sj's Longest Now [v.1]

I’m posting this from newark airport.
I just did something totally foolish —
signed up for a $7/day wireless connection when
I have only 10 min before my flight.

I did this because I just realized something odd – a sequence of inexplicable events made me think, with a black flash, that if I were ever to get into an air accident, this would be the flight for it.

And I would hate to go without even a final word!  But thankfully my flash belonged to some alternate reality, and I managed a few extra words in regardless.  And now you all know more certainly than before what a wonderful mother I have. 🙂

One of the FAQ on the Berkman site is “How do I find out about upcoming events?“.  The answer seems straightforward enough:

Of course the ‘upcoming events’ box contains one random selection from
the coming year and one event which has already passed, and The Filter, while it seems at some point to have been published more than once a year, is stuck on the edition from April 19, 2004.

Now as it so happens, I know there is an interesting-sounding two-day conference on Blogging, Journalism, and How We Can Trust Them Sneaky Citizen Journalists With Our Mindshare. 
And I know it takes place Jan 21-22 at the Center.  But the only
information about it anywhere online, apparently, is on the personal
travel schedule of a friend of mine. How annoying.  Perhaps I
should let the webmaster know…

A site promoting secret knowledge that will Make You Rich, using clever image placement, chain-letter marketing, and other tools to carry its points across, that manages to do so in a tastefully tacky way — this would normally merit a quick post.  In this case, the secret happens to be “RSS feeds”, which makes it doubly interesting. 

Incredibles.  lovely film.  a pleasure to watch ten times over. And yet every watching is tempered by two things:

1. Marvel Comics and the Fantastic Four get no credit, despite being inspiration for almost every superpower and character in the story.  The FF in particular provided the template for most of the Incredible family, from their family worries to their particular powers.  In an odd sort of homage, the gratuitous Next Villain who shows up at the end of the film was pulled straight out of FF #1, their first marvel comic ever.  (Mole Man lives!)

2. The last 15 min of the film are garbage, when compared to the glory of the rest of the film.  They show how mediocre the whole film could have been, were there no time for polishing script, score or scenery.

Back in the Spring, everyone’s favorite voting-machine manufacturer delivered a new ATM to Carnegie-Mellon U. — and it promptly rebooted. When it came back up, its WinXP OS loaded without launching the ATM software, and with its touchscreen interface waiting to be used. The next day, the students got some nice shots of the ATM machine running Windows Media Player…

Thank goodness we still use paper ballots in this country!

Blog-Wiki morphology probed by MSNBC.

Reading World Books as a kid can give you great ideas, or so goes the investigative thread of the Newsweek staff who wrote a quick column on Wikipedia, topping it with the greatest image of Jimmy Wales‘s floating head yet snapped. Of course they refer to the site occasionally as “wikipedia.com”, and can’t quite figure out how it all fits together, but they are enthusiastic. And that counts for a lot.

… English don’t got none. It’s hard to say in one word that something is middling or mediocre unless one is talking specifically about vague quality or ability. Medium-large, medium-strong, middleweight (well, maybe that’s one word), of average thickness, neither slow nor fast, of average intelligence… is this because it’s not emphatic enough to say something is middle-of-the-road? In politics it comes up so much in most any discussion that we not have ‘centrists’. But how about medium-dark, medium-fair, medium-hard, mildly interesting, somewhat obscure, “in the middle-ground”?

The question might better be rephrased as, why do we have two words for most adjectives, one at each end of a supposedly linear spectrum, rather than one word for each adjective (as in NewSpeak), or three (as with “poor, average, good”)?

Once more, I tried to use frassle today.  I was hoping to exploit some of its features, but instead found myself too frustrated  to continue until I had had some tea.  Updates once I’ve settled down a little.

Okay, so I just spent an hour on Frassle, seeing how it works.  And I’m still frustrated, and I got only two useful categories out of my browsing.  But I think I know how it works…  The features that often assuage my frustration on other sites, the help pages and the search function, don’t work the way… one might expect.

The main difficulty I have is that the site doesn’t tell you what you can do with it.  You are immediately presented with three big link-tabs at the top of the screen, for an aggregator, a “publisher“, and a “weblog“.  The publisher looked interesting, but why would I use that and not my weblog?  After I got my first inexplicable red-inked error (on my second submission), I stopped trying to publish, and stuck to blogging. 

The second striking problem is that many features of the site and interface are subtlely dependent on your context — whose writings you’re looking at, whether they are being published or blogged, and whether they are already categorized by you in your aggregator or not.  

Finally, many tasks are not readily reversible.  Things can be added from interfaces that disallow deletion.  Things can be moved or renamed, sometimes magically, from one interface but not from another which looks almost identical.  In one particular case, unsubscribing a feed from a category could only be done by clicking on the category title and then clicking on the word “subscribed” in the resulting page… this alone took me a few minutes to figure out.

In any case, the whole categorization interface (and categorization + the long arm of cross-category matching are frassle’s calling card) is painful to use and only sporadically intuitive.  Flashier now than the last time I visited, but still painful.  And while it occasionally adds helpful mouseover text (which compensates for vague elements in the interface), that too is sporadic.

On the bright side, there seem to be a few new people streaming in to test it out (and hey, I went back :), so I have some hope that alpha 17 will start to look really neat.  I figure I should check back around Hallowe’en.

2005.

I recently read How to Defeat Saddam Hussein, By Col. Trevor Dupuy, US Army (Ret.), a book published just as we were declaring war on Iraq for the first time, back in 1991 — a charming hour’s read. An important feature which is listed on most maps but remained unmentioned in the text was the Wadi al Batin, forming the lower half of Kuwait’s border with Iraq.

It turns out that it is a broad shallow valley, was a riverbed in ancient times — one of many in the region which might have travelled out to the sea from the Tigris/Euphrates Valley. I can just imagine the fertile crescent extending all the way across the middle east. Perhaps I should give slightly more respect to the theories about Atlantis or Eden being hidden under the waters of the Mediterranean or the Persian Gulf.

I’d like to spare a few words to address failure modes in nature, life, and society. Occasions when great potential vanishes, powerful forces cancel eachother out, or metastable situations shift suddenly, with speed and force. Suggest a few of your own…

It’s interesting to note the difference between a ‘positive’ dramatic shift, and a philosophical ‘failure mode’ — from the perspective of a cool-headed system of dynamic equations, they are mirror images of one another; run time backwards and you get the other kind of shift. On the other hand, in all but the most fundamental natural shifts, these two look very different… flash-freezing of a waterfall, or the spontaneous creation of order — the conversion of a mass of identical slime mold cells into a large, functional, three-dimensional sporophyte over the course of hours — feels very different to me than an avalanche, the cataclysmic collapse of land above a fault line, or the eruption of a volcano.

But not all failure modes are bad; they are merely modes which produce the “failure” of an equilibrium, despite — perhaps too quickly for — normal equilibrium forces that would counteract such change.

• Nature – cascade effects (minor tipping points, hundredth monks), strongly polarized equilibria (tectonic shifts [ice ages?], atmospheric shifts), chaotic ‘equilibria’ (many-body states, multiple-attractors, Earth’s magnetic field)
• Life – sudden zeal; sudden repulsion; suicide (outside of society, as opposed to say hari-kari; by the talented and powerful), death by shock, primogenesis
• Society – quick meme transmission (witch hunts, the children’s crusade & other youth brigades, modern Japan clothes trends), collapse of good ‘sustainable’ organizations (Greco-Roman theology), traditions, species (var.; ‘need for change’?)