is in the middle of that.

Right. We have no word for that state of in-between control. We have some words like “management,” or “herding,” or “husbandry.” All these are words for co-control.
I call it “surfing.” When you surf, there is a powerful complicated system, but you’re riding on it, you’re going somewhere on it, and you can make some choices about it.

I think I know what you mean. Artificial life researchers talk about surfing the wave of increasing complexity. A very complex system gets close to a certain edge between rigid control and utter chaos – that’s when the whole thing can surf to the next level of complexity. They see this in evolutionary systems. Some go as far as to say that’s what life does: surf on entropy.
I like that. Metaphors involving the sea are very powerful to me. You have this interesting conflict – a sense of direction, a need to get somewhere, but in a medium that has its own, probably different, sense of direction. You can use the piggyback power of that medium, but you have to keep paying attention, making your own adjustments. Unless you really do want to go with the flow.

EuroTelcoblog
Battle of the press releases

At 9:39 I got an email from Telefonica/O2 announcing a new set of bundled mobile/DSL offerings in the German market (the English version shows the top-of-the-range 16Mbps offering coming in at EUR50 per month for O2 contract subs, including flat rate calls to domestic landlines and O2 mobiles). By 10:15 DT had fired its IFA press cannon, revealing the first steps towards quad-play offerings in Germany with a triple play flat-rate offering starting at EUR81 per month.

Permalink posted by James Enck : 10:43 AM

Facts are stubborn things.

Alain Rene Lesage

Beware the leader who bangs the drums of
war in order to whip the citizenry into a
patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a
double-edged sword. It both emboldens the
blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when
the drums of war have reached a fevered pitch
and the blood boils with hate and the mind
has closed, the leader will have no need in
seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the
citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by
patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto
the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For
this is what I have done. And I am Caesar. (Julius Caesar,?!)

“Fear is like a tourniquet on the big tube of creative flow”

David Lynch

Be Patient, For The World Is Broad And Wide, Edwin Abbott

A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.   (Albert Einstien)

“opposite of good is good intentions”

Kurt Tucholsky

66 percent of conversation is gossip

Gossip, Grooming and the evolution of language

Hamlet
By Act V, we see that Hamlet has somehow found a new perspective. Instead of driving himself to act on his own bloody thoughts, he has decided to leave things in the hands of God: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,/ Rough-hew them how we will.” Instead of planning his action, he is going to let fate or God take control: “There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come–the readiness is all.”

>Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with something bigger
> >and heavier.
> > -Anonymous

“I am a storyteller,” he said. “I want to say a story about myself, my dreams, my fears, strange things, lies, the combination of sincerity and fantasy, autobiography and complete invention, with the desire to astonish, to make love, to move, to put in some philosophies, some doubts.”
Fellini

“I hate flowers. I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they dont move”

Georgia O’Keefe

“our century and our nation will no doubt surpass all times and all peoples.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I must speak of the transit of the slaves in the West Indies. This I confess, in my own opinion, is the most wretched part of the whole subject. So much misery condensed in so little room, is more than the human imagination had ever before conceived. I will not accuse the Liverpool merchants: I will allow them, nay, I will believe them to be men of humanity; and I will therefore believe, if it were not for the enormous magnitude and extent of the evil which distracts their attention from individual cases, and makes them think generally, and therefore less feelingly on the subject, they would never have persisted in the trade. I verily believe therefore, if the wretchedness of any one of the many hundred Negroes stowed in each ship could be brought before their view, and remain within the sight of the African Merchant, that there is no one among them whose heart would bear it.

//

Source: Wilberforce speech to the house of commons on the abolition of the slave trade
Speech delivered Tuesday 12 May 1789

[I knew nothing of this speech till I read Bragg's book. Wilberforce's intent (total abolition of the slave trade) is immense in scope and ambition. Note the manner he brings the liverpool merchants into the issue - what an immense act]

“I shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield
before you are up; and I shall have breakfasted before
you are afield. In short, I shall astonish you all.”

