SJ’s Longest Now

Crisis Camp Street Cred

Posted on January 26th, 2010 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Video: “What I did at CrisisCamp“

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Massive destruction across Haiti

Posted on January 14th, 2010 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Tuesday’s major earthquake in Haiti has destroyed the heart of capital Port-au-Prince and its vicinity, including part of the presidential palace and many major hubs of international groups and embassies.  This sort of emergency was unexpected; there is no disaster relief system in place. Imagine Nature sacking a nation’s capital and you have something like the scene on the ground.  The President was interviewed on CNN yesterday at the airport, commenting on how he has no place to work (or sleep, but he said there was time enough to find a bed), and no communication network; and just needs a place to sit and communicate so he can help people.

Thousands of people are missing, including the head of the World Bank in the country and the head of the UN mission.  The estimated death toll is between 50,000 and 100,000.  Communications lines, airports, and other infrastructure have all failed.  Anderson Cooper yesterday reported that there is no air-traffic control for incoming pilots; rubble rescue teams are generally composed of groups of civilians working without tools.

The World Food Program is preparing a 6-month emergency food campaign, supplying ready-to-eat meals, first aid kits (various kinds) and satellite phones to the area.

Please donate to support the WFP’s work.

Haiti is already by far the most impoverished country in the Americas, with a normalized per capita GDP¹ of $1300 in 2008 (Nicaragua is next, and twice as wealthy), slightly poorer than Chad.  Despite its intense proximity to wealther countries (it occupies the western 1/3 of the island of Hispanola; the eastern 2/3 are the Dominican Republic, with much richer farms and seven times its GDP) OLPC works with 13,000 students and teachers there, but so far our only word from them is that the country head of our program is alright.

¹ – Purchasing power parity raises this to $1300 from a raw per capita GDP of $790.

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Censorship wars in China

Posted on January 13th, 2010 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Google uncensors itself in China, and is playing hardball, prepared to be blocked there. This is officially a reaction to the latest revelation of snooping by highly-trained Chinese crackers.

What will other companies do or think?  Facebook for instance is officially pro-openness, and don’t feel they store much private data.   Nevertheless, they may start caring about the same issues of data security once they expand more into stricter regimes and users of their services start to disappear.

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Help support Wikimedia!

Posted on January 1st, 2010 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

It’s a glorious New Year!  Happy 2*3*5*67, everyone.  I’m spending the new decade in Tokyo, and love it here.  Now to find a few puzzle box craftsmen…

Meanwhile, Wikimedia is running its annual fundraising drive — please donate to support Wikipedia, Wikibooks, or your favorite wiki Project.

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Kalashnikov, on fascism and homeland

Posted on December 9th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Mikhail Kalashnikov gave a few rare interviews and public
appearances last month, during events commemorating his 90th birthday — which was celebrated widely in the Russian media.

In a Rossiyskaya Gazeta interview, the retired Lt. General
discusses his inspirations, and those of the designers of the Uzi and the M-16.  It is short, and worth a read.

Once when I was thinking it over, I recalled our specialist term – ricochet. At least the three of us – Eugene Stoner, Uziel Gal, and me – developed guns to do away with fascists as soon as possible… But the bullets fired from the М16 hit Vietnamese people who fought to unite their homeland. Uzi bursts shatter the slim hope for peace in Palestine and the countries next door… Let alone my АК?

Kalashnikov is the last of his generation.  Eugene Stoner died in 1997, at 74;  Uziel Gal in 2002, at 79.

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L’chayim

Posted on December 6th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

In other news, Vitter, Coburn, Brown, Dodd, Mikulski, and Franken all found something they can agree on: an amendment they are co-sponsoring that would require all Congressmembers and their families to adopt a government option in whatever health-care bill passes.

How I love multipartisanship – it gives my heart’s cockles’ goosebumps goosebumps.

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Financial ignorance: on levees and levies

Posted on November 29th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

I had a small showing of the extraordinary Katrina documentary, Trouble the Water, at my apartment the other night.  It reminded me that we’ve never bothered to trace all of the money that was supposed to go into rebuilding; and that the engineering flaws in the levees have simply been patched up and restored.

Noone has learned much of a lesson in the financial world either,
since the near-collapse of our financial system last year, and all of the old structures that allowed a dramatic failure to happen without warning are one more being strengthened.  Somehow our nation’s financiers haven’t taken a hit to their reputation, since they and the betting parlors  are still the only professions legally allowed to satisfy the gambler’s itch… yet the economists have, and many are in a funk rather than working hard to solve newly-discovered puzzles.

