Category: Uncategorized

Hey, check it out: blog fever is running rampant at work. With increased media coverage about how Google and AOL are taking blogging to the masses, now even the people who have zero interest in blogs at least know what the word means (more or less). Kristin and Mike now have blogs (Snowboard Girl and Mike’s Blog, respectively), and they’ve linked to some other folks I know. Of course Matt has been blogging for some time now, and Kim is a Live Journalist from way back.

It’s interesting to see each person’s approach to the question “what the hell will I write about?” Live Journal steers people, naturally enough, in the direction of a dear-diary kind of journal. Blogs can swing both ways: “My car broke down again this afternoon” or “Christopher Hitchens thinks Ariel Sharon is a butthead, and I couldn’t agree more.” Predictably, women are more willing to share personal details than men. Regardless of gender, I’m often surprised at the things people are willing to share online… I learn things in five minutes that I wouldn’t learn in five years’ worth of work conversations. For the most part this is charming and a good antidote to the closed countenance we generally show the world. But the real test of a blogger is: will you keep it up? It reminds me of a quote by Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad.

At certain periods it becomes the dearest ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a book; and he dashes at this work with an enthusiasm that imposes on him the notion that keeping a journal is the veriest pastime in the world, and the pleasantest. But if he only lives twenty-one days, he will find out that only those rare natures that are made up of pluck, endurance, devotion to duty for duty’s sake, and invincible determination may hope to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat … If you wish to inflict a heartless and malignant punishment upon a young person, pledge him to keep a journal a year.

I’ve been working my way through Howard Rheingold’s timely book Smart Mobs, wherein he talks about the new and transformative properties of crowds that are in constant communication by mobile phones and other such devices. This new technology gives heretofore amorphous crowds a robust nervous system, allowing them to precipitate from the clear blue sky, strike like a fist, and then dissipate again. Rheingold likes telling the story from the point of view of smart crowd activists unseating the government in the Philippines. But Americans seem to prefer zany crowd stunts. Here’s a good article that Nabeel sent along about a flash mob in Texas: Stunts involving ‘mob’ silliness latest e-mail craze. Look for flash mobs appearing (and then quickly dissolving) near you. The overall effect is surprisingly similar to the life cycle of a cellular slime mold, in which lonely amoebas congregate, form a slug-like party on wheels, and then dissolve in a dusty sprinkling of lonely spores. That’s progress for you.

Slashdot, the tech news site with the tagline “News for Nerds. Stuff that matters”, generally reports on Cool New Stuff with a predictable editorial bent along the lines of Linux Rules! and Microsoft Sucks! When I read the comments, I get the feeling that the typical reader is a cranky Libertarian open source hacker that thinks most everybody else in the world is at least 25 watts dimmer than he is. But every now and then I see an item that surprises. For instance, look at this one, entitled How Do You Get Work Done? In it, a self-described procrastinator confesses his problem and asks for help. From the loud and prolonged response to this question, it’s clear that this is a common problem. Evolution may have equipped us with the ability to fight off a sabre-toothed tiger, but not a PlayStation and 150 channels of bad TV. Endless and immediately available amusement is one of the great troubles of our age. Here’s the original message.

I am currently a university student and have a major problem: being able to simply sit down and get work done. I can set aside a day to work, whether it is homework or contract work, and I will be lucky to have an hour done before dinner time. The only time I can actually get solid work done seems to be after midnight under a lot of pressure (ie. a deadline the next day) … I know many of you will have had the same problem. Can anyone please give advice on how to overcome this problem, be it a little trick, medication, or anything else?

I found it almost touching to read through the advice. It’s a rare enough thing to hear a young man in a public forum say “please help me.” But when it’s a voice amid the cacophony of cranky Libertarian coders, and when a hundred people swoop in with sincere advice, well, I think that’s encouraging. Heartwarming, even.

Now I happen to know that you, dear reader, sometimes have a problem with procrastination. How do you fight it off?

So much time to squander, and so little time to squander it in!

Here’s another damned impressive illusion. The last time I posted a link to an illusion like this, I made the observation that after years of seeing the same crappy old illusions, we’re now seeing some dramatic new images. Go to
this link and watch the non-moving wheels appear to twitch and turn. If you really want to get annoyed, leave the image visible in the background of your computer and try to get some work done. It won’t be long before you close the wheel window, because those non-moving wheels are wiggling around too much.

I was trying to remember exactly what it means to “wear” a ship as in the sea shanty lyric

She would not wear, she would not stay
Leave her, Johnny, leave her!
She shipped green seas both night and day
It’s time for us to leave her!

and in the process I came across this marvelous document:
Questions for Young Officers from Examination of a Young Officer, The New Practical Navigator (1814). They are study questions for the young men in the early nineteenth century who wanted to be made captains of one of Her Majesty’s ships. It makes me think of anxiety-provoking grad school qualifying exams. Imagine how you’d answer this question: “The sheers are along side, how do you get them in?” Sounds simple enough. I’m sure your answer would be quick and correct, as follows:

Par-buckle them in with their heads aft on the poop, and get the fore and main runners on them for guys; lash on two four-fold blocks, reeve the masting-falls, get girt-lines on the head of the sheers to steady the mast-head, and put heel-lashings on the sheers.

I love the metrical rhythm of incomprehensible technical jargon. Every age has its geeks, and I can just imagine an argument between two fifteen year old sail geeks of 1814: “You idiot! I can’t believe you would get the girt-lines on the head before you reeve the masting falls! Nobody does it that way. Geez, what a loozer!”