Bathsheba Everdene in Thomas Hardy’s, Far from the Madding Crowd

I think it is time for Deep Blue to prove this was not a single
event. I personally assure you that, if it starts to play competitive chess
[in a regular chess match with a number of top chess players], put it in a
fair contest and I personally guarantee you I will tear it to pieces.” In a
less defiant statement, Kasparov explained his defeat by saying: “I lost my
fighting spirit. I was not in the mood of playing at all… I’m a human
being. When I see something that is well beyond my understanding, I’m
afraid.

New York Times 12 May 1997

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it
on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you But make allowances
for their doubting too: If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being
lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated don’t give way to hating, and
yet don’t look too good nor talk too wise;
If you can dream and not make dreams your master; If you can think and not
make thoughts your aim, If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat
those two impostors just the same: If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve
spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you
gave your life to, broken, and stoop and build ‘em up with worn out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of
pitch and toss, and lose and start again at your beginnings and not breath
one word about your loss: If you can force your heart and sinew to serve your
turn long after they are gone, and hold on when there is nothing left in you
except the Will which says to them “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with kings – nor
lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If
all men count with you, but none too much: If you can fill the unforgiving
minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and
everything in it, And – what is more-you’ll be a Man, my son!

Kippling

“And as I’ve said so often, it’s your in-box that tends to distract you. And to the extent you spent all day working on your in-box instead of fashioning an out-box that then others read and react off of, then you’re reactive and your decisions are ad hoc and therefore random.
Unless you have a longer perspective in a leadership post and plant some standards way down the road, so that the daily in-box items can be tested against those things, you’re going to be like the fellow in the sailboat where the rudder doesn’t work. You’re just going to be milling around.

Unless you have a direction and some speed [and] you’re under way, you can’t calibrate your direction. No one can get it right perfectly the first time. You need to set a direction and then you need to calibrate it. If you don’t have any steerageway, you’re not going forward, you can’t calibrate it.
And if you haven’t developed a longer-term view, every one of your daily decisions, you can do your very best to take them the best you can, but they’ll be random because they’ve not been tested against something.

So my biggest task and problem is to push away the immediate and force myself to address the important, and to try to look down the road and see that we do have a direction, that we do have steerageway, that we can then adjust and calibrate as we learn every day, and goodness knows, I hope we learn every day

Source: Interview with Rumsfeld?!@ NYT

Innovation is outpacing consumption

zolli

Barlow’s classic economy of ideas article — facinating to re-read so many years later. He nailed so many of the issues we are still working through — from IP issues to policy to the idea of an attention economy:

IP on The Global Net
The source of this conundrum is as simple as its solution is complex. Digital technology is detaching information from the physical plane, where property law of all sorts has always found definition.

Throughout the history of copyrights and patents, the proprietary assertions of thinkers have been focused not on their ideas but on the expression of those ideas. The ideas themselves, as well as facts about the phenomena of the world, were considered to be the collective property of humanity. One could claim franchise, in the case of copyright, on the precise turn of phrase used to convey a particular idea or the order in which facts were presented.

The point at which this franchise was imposed was that moment when the “word became flesh” by departing the mind of its originator and entering some physical object, whether book or widget. The subsequent arrival of other commercial media besides books didn’t alter the legal importance of this moment. Law protected expression and, with few (and recent) exceptions, to express was to make physical.

Protecting physical expression had the force of convenience on its side. Copyright worked well because, Gutenberg notwithstanding, it was hard to make a book. Furthermore, books froze their contents into a condition that was as challenging to alter as it was to reproduce. Counterfeiting or distributing counterfeit volumes were obvious and visible activities, easy enough to catch somebody in the act of doing. Finally, unlike unbounded words or images, books had material surfaces to which one could attach copyright notices, publisher’s marques, and price tags.

Mental to physical conversion was even more central to patent. A patent, until recently, was either a description of the form into which materials were to be rendered in the service of some purpose or a description of the process by which rendition occurred. In either case, the conceptual heart of patent was the material result. If no purposeful object could be rendered due to some material limitation, the patent was rejected. Neither a Klein bottle nor a shovel made of silk could be patented. It had to be a thing and the thing had to work.

