Posted on April 1st, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: chain-gang, popular demand, indescribable.
Auntimame has an interesting XO peripherals site, and while I’d like to see us set up an official cut-rate store, it’s nice to see this getting off the ground. Some of the gear there gives new meaning to the word “awesome”. A green USB-latching XO viewfinder? Yes, please…
Posted on March 27th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
This is the best video all week : an ECG on the XO with three leads and a $4 board setup.
Posted on March 26th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: fly-by-wire, international, Glory, glory, glory.
Please come to the first US storytelling jam, at UNICEF HQ in Manhattan, this Fri-Sun. We begin Friday night at 6 with introductions and drinks, and continue through an intense schedule Saturday (10-10) and Sunday (10-6), wrapping up in the late afternoon. I hope to see all of you New Yorkers there, and folks from the region; there are a handful of us coming up from Boston in the afternoon if anyone from these parts wants to travel together.
Topics will include storytelling itself, storyboarding of great ideas, how to run a storyboarding session with children, thoughts on interviews by and of children, how to learn to interview others, capturing personal stories for the OurStories project, and code and designwork needed to improve the above.
Posted on March 18th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
Arthur C. Clarke is dead. Long may his memory live.
There is a last time for everything… I’m going to go reread a few of his stories.
Posted on March 6th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
Even Encyclopaedia Dramatica couldn’t have scripted the past week’s drama around Wikipedia, its supporting Foundation, and many of its prominent promoters.
Danny Wool penned a few blog posts I find in outrageously poor taste, not to mention bad faith. Valleywag gave JW the star treatment, including paying for dirt, which I suppose is final vindication of his being a part of pop culture… which I usually wish the ‘wag wasn’t. Surprisingly, a half-dozen major media outlets followed suit.
Jimmy gets bonus points for going out of his way to address the only matter of true significance to a Wikipedian : whether the standard of neutrality upheld by the project and its core community was compromised by even a hair. The moment that any traditional media or publishing source devotes half this attention to neutrality, I will subscribe instantly and dedicate a week to honoring them.
The community of editors has been dealing with all of this remarkably well; as with every previous drama I can recall, it is robust to such troubles, since 90% of contributors don’t know or care about such things. (A few more tweaks to its infrastructure, and it could be robust to any calamity or change.)
Slashdot came up with some good posts on the subject…
(on the success of the open community model) … It doesn’t matter… the only thing that matters is the positive contribution he made by founding Wikipedia and his later life or his personal details don’t effect that. It is like science, it doesn’t matter who comes up with the evidence or the theory to explain it. The only thing that matters whether it’s correct or not. - abeautifulmind
Love is doomed to fail because men are stupid and women are crazy. — Groening
But in the end, I am left wondering (as usual) why our culture encourages us to be distracted by trivia at so many levels. That is something that WP is directly rooting out in the realm of verifiable essays… perhaps we can reconsider how to get the same spirit to infect other areas of life as well.
Posted on March 4th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
A nice photoshoot with three young cousins: the XO, eee, and Classmate. The text and analysis could use some work, but the visual comparisons speak for themselves.
Posted on February 28th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: poetic justice, indescribable.
Inspired by this spoof of Mankiw and the droll wit of my future Aikido opponent, I am tempted to publish a blog tackling each failed field in turn. Oh, and there are so many…
Posted on February 28th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
I ran into Danny Weitzner after the FCC’s Broadband Network Management Practices hearings Monday night, who reminded me that reasonable content stamping designs have been out for a decade; something future implementations of casual and learnable tagging should engage. And I think we came to some reasonable conclusions about the characteristics needed for a project and group to compose a lasting collaboration to gathering, sorting, and improve knowledge and its use in some field.
I remain fascinated by some of the debates against freedom to classify on the grounds that they enable censorship.
Posted on February 28th, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: Uncategorized.
I revisited Clay Shirky’s oft-cited “ontology is overrated” today, noting again with pleasure that the essay is insightful enough to be wrong in a many places. The essay hasn’t grown on me, however, and the conversations about organizing knowledge do not seem to have advanced (even as collectives of editors have grown in practice). Most discussions on the subject are incidental and disorganized — more reminiscent of the ancient debates about whether the world is composed of four or five elements than of any serious effort to choose axioms and assess their logical conclusions.
So my pleasure with Shirky’s writing was immediately followed by a pang of fear that I don’t know anyone insightful enough to be right and prolific enough to write about it openly for the benefit of all.
I am not a fearful person, but I have the sense that we don’t have a great deal of time to sort and share our bounty of knowledge before our window of costless global collaboration is interrupted by something mundane and unavoidable.
One of these days I hope to see active discussions of the origins of ‘expertise’ and skill, and schools of knowledge-organization that offer apprenticeships to teach their subtleties to all comers. (more…)
Posted on February 23rd, 2008 by metasj.
Categories: poetic justice, indescribable, Glory, glory, glory, Uncategorized.
Chinese philosophers debated for centuries whether one discovers the nature of the universe by investigating oneself or by investigating the outer world. I don’t have a dog in that fight (I might say both grant equal power of discovery when approached properly), but I do like poring through random selections to get a feel for an expansive whole (yes, I want a Special:Random for the universe).
Sometimes I do that reflexively while thinking, practiving a little Langerfulness. So it was that I found myself tonight seven pages into the discussion threads for the YouTube video “Why Chuck [Norris] endorsed Mike [Huckabee] - Episode One [of Five]“, where I ran across the following exchange between BuckDresser and jtm04d; those of you who know my favorite tests of familiarity with good scientific method may appreciate it… (more…)
