Five Secrets to Success

Link!

While this is written for and by people in the non-profit sector, these are pretty good rules to live and work by.

Book Time: Postsingular by Rudy Rucker

I also recently finished Postsingular by Rudy Rucker (you can read the entirety free online at http://www.rudyrucker.com/postsingular/). I'm not usually a huge Rucker fan, but a book that starts with the Earth being almost completely turned into a giant computer that is simulating earth by rogue nanotechnology has me at "Hello". As in much science fiction, the emotional lives of some of the characters makes them seem as if they're strangely unfamiliar with normal emotional lives, but, hey, read it for the fun of the ideas.

Book Time: The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski

I just finished The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski. He was the Africa reporter for the Polish state news service for several decades. It's Africa from very close up; the book isn't so interested in the politics of Africa as it is the daily lives of Africans, and how different the expectations about life are from the Western experience. His prose is so tight and the subject so novel that you want to quote it to people as you read it. Recommended. (Thanks to Marcel for suggesting it.)

Past Life of My Weblog

Combining some Ruby code, an old file, archive.org, and my old Hiptop weblog, I've managed to reconstruct my original weblog that I kept from 1999-2005. I've been wanting to do this for quite some time now.

You can read each year of it here.

Practice and a sense of Theatre

That's what it takes to do something like this:



When the barrier to getting video published plummeted, I wondered what would succeed on it. The traditional forms of displayed entertainment (90 minute movies, 30 minute TV shows) seemed to have not worked well. The two genres that I think succeed best so far are short-form comedy and what I'll call look-what-I-can-do videos, like this one.

Art by Livestock

Salt licks take on sculptural qualities as they are used.

New Tech Splurges

Bought a couple items recently that are pretty sweet additions to the home computer:

1. A Drobo storage device. It's basically a box with bays for up to four SATA hard drives that looks to the computer like an ordinary USB drive. Each bay has a status light, telling you, in effect, "everything's fine" or "replace me" or "getting full, swap in a bigger drive". All of those are actions you can do on the fly, without powering down or telling the Drobo in advance. The Drobo ensures redundancy of data on the drives. It's such a charming device that I almost want to replace drives to see it in action, but really, it's a place to store data and not worry about it. No more worrying that I should do a backup; all i really need to concern myself with is offsite backups in case the whole device is destroyed or lost at once.

Given that we dropped major $$$ to retrieve data from a dead drive a year ago, this is a great thing to have. It's like a RAID drive or a NetApp for the masses, minus the administrative headaches.

2. Ostensibly I bought a 30 inch monitor for Diane so she could work on her school stuff and have many more documents open and visible at the same time. It also sort of vaguely (cough, cough) occurred to me that it might be nice for gaming, especially with so many great games out (BioShock, Team Fortress 2, Half Life Episode 2). In fact, it's beautiful and it works great for Diane, but it's so huge that I fear I can't see everything that's happening in a FPS game, much like sitting in the front row of a movie theatre. Will I have to switch game genres? Or sit back further from the computer (shudder)?

Now of course, it's turning out that running Diane's documents and a game is proving a strain for the computer, so I'm soon to install 2 Gig of RAM in the machine, which I am hoping will make it less painful to switch from citing academic references to bludgeoning aliens.

Mind wins arguments against reality

An amazing piece by filmmaker Errol Morris about how we believe our mind's notions rather than facts presented to us.

"The photo of a man holding a photo of the man in the iconic photo created an associative link much stronger than mere words might have. We see the man who purports to be the Hooded Man in a photograph, holding the Hooded Man photograph.

Years ago I became enamored with the writings of Norwood Russell Hanson, a philosopher and ex-fighter pilot who died at the age of 43 while flying his own plane to a lecture engagement at Cornell. Hanson, among others, pioneered the idea that observations in science are not independent of theory but are, on the contrary, quite dependent on it. In his book, “Patterns of Discovery,” published in 1958, he coined the term “theory-laden” and wrote: “there is more to seeing than meets the eye.” I would like to make an even stronger claim: Believing is seeing."

Global culture, indeed.

Polish rap, bhangra, Bollywood video, and hints of Tuvan throat singing? Genius.

That Pounding Noise is the Sound of Progress

As I type this on the living room couch on a Saturday morning, workers are cutting out the door that leads from our bedroom to the back garden and replacing it with a new door. The old door was both unattractive and falling apart, the latter due to the fact that we live five blocks from the Pacific Ocean and thus have moist salty air pretty much every day (especially at night). Last week they replaced four windows, including one which I had removed and boarded up six years ago.

This kind of renovation is odd, in that you have tons of decisions to make about the windows and doors before they get made, but the actual process of getting them in place is pretty quick. Admittedly, the painting and finishing aren't done yet (too damp to paint today) and the house is a huge mess, but, you know, there is a window. It's sort of like writing software; often the main point of the software is done pretty fast.

Is there anything good about Men?

A seriously fascinating paper on the different cultural rules that men and women follow, how they work together, and how they result in men's increased likelihood of being rich (or homeless), having many children (or none). A brilliant look at how the two different evolutionary paths have led to such different behaviors.

"For women throughout history (and prehistory), the odds of reproducing have been pretty good. Later in this talk we will ponder things like, why was it so rare for a hundred women to get together and build a ship and sail off to explore unknown regions, whereas men have fairly regularly done such things? But taking chances like that would be stupid, from the perspective of a biological organism seeking to reproduce. They might drown or be killed by savages or catch a disease. For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe. The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We’re descended from women who played it safe.

For men, the outlook was radically different. If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances, try new things, be creative, explore other possibilities. Sailing off into the unknown may be risky, and you might drown or be killed or whatever, but then again if you stay home you won’t reproduce anyway. We’re most descended from the type of men who made the risky voyage and managed to come back rich. In that case he would finally get a good chance to pass on his genes. We’re descended from men who took chances (and were lucky)."

A Generative Brian Eno Piece for Computer

I was hanging around at Fort Mason last night, waiting to have dinner at Greens with the Harmonic gang (Muffy, Rom, Marcel, and Adam), and happened upon the Long Now offices. I went to many of the Long Now events when they were starting up, but since I started working in Mountain View, it's been impossible for me to go.

Anyhow, they were selling a Brian Eno piece of generative audio and visual work (called 77 Million Paintings) that you can run on a computer. I recall seeing some Eno pieces 20+ years ago in San Francisco, these very slow-moving colored lights built into what I remember as a table top. I thought it was a great idea, and while living in Barrington Hall built some similar pieces with a computer screen covered with foam (to diffuse the light) and a simple program to move colored rectangles around. But I never went any further with it (I've never allowed myself to spend much money on my artistic impulses, to my discredit).

77 Million Paintings, though, really got me thinking about this whole field, and I want to start working on these types of things again. Now that the hardware is relatively cheap, I hope to spend some time pursuing it this year.

As I mentioned in The Journal...

I was interviewed for a piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Not about my work (which would not thrill Journal readers anyway), but about the quotes I put at the end of my emails. So crazy what can interest people. Will post here if anything comes of it.

Noticing Beauty

An amazing article about our blindness to beauty when we aren't looking for it.

"No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?"

Well worth reading.