Thus the rights of invention and authorship adhered to activities in the physical world. One didn’t get paid for ideas but for the ability to deliver them into reality. For all practical purposes, the value was in the conveyance and not the thought conveyed.

In other words, the bottle was protected, not the wine.

—- snip ——

IP on The Global Net
Generally, the issue of consumer payment for broadcast products was irrelevant. The consumers themselves were the product. Broadcast media were supported either by selling the attention of their audience to advertisers, using government to assess payment through taxes, or the whining mendicancy of annual donor drives.

All of broadcast support models are flawed. Support either by advertisers or government has almost invariably tainted the purity of the goods delivered. Besides, direct marketing is gradually killing the advertiser support model anyway.

Broadcast media gave us another payment method for a virtual product in the royalties which broadcasters pay songwriters through such organizations as ASCAP and BMI. But, as a member of ASCAP, I can assure you this is not a model that we should emulate. The monitoring methods are wildly approximate. There is no parallel system of accounting in the revenue stream. It doesn’t really work. Honest.

In any case, without our old methods of physically defining the expression of ideas, and in the absence of successful new models for non-physical transaction, we simply don’t know how to assure reliable payment for mental works. To make matters worse, this comes at a time when the human mind is replacing sunlight and mineral deposits as the principal source of new wealth.

1. Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it were
2. Be candid with everyone
3. Dont manage, lead
4. Change before you have to
5. If you dont have a competitive advantage, dont compete
6. Control your own destiny, or someone else will

PBS – JOHN GARDNER – EDUCATION AND EXCELLENCE
You learned very early that we react to our environment. You now know that in some measure we create our own environment. You may not yet grasp the power of that truth to change your life.

I agree with the implication that you’ll learn only if you positively want to… The reality that comes before those other realities is that you are caught in what Santayana called the human predicament, and you will find it useful to learn something about that predicament.

So I hope you will take the courses that expose you to the whole range of human experience–the heights of philosophy and the depths of suffering, the despair and resilience of the human spirit, the bloodshed and the great mercies. Humans are creatures that live not just in the world of physical stimuli but in the insubstantial world of visions, aspirations, illusions, self-deception, faith, skepticism and reverence. We have seen them create inexpressible beauty and we have seen them descend to unspeakable depths. Exposure to that astonishing story can help us to prepare for what are to me central themes of moral striving–to be true to the best that humans have said and done, to strive for the enhancement of individual dignity, the release of human potentialities, the liberation of the human spirit. Most of all, I hope you will come to understand that you are part of a long story, that you have deep spiritual links with those who have gone before and deep obligations to those who come after.

… You will prepare yourself far better for the unknown future if you cast a wide net during your undergraduate years. Careless people treat unique moments as throwaways, and live to regret it. You will never again in all your life have a better opportunity to explore the various fields in which you might exercise your skill and judgment. Life closes in. The path ahead narrows.

… Nine times out of ten your problems are due to choices you’ve made.

But life isn’t a mountain that has a summit. Nor is it–as some suppose–a riddle that has an answer. Nor a game that has a final score.

Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentialities I mean not just intellectual gifts but the full range of one’s capacities for learning, sensing, wondering, understanding, loving and aspiring.

Now, the conventional thing for me to do in closing would be to wish you success. But success as the world measures it is too easy. I would like to wish you something that is harder to come by. I wish you meaning in your life. You are the architect. Build a structure you’ll be proud to live in!

“This is the true joy in life – being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on
the scrap heap; being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote
itself to making you content.”

– George Bernard Shaw

Source: will wright / wired piece

“Just watch a kid with a new videogame. The last thing they do is read the manual. Instead, they pick up the controller and start mashing buttons to see what happens. This isn’t a random process; it’s the essence of the scientific method. Through trial and error, players build a model of the underlying game based on empirical evidence collected through play.”

