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Entries from March 2008
31 March 2008
30 March 2008
links for 2008-03-30
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Talk of the Bald Men - Eno and Shirky recording for those of us who weren't there.
29 March 2008
links for 2008-03-29
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I'm doing it.
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'Here a "they're," there a "their," everywhere a "there" but where it ought to be.'
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Armed with brooms, costumed college students are playing a down-to-earth version of Quidditch
26 March 2008
The turkey and the butcher
Just wanted to get this little ditty out:
I was listening to a very interesting Long Now seminar by Nassim Taleb, about his insight into randomness, predictability, and the like.
If you don't know who he is, Taleb wrote a very popular book called 'The Black Swan', which takes it title from an old English saying that equated something impossible with seeing a black swan. Well, that saying got messed up when black swans were seen in Australia in the 18th century.
A great anecdote, created by his brother, he brought up to illustrate the overall point of the 'black swan' was the story about the turkey and the butcher.
Basically, the turkey views the butcher as this benevolent person, who constantly attends to the well-being of the turkey. And when the butcher comes one day to kill him, the turkey is astounded at the unpredictability of the butcher's behavior. Of course, to the butcher, it was all very predictable. Down to the chop.
Moral of the story: You can't always predict things based on past trends.
Corollary (for me at least): There are views that do make these 'black swans', these amazingly unpredictable events, predictable.
One other thing he mentioned that keeps me thinking and ties to the Long Now perspective is about the wisdom of old folks being a resource in how to deal with black swan moments. Hm...
25 March 2008
links for 2008-03-25
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[via Twitter mojosd, of course]
24 March 2008
links for 2008-03-24
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[More interesting things to explore] The major purpose of the Pathways Project is to illustrate and explain the fundamental similarities and correspondences between humankind’s oldest and newest thought-technologies: oral tradition and the internet.
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An old mainstay in science education
23 March 2008
links for 2008-03-23
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Fawnt is a font resource for designers, developers, and anyone that appreciates the web's highest quality fonts.
21 March 2008
links for 2008-03-21
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Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail? One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans.
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LIFE: WHAT A CONCEPT! An Edge Special Event at Eastover Farm [8.27.07] Freeman Dyson, J. Craig Venter, George Church, Robert Shapiro, Dimitar Sasselov, Seth Lloyd
ReadWriteWeb on: 35 Ways to Stream Your Life
Josh Cantone, on Read Write Web has a run-down of a bunch of different ways to lifestream (link below). I don't know about you, but I think that's significant.
He also points to an earlier article (primer) by Rich McManus. It was reading some stuff by RIch about lifestyle aggregators that initially got me thinking of this and was a driving thought behind the stuff I did here at Nokia.
The great thing is that there is a large collection of ways folks are doing lifestreaming. With each one, we end up learning more about what works and doesn't, increasing the chance of a big breakthrough (in the next 6 months?).
One other thing that Josh points out, is Jeremy Keith is one of the early explorers in this space. Interesting. I'd forgotten that.
Link: 35 Ways to Stream Your Life - ReadWriteWeb
It's a pretty good bet that if you're not making a Twitter or Facebook application, you're probably making a lifestreaming application.
19 March 2008
links for 2008-03-19
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Ah, this is one I will miss. [notified via Twitter]
Recent Posts
- Tracing paths in woods nearby
- Swimming the sea of knowledge (the Concept Web?)
- The Electric Knife Syndrome
- Live via Mobile is the new Live
- Twitter is the queen of micro-down
- Not only are they doing a good job, but it's scaringly real
- Rough analysis of start-dates for and topical categories of the world's 50 most powerful blogs (BONUS: indie-journalists)
- Billion-dollar life sciences bill passes Massachusetts Senate
- Alex bopped me with a baton - lifestreams, semantics, and tapping the next person
- Kevin Kelly and the New Rules of the New Biology
My writings
- Cognections - site
Precognition, cognition, recognition - photos and writings. - Lifeblog - site
Thoughts and actions ranging from biomedicine, molecular manipulations, indiscriminate writing, the long now and a post-electronic age, various forms of performances thespian and corporate, and philosophizing on the fusion of Internet and mobile devices. - One night
A global story of one night in the mobile life. Written for Vodafone'sreceiver magazine. Made into a podcast, too. - chillin'
Deep thinking while up in the stratosphere. - The Depths of Thought and the Inquiry into Our Spirit
Something I wrote eons ago, wondering at the difference between humans and other animals.
