Don’t let me sit on the sidelines.
Never let me watch others make the world go round.
Never let me watch others dance the night away.
Never let me see the band play on without me.
Never let me… wait for others to suck it all in.
This is all there is.
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i finished a book. it’s not clear to if i liked it. sparse, existensial, left hanging.
point omega. a novella set in the desert in the recent past.
characters searching for slowness and vastness…. zen…. the moment, a moment. an author searching for a moment. 100 pages that seem like 300 because all the talk of vastness. or maybe it was the music pouring from headphones or the vastness of the ground 5 miles below my rightside 757 window.
read the book. we wont share the same experience. it’s a weirld empty vessel ready for your filling. might have been the author’s point… or his side effect.
and so it is with everything else. an existence of disconnects. these disconnects arent bad they just exist. we all have private experiences. you cannot know me. i may not be able to know me. we know facts and ocassionally find a narrative to group the facts. facts = events. things interact. self awarenes is the exhaust, the by product of our nueral narrative.
im writing this on a droid phone. it is a terrible writing instrument in general. however on a plane it provides a compact canvas with no digital distractions. i am not using a word processor with all its algorithmic fixes and helpers. it is refreshing to me to be able to screw it all up and not have technology try to make it all right.
messy technology is my favorite. technology that tries to be too coherent, too slick, too well design fights against the disconnects i write about above. it elimimates the magic of accidents… happening into a different way of doing it, a nifty new view a mistaken stroke that changes the course of a project, business, country or life.
this is how i write software. i cut, paste, try something, try something else, fix, start over, change editors, change monitors. i start with the smallest, sparsest description of a project and dance. i like people to play with software and media early. not so they can see if it fits the spec but so they can grow along with the software. this is the only way to turn wide disconnects between users and end products into the necessary, and fragile, into bridges of usuability. software should be a vessel that the user can bring their unique experience too and the software can dance with the user.
i do not love the iphone. it forces me to waltz when i want to hip hop or stomp or jazz. as a user amd a developer conformity is a requirement. conformity doesnt increase knowledge or enjoyment. it increases habit and eliminates accidents.
this is also why i despise collaborative filtering aka recommendation algorithms. these always tend towards everyone seeing the same things. a bookstore or a library or music store is still a womderful experience because things are not organized by what you might like…. alphabetical or front tables or genres with spines, cases to catch your eye is a great way to run into a different thing. we see the same movies, read the same books, use same phone, have the same views and yet its all false because really, as i said, were all very different. why not celebrate and fully experience that reality in everything we do? doing and buying the same thing wont make us satisfied or generate understanding. its just boring and reduces experience.
and thats all we get is experience. this waking string of 28000 days. experience what the senses send in. i want more of that….soak it all up. i dont want less experience in exchange for less discomfort or ease of use or a common experience. those are false chasings…. unachievable and entirely boring.
i didnt like the book. i did enjoy the experience. read it or dont… but do tell me about what you do read.
For one thing, the smartest people do not necessarily make the best political choices. William F. Buckley once famously declared that he would rather give control of our government to “the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.” Bruce Charlton, a professor of theoretical medicine at the University of Buckingham, recently coined the term “clever sillies” to describe people who hold wacky political views seemingly because of—rather than despite—their high intelligence. Conservative writer John Derbyshire has also observed that political naivety exists at both extremes of the IQ distribution, not just the lower one. The reason is that brilliant people can sometimes be so consumed by abstract philosophy that they forget common sense.
Hahahaha.
It’s the “Bell Curve” argument all over again.
There’s no way to really answer this. It’s clever writing and fun with stats, but it’s a bogus argument. a) impossible to really categorize political beliefs in such binary way b) there are so many behavioral factors involved in your belief system that it’s hard to draw a cause strong enough to justify the distinctions here.
Fun read but fairly useless.
Unless it’s true.
I’ll leave the last words to the article author:
The bottom line is that a political debate will never be resolved by measuring the IQs of groups on each side of the issue. Even if certain positions tend to be held by less intelligent people, there will usually be plenty of sharp thinkers who take the same side. Rather than focus on the intellectual deficiencies, real or imagined, of certain politicians and their supporters, people should strive to find the best and brightest spokesmen for the opposing side.
There is a certain devilish fun to contemplating the intelligence of liberals and conservatives, but it should have no effect on how we think about issues. Political debates would be better without it.
4-8 weeks max before someone puts linux on iPad.
Maybe I should do it? I did, after all, invent the LiPhone several years ago.
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Perhaps a more apples to apples competition is HP/Microsoft vs. Apple for the yet to be valuable category of “tablets”.
The HP Slate and Apple iPad devices are remarkably similar.
Here’s the Slate:
Here’s the iPad:
That’s right… the same basic concept and function.
you know why Apple will sell more than HP? Marketing. Look at how Apple polishes everything up from the product design to the silly video.
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It’s on….
digital books just got way more interesting.
Here’s the big differences between the devices and services:
Kindle
Basics: Low powered device that can run for days without a recharge. Black and white epaper / eink screen. 3g connectivity. Ability to add storage via SD card.
Pros: Closest thing to a real book out of all the devices and digital book ideas. Amazon ebookstore is huge.
Cons: single purpose device. read books. and make sure the books don’t have pictures, diagrams or anything other than text.