Great essay by Lick — this is exactly what I want to create with findin.gs, over time my hope is that this database will serve as a platform for associations, and thought. This was written in 1960 — very great

Digital Equipment Corporation
3.1 A Preliminary and Informal Time-and-Motion Analysis
of Technical Thinking
Despite the fact that there is a voluminous literature on thinking and prob-
lem solving, including intensive case-history studies of the process of inven-
tion, I could find nothing comparable to a time-and-motion-study analysis
of the mental work of a person engaged in a scientific or technical enter-
prise. In the spring and summer of 1957, therefore, I tried to keep track
of what one moderately technical person actually did during the hours he
regarded as devoted to work. Although I was aware of the inadequacy of
the sampling, I served as my own subject.
It soon became apparent that the main thing I did was to keep records,
and the project would have become an infinite regress if the keeping of
records had been carried through in the detail envisaged in the initial plan.
4
Page 12
It was not. Nevertheless, I obtained a picture of my activities that gave me
pause. Perhaps my spectrum is not typical—I hope it is not, but I fear it is.
About 85 per cent of my “thinking” time was spent getting into a po-
sition to think, to make a decision, to learn something I needed to know.
Much more time went into finding or obtaining information than into di-
gesting it. Hours went into the plotting of graphs, and other hours into
instructing an assistant how to plot. When the graphs were finished, the
relations were obvious at once, but the plotting had to be done in order to
make them so. At one point, it was necessary to compare six experimental
determinations of a function relating speech-intelligibility to speech-to-noise
ratio. No two experimenters had used the same definition or measure of
speech-to-noise ratio. Several hours of calculating were required to get the
data into comparable form. When they were in comparable form, it took
only a few seconds to determine what I needed to know.
Throughout the period I examined, in short, my “thinking” time was
devoted mainly to activities that were essentially clerical or mechanical:
searching, calculating, plotting, transforming, determining the logical or dy-
namic consequences of a set of assumptions or hypotheses, preparing the
way for a decision or an insight. Moreover, my choices of what to attempt
and what not to attempt were determined to an embarrassingly great extent
by considerations of clerical feasibility, not intellectual capability.
The main suggestion conveyed by the findings just described is that the
operations that fill most of the time allegedly devoted to technical thinking
are operations that can be performed more effectively by machines than
by men. Severe problems are posed by the fact that these operations have
to be performed upon diverse variables and in unforeseen and continually
changing sequences. If those problems can be solved in such a way as to
create a symbiotic relation between a man and a fast information-retrieval
and data-processing machine, however, it seems evident that the cooperative
interaction would greatly improve the thinking process

“The day of the gun, and the bloody body, and the court house came and
commenced to sing a sobbing sigh out of every corner in the room; out of each
and every chair and thing. Commenced to sing, commenced to sob and sigh,
singing and sobbing. Then Tea Cake came prancing around where she was and the
song of the sigh flew out the window and lit in the top of the pine trees.
Tea Cake, with the sun for a shawl. Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never
be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his
memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She
pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist
of the world and drapped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes!
She called in her soul to come and see.”

Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God

“…you dont mind? Oh, Miss Burton, you must try to mind a little. Life is in the minding”

stoppard invention of love

What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole
truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.
– Boris Pasternak

give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.
- Desiderius Erasmus

Listen to the technology. Find out what it is telling you.

Carver Mead

Quotes from Anton Wahlman’s sig file:

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will
not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius
will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not;
the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination
alone are omnipotent.” – Calvin Coolidge

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even
though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits
who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray
twilight that knows neither victory, nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt

“If you ever need anything, just call me and I’ll help you figure out
how to live without it.” – my grandpa

“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on
the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” -
Kurt Vonnegut

“General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity
for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization:
Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev,
tear down this wall!”

“My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation
which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes.” -
Ronald Reagan

“The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads
among them bounties, donations and benefits.” – Plutarch

“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile – hoping it will eat him
last.”

“A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then
asks you not to kill him.”

“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with
the average voter.”