This is happening all over the world.  It is instructive, for instance, to see Dubai’s response to feeling the collapse of the small facet we call a real-estate bubble, since it is a year delayed from the crunch felt in the US in an economy built largely on real-estate.  Everywhere, people who find themselves locally better off, even if none of the fundamental problems have been resolved, consider themselves “out of trouble”.  You hear it in political rhetoric, in the reports of firms and sectors.

It’s a bit like being saved from a plague and instantly relaxing investment in preventive medical research… we should be better students of history than that.

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Scozzafava: Politics and my old home town

Posted on November 17th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Just minutes from my old home town in NY-24,  State Assemblywoman  Dede Scozzafava (R-NY) found herself at the center of a remarkable political brawl between the Democratic, Republican, and Conservative Parties, in Congressional district NY-23.

Scozzafava, then the floor leader and Minority Leader Pro Temp in
the New York State Assembly, has represented Lewis, Oswego, St. Lawrence, and Jefferson counties for 10 years.  She was the Republican candidate in a district that hasn’t been represented by a Democrat since the Civil War.  She had a comfortable lead in the race in September, at which point the
unknown and inarticulate Conservative candidate started garnering attention, and things took a dramatic turn.  Gingrich, Palin, and Biden got involved on different sides.

The tireless Roy Edroso carefully charted Scozzafava’s course from certain frontrunner to maligned by half her party, to a surprise suspension of her campaign and endorsement of her Democratic opponent the weekend before the election.

(more…)

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Not even wrong: LHC edition

Posted on October 13th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

On committing to playing random card games to determine the future operation of the LHC as a mechanism for detecting reverse causality by a Higgs-abhoring Nature … generated by a Higgs-abhoring Nature, as seen by the failure of all potential Higgs-producing supercolliders.  Why would one play card games to determine whether or not to produce a Higgs boson?   So as to avoid the  “accidental” failure modes that we have apparently observed so far, which might result in loss of human life.

The article linked above describes a series of papers on reverse causality.  They postulate that some natural aversion by the Universe to the presence of Higgs bosons has led to the continued failure of the Large Hadron Collider, the bankruptcy of the Superconducting SuperCollider project, and any other projects that might conceivably have produced a Higgs.  They use a quirky choice of mathematics and grammar; but the authors are no cranks.   They are Holger-Bech Nielsen, one of the early creators of string theory, and Masao Ninomiya, one of the editors of International Journal of Modern Physics A — certainly respected in the right context, though given a certain distance today.

Fascinating, and an excellent candidate for Not Even Wrong.   Of course readers of this blog recall that after another couple of setbacks, the LHC will discover Higgs particles on December 21, 2012 .

3 comments.

TS^2 : Dual touch-screen trend-setting, and a prediction

Posted on September 24th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized, chain-gang.

Gizmodo features a mind-molding video of Microsoft’s dual-touchscreen Courier tablet laptop.

“I never need porn again, as I can just watch that video over and over and over” – Mattchew, from the comments

The Longest Now crystal ball says Matt will need something else to watch soon, once such designs become bog-standard.  And we won’t be calling them ‘touchscreens’ soon… because why would you use a non-responsive display?

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Long-term challenges in education

Posted on September 2nd, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized, chain-gang, international, metrics.

Mitchell Charity recently quoted to me from Lant Pritchett’s essay, “Long-Term Global Challenges in education: Are There Feasible Steps Today?” – Ch.3 of RAND’s Shaping Tomorrow Today: Near-Term Steps Towards Long-Term Goals.

A fun quote:

So, a key question is, “Is each annual 100 million–strong cohort emerging from completion of basic education adequately equipped for its lifelong participation in the relevant society, polity, and economy?” The answer is, “No one has the slightest idea.” Really. Not the slightest idea[...]

I wonder how RAND chooses the areas it tackles for long-term global planning.  How does one go about finding ‘documents like this’ (e.g., long-term plans for educational purpose) in a meaningful way?  Tony Pryor, call your office.

0 comments.

The Tower of Babel : normalizing language representation

Posted on August 23rd, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: SJ, chain-gang, international, popular demand, wikipedia.

Part of a series on difficult topics from the Wikimedia community

There are some perennial projects that take more than a single barnraising to understand and plan for. One is the issue of supporting different languages equally — the world’s largest and smallest languages are both underrepresented among the projects.  While I would like to see Wikimedia become a model for the rest of the online world in this area, how a global community can provide support, bugfixes, and advice to different/new language groups is an issue for many multilingual projects.  So I offer these questions to all readers – feel free to answer them for the projects you are most familiar with.

• What technical and other support do various language projects need to become awesome?
• What variations are needed for projects whose main goal is language and cultural preservation?
• What sharing of advice or practices would make starting new projects easier?
• How can established projects help new projects with outreach, communication, and planning?

