Hao Wu imprisoned : HEY!

Posted on March 28th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

Even the best and the most harmless can be trapped in China for being too curious. 

“>

Hao Wu (

0 comments.

Pitasticity

Posted on March 21st, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

(from the Pi Cat) : Happy
Pi
Week, everyone!

0 comments.

Wiki Wednesday tomorrow : Grafton Street, 6pm

Posted on March 7th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

Tomorrow I will be hosting the first Boston Wiki Wednesday at the Grafton Street pub & grille at 6pm.  These gatherings will generally take place the first Wednesday of each month; thanks to Socialtext for the idea and for the first round of drinks :-)  

(Socialtext is also the drive behind the best implementation of WYSIWYG wiki editing I’ve seen to date, free or not; try it out to see what I mean.  Now if only we could get something similar for in-place image editing…)

This is not a replacement for our bimonthly Wikipedia meetings; we’ll talk more about projects and internships and new wiki ventures.  Come out and say hi, or bring ideas to share.  RSVP on-wiki.

Wiki Wednesday tomorrow : Grafton Street, 6pm …

0 comments.

Simmons GSLIS blog takes off

Posted on February 23rd, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

Kudos to the Simmons grad school of library and information science, who are taking the modern connotations of their full name seriously.  They have started a group blog for the school, and are thinking of a school-wide wiki…

I still find the notion of ‘librarianship’ and of libraries themeslves an unappreciated anachronism in our world culture; even among professional librarians.  People who spend their lives gathering hundreds of thousands of volumes in order to allow those in the target audience who can gain physical access to them to read them for free, rarely fail to look askance at the idea that they might provide searchable databases of public information; even a database of book citation information.  The OCLC still haven’t quite decided to do such a thing, despite their meta-collaborative nature [above and beyond the implicit collaborative nature of all library work].

Simmons GSLIS blog takes off …

1 comment.

Simmons GSLIS blog takes off

Posted on February 22nd, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

Kudos to the Simmons grad school of library and information science, who are taking the modern connotations of their full name seriously.  They have started a group blog for the school, and are thinking of a school-wide wiki…

I still find the notion of ‘librarianship’ and of libraries themeslves an unappreciated anachronism in our world culture; even among professional librarians.  People who spend their lives gathering hundreds of thousands of volumes in order to allow those in the target audience who can gain physical access to them to read them for free, often look askance at the idea that they might provide searchable databases of public information; even a database of book citation information.  The OCLC haven’t quite decided to do such a thing yet, despite their meta-collaborative nature [above and beyond the implicit collaborative nature of all library work].

Nevertheless, the persistence of the idea of providing free access to physical materials goes to show the power of custom and professional culture…

Simmons GSLIS blog takes off …

0 comments.

Posted on February 22nd, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

0 comments.

Manypedia – what WP is best at

Posted on February 17th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

I was researching publication of Muhammad cartoons not long ago, to
update the main article about them on Wikipedia.  They had listed
the Daily Illini
as the first US college paper to have republished some of the cartoons
last week, which sounded wrong to me (it turns out they were close
tothe first, but the Salient at least was a day earlier). 

I had momentarily forgotten the best place to find such lists online,
and laughed out loud to see the reference I wanted was another
Wikipedia page.

[[List of newspapers that reprinted Jyllands-Posten's Muhammad cartoons]]
is just what you might expect; a list, with dates and references and
hyperlinks, of all newspapers that have reprinted some or all of the
cartoons in response to the controversy.  Ordered separately by
publication date and by country. 

As it notes at the start, “This list is probably not complete.”  Surely not.  But with over 120 entries, it is a start…  Two other favorite lists : [[List of interesting or unusual place names]] and the infamous [[List of lists of lists]], which has become something more and less than a list over time… see also [[Controversial newspaper caricatures]].

Manypedia – what WP is best at …

1 comment.

Qwika rocks the casbah

Posted on February 15th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

Everyone who feels that special need to search multiple languages and
projects at once, check this baby out. Oh, and wikiwax is back
up!  Hooray…

Qwika rocks the casbah …

0 comments.

Brian Mingus is always right

Posted on February 14th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

Brian Mingus, that devilishly cognitive Colorodan, is a remarkable fellow.  Besides which, he is always right.  Or so it seems sometimes… for instance, LibraryThing.  One look is enough to tell you that it is, in fact, the sexiest “Web 10” site around.

I yearn for the day this kind of brilliance turns into a free and globally-editable annotated citation database.    Tim Spalding is my official hero of the week.

Brian Mingus is always right …

1 comment.

The $1,000,000 artwork… Tew style

Posted on February 11th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

This just in.  The milliondollar homepage may be finished, but
don’t despair!  Now you can own your piece of [one of a hundred]
similar work[s] of artistic genius, while supporting the world’s finest
knowledge initiative :-)   Someone pseudonymously named “Clemens”
is kindly fronting the web real-estate and domain.  Consider this
an exercise in good will….

The $1,000,000 artwork… Tew style …

0 comments.

This mailing-list business has gone too far…

Posted on January 25th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

“[x]  Yes, sign me up for the latest news and updates about Logan Airport WiFi Connections.”

I would pay good money to see the past list of ‘latest news and updates’, for kicks, but I don’t want to get spammed with them in the future.

0 comments.

The Line (Snowcrash)

Posted on January 13th, 2006 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

Stephenson is a fine author.  Snowcrash was a good book.  But
it has one line that is so telling that, when James and I first
discussed the book, long after reading it, he said “Ohh, Snowcrash is
great.  The
Line!”  And I knew precisely what
he meant. 