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”

“You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor
and you will have war.” – Winston Churchill (to Chamberlain)

“The point is, ladies and gentlemen, is that greed–for lack of a better
word–is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts
through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in
all of its forms–greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge–has
marked the upward surge of mankind. And Greed–you mark my words–will
not only save Teldar Paper but also that other malfunctioning
corporation called the USA.” – “Gordon Gekko” (Michael Douglas) in WALL
STREET (1987)

“I thought I could save the world if I could bring together the truly
elite people, the most beautiful women with the most perfect bodies,
best faces, and intelligence, and the elite men, the captains of
industry, lawyers, and senators. This would bring about the most
happiness, to the best people, who most deserved to be happy.” – Jason
Itzler (NY Confidential)

“Only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how
magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.” – Richard Nixon

“Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for
his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his
country.”

“For over a thousand years, Roman conquerors returning from the wars
enjoyed the honor of a triumph – a tumultuous parade. In the procession
came trumpeters and musicians and strange animals from the conquered
territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured
armaments. The conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed
prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children, robed in
white, stood with him in the chariot, or rode the trace horses. A slave
stood behind the conqueror, holding a golden crown, and whispering in
his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.” – General George Patton

This circulated back in 1999, fun data points:

> << "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
> –Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of
> science, 1949
>
> “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
> –Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
>
> “I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked
> with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a
> fad that won’t last out the year.”
> –The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957
>
> “But what … is it good for?”
> –Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968,
> commenting on the microchip.
>
> “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
> –Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital
> Equipment Corp., 1977
>
> “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously
> considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of
> no value to us.”
> –Western Union internal memo, 1876.
>
> “The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who
> would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?”
> –David Sarnoff’s associates in response to his urgings
> for investment in the radio in the 1920s.
>
> “The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn
> better than a ‘C,’ the idea must be feasible.” –A Yale University
> management professor in response to Fred Smith’s paper proposing reliable
> overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)
>
> “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” –H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers,
> 1927.
>
> “I’m just glad it’ll be Clark Gable who’s falling on his face and
> not Gary Cooper.”
> –Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role
> in “Gone With The Wind.”
>
> “A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports
> say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you
> make.”
> –Response to Debbi Fields’ idea of starting Mrs. Fields’Cookies.
>
> “We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.”
> –Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.
>
> Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” –Lord Kelvin,
> president, Royal Society, 1895.
>
> “If I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have done the experiment. The
> literature was full of examples that said you can’t do this.”
> –Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M
> “Post-It” Notepads.
>
> “So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing,
> even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about
> funding us? Or we’ ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our
> salary,
> we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to
> Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You
> haven’t got through college yet.’”
> –Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari
> and H-P interested in his and Steve Wozniak’s personal computer.
>
> “Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and
> reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against
> which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out
> daily in high schools.”
> –1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard’s
> revolutionary rocket work.
>
>
> “You want to have consistent and uniform muscle development across
> all of your muscles? It can’t be done. It’s just a fact of life. You
> just have to accept inconsistent muscle development as an
> unalterable condition of weight training.”
> –Response to Arthur Jones, who solved the “unsolvable” problem by
> inventing Nautilus.
>
> “Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil?
> You’re crazy.”
> –Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to
> drill for oil in 1859.
>
>
> “Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”
> –Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University,1929.
>
> “Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.”
> –Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure
> de Guerre.
>
> “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” –Charles H. Duell,
> Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.
>
> “Louis Pasteur’s theory of germs is ridiculous fiction”.
> –Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872
>
> “The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the
> intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon”. –Sir John Eric Ericksen,
> British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria 1873.
>
> “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”
> — Bill Gates, 1981

Source: Gelernter

“Most computer technologists don’t like to discuss it, but the importance ofbeauty is a consistent (if sometimes inconspicuous) thread in the software literature. Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology… Beauty is important in engineering terms because software is so complicated… Beauty is our most reliable guide to achieving software’s ultimate goal: to break free of the computer, to break free conceptually.