If you want to learn more about any of these terms, this website comes with a good glossary. And by the way, sheers are spars lashed together, and raised up, for the purpose of getting out or in a mast. And to wear ship is to change a ship’s course from one tack to the other, by turning her stern to windward. But you knew that already.

Mary Beth sent me a link to a piece on NPR about wikis that aired on Monday. The commentary (by David Weinberger) was good and got to the heart of why wikis are so interesting. Here’s the blurb from the NPR site:

It might sound a little crazy, letting just anyone write whatever they want on your Web site. But that’s just what Wikis are designed for. Wikipedia.org, for example, lets the public collaborate to build a surprisingly accurate encyclopedia. Commentator David Weinberger says wikis are one example of “social software,” intended to allow people to work together with ease.

I wanted to blog the piece, but in situations like this I like to check blogdex and see if all the kids are doing the same thing. I’ll hesitate before I post something that absolutely everybody else is picking up on. For instance, if a big-name print journalist writes a disparaging piece about blogging, you can be sure that thousands of blogs will dissect it the next day. But I didn’t find any comments about the wiki commentary on blogdex. This is instructive in itself. Blogs are bound up with their owners’ egos, whereas wikis are anonymous averages of multiple viewpoints. People don’t get worked up about wiki press coverage the way they do about blog press coverage.

Matt pointed me to an excellent piece of some commentary on this very point by Clay Shirky at Corante (a recent discovery). The gist of it, as Shirky says, is this: “Though both weblogs and wikis support conversational patterns, weblogs are ‘conversation as published comments’ while wikis are ‘conversation as shared editing.’ Weblogs tend towards polarized or divergent views, while wikis tend towards convergent ones.”

Kevin Kelly, who has worked on the venerable Whole Earth Review and Wired magazine, as well as writing several books, is an incurable magpie, collecting and making observations about cool new things. He’s good at it, and he has his own blog/list of the latest things he’s been playing with at Recomendo. It reads a lot like the old Whole Earth Review style, but you don’t have to wait three months to get it. Here, for example, is a good piece on How to Make Your Own Topo Maps.

The greatest gift of the web is the ability to leverage communities. On the web, enthusiasts not only consume maps, they produce them too. Niche maps (bird spots along the Erie Canal for example) now have immediate and reciprocal niche audiences. The future of mapmaking lies in developing tools that allow maximum participation by any person with passion for maps.

Another great gift of the web is that it empowers clever magpies like Kevin Kelly.

Star Chamber trivia item: A few years ago I wrote a piece about his work at Whole Earth Review, and he now points to it from his website.

My neighbor Geoff forwarded this nifty animation of actual economists filmed in the wild. The creator of this animation, Andy Foulds, has put together some amazing stuff on his site. Check out his abstract expressionism generator. Foulds’ real forte seems to be clever picture-morphing. Watch George W. get led around by the nose in this goof on money and politics.

Have you ever been to the Four Corners monument where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah come together? It’s a relatively remote tourist trap of a place that’s really only good for two things: Navajo fry bread, and standing in four states at once while saying “Hey, look! I’m standing in four states at once!” The surveyors who set the states’ boundaries declared the point to be at 36° 59′ N, 109° 02′ W. And unless you own a GPS receiver you’d never know that the concrete slab proclaiming to be the Four Corners point is actually completely in Arizona. The true Four Corners point is awkwardly situated a hundred yards or so away, as my friend Roy (who does have a GPS receiver) determined. Think of all the misguided pictures of sneakers on that slab! Oh the humanity!

This business of invisible survey lines floating over real terrain is fascinating. After all, as this satellite image of the Four Corners region shows, nothing about the landscape particularly invites us to paint straight lines across it. But in doing so, we make some barren patch of nowhere worth visiting. Cynically I want to say: if looking at invisible lines is so interesting, I’ll put some in a box and ship them to you for a very small charge. But looking at invisible lines is interesting, as the Degree Confluence Project illustrates. In a practice akin to geocaching, adventurers with digital cameras and GPS units are photographing places in the world where lines of latitude and longitude come together. The pictures are charming and the stories are folksy. You can spend hours here. Look at the great big map of coverage and click on some remote place and see what you turn up. I like the story of 49 N 133 E, which is near Birobidzhan in extreme eastern Russia. The author writes “If you ever thought that explaining what a confluence is and why you want to find one to friends was hard, try explaining one to your Russian driver with a translator.”

Incidentally, the ever-helpful Wikipedia also notes

Another four corners, the intersection of the borders of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut in Canada, is not graced with a similar tourist attraction because it is located in extremely remote northern wilderness.

Set up a Navajo fry bread stand there and you could make a killing!

From the Frivolous Links department, we are proud to bring you pet costumes from Japan. This meme is sweeping the net… if you haven’t seen it already, you may as well see it here first: The tailor of a cat CAT PRIN. If you enjoy dressing up your cat in darling outfits, then this is the site for you. Even if the thought has never once occurred to you in your long life, take a look, because, gosh darn it, if there’s one thing those Japanese know, it’s cute. Before purchasing, however, keep in mind that the Anne of Green Gables outfit is recommended for expert tailors only. The site comes with instructions for how to have fun with CatPrin. I won’t tell you what steps 1 and 2 are, but step 3 is “Remove her clothes and give her a hub, say Thank you!”

Before departing these regions, and in the name of equal media access for cats and dogs, here is a Japanese site where you buy costumes for your dog:
Beetle Calcium (sic). Space Dog looks good, but the smart doggie set is stepping out in the Samurai Suit. [spotted on Industry]