The book came up twice today, and I was forced to recall the passage
through the haze of a few years.  I sharpened my memory on chapter
thirty-six; to share with you its unadulterated glory:

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that
under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in
the world. If I moved to a  martial-arts
monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family
was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge.
If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to
wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to
being bad.

Devotion and circumstances.  How could mere facility not pale in comparison?

0 comments.

Forces of nature : entertainment (fun and vice)

Posted on December 31st, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

Food Force, the recent release from the blockbuster UN Games Division (not its real name), is a ~200MB download (PC/Mac), but it rocks.

Which brings us to the first of a set of forces of nature : entertainment
– just good, clean fun.  There are many real voids in the
entertainment world; there is precious little in the way of pure Fun.
If you compare today’s parched digital / isolated-family-unit
microcosms with the networked social environments of Rio, Barcelona,
Suriname, or Tel Aviv, you’ll understand what I mean.

There is also the ever smirk-inducing world of entertainment via vice.
It tickles a related but quite different set of longings; and while
play was surely the first hobby, back when all forms of entertainment
were the same, vice supposedly gave rise to the first ‘professions’,
once it acquired its own concept and niche. But that is a force of nature for another post, another time…

Forces of nature : entertainment (fun and vice) …

0 comments.

Expression and censorship : evolutionary theory

Posted on December 27th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

Evolution.  A word with
simple origins, narrowed by specific use over time through association
with genes, reproduction, random processes, fitness.  Selection,
even “natural selection“,
likewise.  Research into, or writing about, certain related
‘evolutionary’ theories (for loose definitions of the term) has become
systematically stigmatized — the most insidious form of censorship –
since Morgan’s work in the 1920s. 

It fascinates me that the successful description and study of one
mechanism for key observations about the world often pushes out
supplementary theories, without being fully aware of doing so, like
newborn chicks pushing their siblings out of the nest.  This post
is a brief meditation on how this has happened with evolution; with
links to a few related resources.  I have found myself having
related conversations a few times over the past weeks, thanks to the
often-reductionist debates in the US over
whether to teach the religious doctrine of “creationism“
in public schools;

I have no strong feelings about creationism or intelligent design; I am no more or less
bothered by its teaching that by the teaching of any other religious
doctrine in schools.  However, in two conversations recently, I
found that well-read friends of mine,
with some talent and experience in biology, had no idea (and indeed,
were momentarily shocked) that scientists still investigate trait
transmissions other than natural selection.   This bothers me
a great deal.  Both
discussions quickly turned heated at the suggestion that one
might study anything but selection as a mechanism for biological or
genetic change.  [For an interesting an neutral view of that argument, predating modern preconceptions, see JBS Haldane's book below, or any writing from the 1880s to the 1920s.]

Back to free expression of ideas
– Stigmatization is a common, unconscious way for groups to settle on
a single set of principles and limit fundamental argument; in science,
evolution may be the subfield in which this has had the most profound
and widely-felt effect.  Unlike, say, Church-sponsored
stigmatization of novel astronomical theories
during the Renaissance, the modern stigmatization of novel evolutionary
theories is happily unconscoius; so research proceeds along other
lines, and finds funding and interest… but it tends to change its
terminology often to avoid being discarded out of hand.

Conrad Waddington was one of
the more prominent researchers pursuing such other lines  of
research in the later 20th century.  His 1975 book “The Evolution of an Evolutionist“
says much — in the title he has already begun defending himself from expected attacks on his
position.  In it he describes his changing thoughts about
evolution over time.  Among other things, Waddington studied ‘canalization‘
- a term for the inclination of different members of a given species
with sidely different genes (often sharing no more than 50% of their
specific genes with one another, according to one quote) to develop
into very similar organisms.

Since the 1930s, when it was still possible
to investigate “Lamarckian” transmission of traits without being deeply
scorned, researchers have regularly changed the terminology used for
such studies.  While the definition of evolution became ever more
specific, the terms used for related concepts were in flux… 
currently, “epigenetic” and “neo-evolutionary” are two terms one might serach for to unearth ongoing research into alternatives to canonical evolutionary theory.

Some brief examples :

0 comments.

Cosmic thread convergence

Posted on December 26th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

After Googling for one or two name variations on Wilson Rodri[g|q]ue[s|z], a (pseudonymous?) name made famous by a footnote to Fernando Meirelles’s remarkable City of God
(3 riveting hours with no moments wasted), I had one of those joyful
black moments one presumably encounters near the Convergence of All
Things.   I stumbled across a number of posts in various fora
asking for more information about him or his photographs, and then in a
deja-vu sequence discovered “CantFinditonGoogle.com“.  A note about my present search was the latest post on the site.

So remember, children : “Live your life with a gentle hand, and be ready to leave it at any time“. 

Cosmic thread convergence …

1 comment.

Marvel stoves and tears

Posted on December 21st, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.


But secretly, while the grandmother


busies herself about the stove,


the little moons fall down like tears


from between the pages of the almanac


into the flower bed the child


has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Marvel stoves and tears …

1 comment.

Metatranslation and meat translation

Posted on December 18th, 2005 by longestnow.
Categories: %a la mod.

There are some fine references – in semiotics (meta-analysis), translation research (metadata about translation), and translation practice (rolling up all the content of a body of work into some new original [translated] piece) – to metatranslation. It is the last definition that I prefer, but all are important and related.

The new Global Voices drive to have parallel content generated in many languages suggests a partnership between meta, meat and silicon translation…

Metatranslation and meat translation …

2 comments.

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