Software is stuff unlike any other… Software’s goal is to escape this gravity field, and every key step in software history has been a step away from the computer, toward forgetting about the machine and its physical structure and limitations — forgetting that it can hold only so many bytes, that its memory is made of fixed size cells, that you refer to each cell by a numerical address. Software needn’t accept those rules and limitations. But as we throw off the limits, what guides us? How do we know where to
head? Beauty is the best guide we have.”

(Adapted from “Machine Beauty:
Elegance and the Heart of Computing,” by David Gelernter, Discover Sep 97)

IF IT WORKS IT’S OBSOLETE

Marshall McLuhanisms

The story of modern America begins with the discovery of the white man by the Indians.

The trouble with a cheap specialized education, is that you never stop paying for it.

One of the nicest things about being big is the luxury of thinking little.

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.

People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them each morning like a hot bath.

Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.

The road is our major architectural form. The missing link created far more interest than all the chains and explinations of being.

The nature of people demands that most of them be engaged in the most frivolous possible activities- like making money. Today each of us lives several hundred years in a decade.

In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.

With telephone and TV it is not so much the message as the sender that is “sent.”

When a thing is current it creates currency.

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

News, far more than art, is artifact.

We look at the present through a rearview mirror.

We march backwards into the future.

When you are on the phone or on the air, you have no body.

All advertising advertises advertising.

The future of the book is the blurb.

Mud sometimes gives the illusion of depth.

The spaceship earth is still operated by railway condutors, just as NASA is managed by men with Newtonian goals.

Men on frontiers, whether of time or space, abandon their previous identities.

Neighborhood gives identity. Frontiers snatch it away.

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

The road is a flattened-out wheel, rolled up in the belly of an airplane.

“I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt.”

Nature does not reveal its secrets, it only responds to a method of questioning

Hidelberg

<< >“The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.”

>–Kahlil Gibran

“Absolutely nothing on earth has ever been succesfully defended.    Attacking gives you momentum;forces the enemy to concentrate on defending their space first,and makes them commit critical errors that determine the outcome of the battle”.  (General Patton)

The joke of the world is less like a banana peel than a rake, the old rake in the grass, the one you step on, foot to forehead. It all comes together. In a twinkling. You have to admire the gag for its symmetry, accomplishing all with one right angle, the same right angle which accomplishes all philosophy. (Annie Dillard p. 42)

“Persistent optimism is a force multiplier”

Colin Powell

“A useful starting set of solutions to the problems outlined above includes
A better text search methodology, effective both within a local document or system and with respect to extremely large data spaces such as the web
A method of eliminating all modal aspects of the basic human-machine interface, a method that is readily learned by newcomers and which is habituating
An improved navigation method, as applicable to finding your way around within a picture or memo as within a collection of images, documents, or networks; a method which makes use of inborn and learned human navigational skills
A set of detail improvements to some existing mechanisms that make them consistent with the goals and principles of the rest of the design.

Better text searching requires that the search be extremely fast (the next instance appears within human reaction time), interactive at the typed character (or spoken morpheme) level, and not based on dialog box interaction. You should be able to change the pattern (what you are seeking an instance of) at any time, including during a search. The results should be shown in context and not as a list of documents or sites. A search mechanism that is sufficiently fast and powerful also can serve as a cursor positioning mechanism in text. Such a cursor positioning tool can be significantly faster than graphical pointing devices and can unify local and internetworked information retrieval.

In present systems, work gets done in applications (which are sets of commands that apply to certain kinds of objects). Tasks are not accomplished at the desktop, and desktops (or launching areas in general) should disappear as interfaces improve. The idea of an application is an artificial one, convenient to the programmer but not to the user. From a user’s point of view there is content (a set of objects created or obtained by the user) and there are commands that can operate on objects. Commands should be independent of applications and be applicable at any time and to any object. If there are times when a gesture that used to evoke one command now invokes another (or evokes no command), then the system’s interface suffers from being modal. If applying a command to an object does not make sense, then the object should be automatically transformed so that the command can apply to it — for example, a spelling check applied to an incoming fax requires that the fax first be run through an OCR program to change it from being a bitmap to a sequence of characters. If nothing can be done, then the system should do nothing.