Nook
Basics: Similar to Kindle. It’s a slightly more functional kindle. Has a nice color screen for media browsing. Books through Barnes and Noble.
Pros: Nice feel to the device. Color is nice.
Cons: Single purpose device. BN ebookstore is not as robust or easy as Kindle bookstore.
iBooks/iPad
Basics: Apple’s fully featured tablet. Basically a decent computer with eBooks reader software.
Pros: Multi purpose device. Can actually compute. Beautiful screen. Possible to have nice reading+interactivity.
Cons: Battery life is more like a phone, less like a book! Glossy screen. Not quite as “rugged” as kindle.
Pricing:
Kindle and Nook are around $250. Entry level iPad is $499.
Pricing on all of these are within $150or so. Amazing that iPad is that low. Almost impossible to pick a single use device that costs as much.
Conclusions
For me, what wins is the best book/publication selection. Amazon is really hard to beat in that area.
Prediction – Kindle app on iPad pretty quickly! I think Amazon will have to give up on the Kindle if it doesn’t come out with something the publishers want to push hard. You can’t beat Apple at hardware on a grand scale. not yet.
[UPDATE 4/25/2010: I’ve been using my iPad for several weeks now. I haven’t turned on my Kindle since I got my iPad with the Kindle software. There’s simply no need. I’m amazed by the iPad battery life. I also didn’t anticipate how useful it is that you don’t need light to read on the iPad. Like duh! iBooks isn’t quite good enough to compete with the Kindle store based on inventory but I suspect that will change quickly.]
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The rumors are finally rumors no more. The iPad is out.
When the iphone came out it was clear it was going to change phones.
the iPad… hmmmm…. where does it fit? what does it advance? what experience does it enhance?
the only obvious thing I see right now is video gaming and ebooks/publishing.
but…… 10 hour battery life makes it a tough tough tough thing to compete with good ol’ paper.
There’s a lot of talk about Digital Publishing… new form of newspaper. I just don’t buy it. If the browser wasn’t a good medium for newspapers, there’s really no basis to assume the iPad will be.
There’s a killer application in education for this. It’s actually functional enough to act as a digital library and a computing tool.
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MOON is an extraordinary movie. A slim 90 or so minutes, 1 main actor, minimal sets and effects and one gut punch of a concept.
Duncan Jones and everyone who worked on this movie deserve a real high five for keeping this subtle and letting the eerie realizations of Sam Bell take center stage. SciFi/futurism/philosophical benders tend to go over the top and lose their power by setting everything in such a bizarre environment with over the top characters. MOON does not.
What’s really disturbing about MOON is that this is a plausible future of some sort. It’s not flying cars, light speed, terminators nor brains in vats powering a super computer. It’s a future of clunky cloning, functional energy technology, and AI that isn’t all powerful.
I don’t want to ruin the story for folks so I’m not going to go into much detail. If you at all wonder about what we all think it means to be alive, be a human, be self aware and be free, you will really enjoy this movie and probably be really unnerved by it.
No conclusions. more questions…
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What do we really mean by human rights? where do these rights come from? what is their source of power?
Russell’s (Son) position:
Though we have produced powerful rhetoric and documents through human history human rights are simply a concept. They values we create and we choose to live by. There is no such thing has some absolute, outside of us thing called a human right. The universe doesn’t have a conscience. Humankinds evolution from earlier species didn’t somehow magically produce some special rights for us that the rest of the universe can’t enjoy.
Agreeing to some basic rights seems to be a beneficial idea for humankind. Freedom in all its forms seems to be a pretty darn useful value to live by. That doesn’t make it some universal truth.
All men aren’t created equal – not in body, not in cognitive ability, not in environment. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t treat everyone on equal ground. Not Equal doesn’t mean better or worse. I think that’s the confusion that makes people fall back to claiming some fundamental human rights.
Does the fact that human rights spring forth only from man and not the universe, not a god, or some other outside source devalue them? make them less powerful? No. In fact, in some sense I think it makes it more powerful. The fact that billions of people can agree on some basic principles is quite powerful and very empowering. It actually increases the burden of enforcing it because there’s no faceless being we can blame when these agreed upon rights are violated.
Donna’s (Mother) Position:
Hmmm. Human rights. We’ve assigned a lot of value to the words and far less to those issues we find critical enough to include under the label.
I’ve never operated under the illusion that God defined human rights. Some big thinkers have done that, and others have shunned the notion that there are any universal needs that might rise to the level of being rights we grant and protect.
It seems more important to me to try to answer if our basic needs have advanced as our knowledge as human beings has advanced. Do we add to the list of things we value and protect as rights or are we locked into what we could reasonably provide in the past? Food, clean water, education, shelter, healthcare, equal protection under the law … are these all just things we need and desire or are they rights we identify and extend to one another?
And that pesky little topic of equality becomes so muddy all on its own as we deny various individuals their abilities to become waht they could otherwise be by limiting their access to some basic human needs. We create inequality and then shrug our shoulders and call it inevitable. And we most definitely make decisions about less than equal meaning less than good — and less worthy.
So, if we do not define some of our basic human needs and desires as rights, we will doom millions of our fellow men and women to poverty, to pain, to illness, to cold and so on. If we have the ability to lift one another by sharing human values as human rights, I say we do so.
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