Let me offer one example of how this has been difficult to grasp within Wikimedia: discussions on the early international list were generally in English.  This led to a certain founder effect among participants, and in how the projects are today framed to the world, from elaborations of the vision to interface design.  And this has forked discussions of what language projects need – those in the language of the project, which can happen easily and fluidly among its participants and contributors, and those meta-discussions in one or two shared languages with the potential of setting Wikimedia-wide policy or affecting all projects.

As another example: non-Latin character sets, and cultural differences about editing and participation across different parts of the world, have always been part of discussions about how Wikipedia and its sister projects should advance.  Nevertheless, the early language communities drawn to the project were largely European, and issues that only affect non-Latin readers can still take a while to fix (for instance, replacements for Roman-alphabet captchas, or fixes to javascript and css layouts in corner cases).

What are your examples? What am I leaving out?  How can the global community and the Foundation better support small and underrepresented languages?  Feel free to leave links to current or historical discussions about problems and opportunities.

1 comment.

ICT4Dev and three-legged stools

Posted on August 20th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized, popular demand, wikipedia.

The ICT4Dev aggregators on technology and learning have been covering some excellent topics over the past few months, and doing a good job of bringing some new commenters into these discussion online.

Here is a series, part of the Educational Technology Debate, on ebooks and affordable access to [preexisting] content, featuring Dick Rowe (Olé!)and Angus Scrimgeour. People still avoid talking about building new materials from scratch – the sort of work that a skillful teacher engages in every week – which is when another leap forward will begin. But they are keen on finding ways to let interactivity and creativity improve and annotate books and class materials.

Do we need a three-legged stool? Will it balance?*  What else is missing?

* I can see a whole new series of YouTube videos based on this hook… including everything from architecture to ontologies.

1 comment.

Wikimedia elections : thank you! and next steps

Posted on August 14th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: SJ, international, metrics.

The elections results are out, and I will be serving the community as a Trustee for the next two years. I am looking forward to the challenge; thank you to those who trusted me with their vote, and congratulations to Ting and Kat – it is an honor to represent the community alongside them.

Thank you also to Philippe and the elections team, and to all candidates who took time to run.  I was particularly glad to see Góngora running, as a new face in meta-affairs, and I hope to see more participation in meta discussion by active es:wp contributors.

I will help the Board be more open.  I have revived the Wikimedia meetings page for suggested agenda items – please leave your ideas and comments there, in any language.  (I know this is a tough thing to request in a monolingual blog.  Suggestions for making this blog more accessible are welcome.)  I will post my own thoughts about agenda items there in advance of future Board meetings.  One of my first efforts will be getting all foundation resolutions and policies translated into Wikimedia’s core languages.

The next one is coming up in a few weeks, during Wikimania – I don’t officially become a Board member until we meet.  I am looking forward to Wikimania, and hope to see some of you there!

I have also updated the old Wikimedia Reports page, as one way to better coordinate organize information – please help add new reports to it, and translate it into other languages.

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San Francisco: long-term exposure

Posted on August 8th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

When you’ve been exposed to Bay area weather for too long, visiting New York can make you pull a face.  (But what is that metallic distortion in the background?)

Sage Ross Photo Booth: Shining Happy People

3 comments.

Apprentices and Wikisourcerors

Posted on August 6th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

As with being a Wikipedian, being a Wikisourceror is a mindset, a view of the world: a compulsion to make source materials freely available for cleaning up, review, annotation and translation, a sense of how they would be used in other educational works.

I have this bug, for databases and for books.  But I haven’t indulged it much — I have contributed sporadically to Wikisource, mainly tiny works in English and Nahuatl, but nothing significant.  The largest work I’ve gotten copyright release for, the Whole Earth Catalog, I haven’t managed to digitize.  So I am still an apprentice, and can not speak definitively about what it means to be a wikisourceror.  But I want to share a story about someone I met who clearly has this spirit, and has gotten his students to work together on wiki-style projects to make their classroom work available to the rest of the world.

(more…)

0 comments.

Patrick Farley draws the blues

Posted on August 4th, 2009 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Patrick Farley’s Electric Sheep Comix are back online, with the same combination of blues, joy, nostalgia and artistry that they have always had.   The new website was launched and announced on Twitter the day I posted about them… coincidence, surely.  Roughly ten of the original comix (including most of my favorites) are reproduced in their original form — thankfully, since the Internet Archive versions I linked to earlier this week were missing some images from every story.

I recommend you start with Apocamon or Dicebox, or even Delta  Thrives when it’s put up, for a quick immersion in color and art.  But my favorites are  the Jain’s Death and the full Spiders series (only the third episode of which is currently online).

1 comment.

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