The present paradigm of desktop, applications, and documents can be replaced by a simpler, modeless concept of content and commands. In such an environment, vendors will sell command sets and transformers rather than applications, and a user may not have to deal with a huge application when all he wants is a few new abilities. Such a reorganization will also eliminate much redundant code now present in the multiple applications we use (consider how many different text editors reside on a typical personal computer: There’s one for the word processor, one for the file name editor, one for dialog boxes…. But there need only be one set of commands for word processing functions).

The twin problems of navigation and limited display size can both be ameliorated by using a video camera paradigm, where the user can zoom in and out and pan horizontally and vertically over a universe of objects. Objects (documents, pictures, games, anything that has a visual representation) can be grouped into visible clumps and clusters, which can be marked with colors and shapes, and left in locations that are in themselves memorable (the address book is in the upper left corner of the world). Zooming out from your computer can give you a view of your local network, and going still farther, the web comes into view, as organized by a universe vendor (comparable to today’s portal vendors).

This is a summary of a longer work, and can therefore touch on only a fraction of the the book’s topics. Even a book of encyclopedic dimensions cannot cover so vast a field as interface design. The message that The Humane Interface brings, aside from its methodological specifics, is that major improvements in interface design are both profitable and moral — profitable because a good interface is cheaper to implement, is more productive, is easier to maintain, has lower training costs, and requires less customer support than a bad interface — moral because it brings smiles to the faces and erases furrows from the brows of users. One can do good and yet do well by rethinking interface design.”

Source

“The Greeks never wrote obituaries – they asked one question
whenever a man died. ‘Did he have passion?’”

Patent / and copyright issues not limited to media. Nano tech will mean anything for which u have a blueprint u could potentially copy … we are copyrighting plants (eg: life) where does this lead … “The open-source software movement, where programming instructions are freely available and improvements to the software are supposed to be returned to the larger community, may be a template for such a world. If we literally eliminate scarcity except for a few, rare items — anti-matter won’t be trivial to assemble, Drexler notes — people’s motivations will change. They’ll create things because they want to, because they want recognition or some other non-financial reward.
That’s how the open-source people do it today, where they share their ideas and programming code in a global community of like-minded people working for a larger goal, for motives that often include fame within the community. Maybe, in 100 years, spaceship design will be an open-source project.”

http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/columns/gillmor/docs/dg061100.htm

I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because
I hate plants. — A. Whitney Brown

Those who predict the future lie, even if they tell the truth (Arab Proverb)

“TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.”

David Foster Wallace

Ah yes, I wrote the purple cow!
I am sorry now I wrote it
But I can tell you here and now
Ill kill you if you quote it

Burgesss

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a
foreign language. Do not now look for the answers…. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps
you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. (Rainer Maria Rilke)

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a
foreign language. Do not now look for the answers…. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps
you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. (Rainer Maria Rilke)

“Do you have any questions for my answers?” Henry Kissinger.

Sam Harris / rant against religious moderation. Perspective the religious moderates seek to bridge the gap between science and religion — yet as Dawkins believes its not a gap that is bridgeable and that attempts to do so actually undermine the very basis of moderation. Need to have an end to end view of the scientific process and need for hypothesis, testing, results to drive analysis vs. faith.

Some data:

22% of americans think Jesus will come to earth and redeem in the nxt 25 years
22% of americans think he probably will

44% believe the creator promised Israel to the Jews
44% believe we have no genetic precursors in the natural world, we were created from mud by God literal Biblical creationism

The “End game is not tolerance of patent irrationality, it is reason”

Source: Sam Harris, Podtech talk 2004

“Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.” Angels in America

Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is
clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?

- Lao Tzu
(c 6th C. BC)

“If you want to claim you rights — then other people’s rights make claims upon you that are in fact duties”

In our time / podcast

To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.
To reach for another is to risk involvement.
To expose your feelings is to risk exposing your true self.
To place your ideas, your dreams, before a crowd is to risk their loss.
To love is to risk not being loved in return.
To live is to risk dying.
To believe is to risk despair.
To try is to risk failure.
But risks must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk
nothing.
The people who risk nothing, do nothing, have nothing, are nothing.
They may avoid suffering and sorrow, but they cannot learn, feel, change,
grow,
love, live.
Chained by their attitudes they are slaves; they have forfeited their freedom.
Only a person who risks is free.

- Dr. Robert H. Schuller

Scan This Book! – The Archive – The New York Times

The 15 percent of the world’s 32 million cataloged books that are in the public domain are freely available for anyone to borrow, imitate, publish or copy wholesale. Almost the entire current scanning effort by American libraries is aimed at this 15 percent. The Million Book Project mines this small sliver of the pie, as does Google. Because they are in the commons, no law hinders this 15 percent from being scanned and added to the universal library.

Scan This Book! – The Archive – The New York Times
Which leaves 75 percent of the known texts of humans in the dark. The legal limbo surrounding their status as copies prevents them from being digitized. No one argues that these are all masterpieces, but there is history and context enough in their pages to not let them disappear. And if they are not scanned, they in effect will disappear. But with copyright hyperextended beyond reason (the Supreme Court in 2003 declared the law dumb but not unconstitutional), none of this dark library will return to the public domain (and be cleared for scanning) until at least 2019. With no commercial incentive to entice uncertain publishers to pay for scanning these orphan works, they will vanish from view. According to Peter Brantley, director of technology for the California Digital Library, ”We have a moral imperative to reach out to our library shelves, grab the material that is orphaned and set it on top of scanners.”

No one was able to unravel the Gordian knot of copydom until 2004, when Google came up with a clever solution. In addition to scanning the 15 percent out-of-copyright public-domain books with their library partners and the 10 percent in-print books with their publishing partners, Google executives declared that they would also scan the 75 percent out-of-print books that no one else would touch. They would scan the entire book, without resolving its legal status, which would allow the full text to be indexed on Google’s internal computers and searched by anyone. But the company would show to readers only a few selected sentence-long snippets from the book at a time. Google’s lawyers argued that the snippets the company was proposing were something like a quote or an excerpt in a review and thus should qualify as a ”fair use.”

Fascinating talk by de Waal.

Notes:
[Aggression is a dispersal action, but then it attracts…
Visual and auditory cues to indicate roles and hierarchy. Human voice patterns (very low level cues) communicates status.

If cues aren’t clear “then all hell breaks loose, because hierarchy is unclear”
Apart from being dominant, control role (arbiter role) keeping the piece, if they are good at it, good leaders and they become popular with the group. Alpha male will defend the weak parties in the group — whole group will stand up for him. Key to suppress the number two role — leaders want a strong number two but need to visibly keep him down. Over 30 years of work watching these leadership roles.

Two kinds of leaders.
- Suppressive everyone, attract everyone
- Populace, support the weak, get support back from them ends in a more stable position. Beginnings of democracy.

Height and leadership — pictures of Chirac, Bush etc. and order in photos

Reciprocity and fairness / very interesting
Sharing sessions: If A grooms B there is an increased tendency to increase food sharing to B. Indicates memory and gratitude, some sense of reciprocity and sharing.

Put two monkeys side by side, offer one cucumbers, the other grapes. “We measured preferences for food and corresponds 100% with prices in the supermarket”. If you do this for two monkeys and offer both cucumbers. 5% rejection rate, 95% happy to exchange. If one get cucumber but neighbor gets grapes — rejections go up to 50%. If you give the other one grape with no effort — rejections from other monkey go up to 80%. Clear sense of fairness among primates. Fits with behavioral economics – fascinating re: irrational behavior here in Italy given bureaucracy etc. Maps to gini index by country etc.

Source: Frans de Waal
Podcast from Poptech 2004
Podcast on IT Conversations, also see