The Longest Now

I had forgotten the long essay I wrote about this transition here on my blog… or rather, on my first law school blog, when blogs.law was new and cuddly.  My transition to the current wordpress skin made it more visible, new-found visibility online made it a repeated spam target, and I rediscovered it today.  So spam has done something good for me.  Thanks, spam king!  

For those of you who missed it the first time around in early 2004, before I knew how wikipedia works or even that it was community owned and run.  Here it is again: On Multilingual Encyclopedia and Dictionary (public domain).

Daniel goes to Ethiopia.  Elana is digitizing some of her reels of footage this weekend, so expect some fantastic video from Mongolia and elsewhere soon.

I hope you’ve all seen this by now.  Thank goodness for perpetually-compounded world-saving.

Ike hit Texas hard this morning, straight over central Galveston.  They say 3m will be out of power for two weeks… including our house in Houston.

UPDATE:  Our street was lucky.  Our house is good as ever, having no enormous trees nearby.  My mother reports the only noise it made was a loud humming from the gutters at a certain windspeed (I could hear it over the phone!).

UPDATE 2: A house across the street had its roof aerated by falling trees from both adjacent properties, and the ancient oak in the open lot next to us (vacated and cleared after the last big flood) was ripped down.  Flooding wasn’t bad; only 2 ft of water in the street.  The local bayou is far from the main channel, and was a good 3 feet from flowing over when high tide passed at 4pm.  10 blocks away things were worse…  Now everyone just has to make do without power for the next fortnight.

UPDATE 3: Only 1m are still without power; we expect to do without for another week.

And this is why we went into space 40 years ago: an image of Ike from the International Space Station… with a little ‘station finger’ over the lens.  Great buildings such as the Pyramids and the Wall are, despite what they say, hard to see from space.  But massive atmospherics?  You can see those from Saturn.

More below the fold.

(more…)

Chris Ball, a Mad bio-savvy artisan, and Wade Brainerd all spent part of the past two weeks getting a disk-conserving wikireader onto the XO that supports browsing and simple searching over a 100-fold compressed set of articles.
The result :

• a 100M activity containing most of the Spanish Wikipedia, with illustrations, math fontification, and templates

• scripts that support generating a new version from the latest articles, from heuristics defining the most popular titles, with only a few hours of work

There is also a short blacklist of pages and images that need improvement which will change over time.  A whitelist of unpopular but crucial pages will surely build up, and the process will find a way to learn from the subject-specific wikireader efforts to produce smaller uncompressed collections.  The same idea and scripts can provide a roughly Britannica-sized collection for every major language; or a multilingual cover of the 200 smallest languages; expect an English one soon for comparison.
While this reader (which has to unzip each page as it is requested) is slower than browsing html, it is still a pleasure to use. The real lack, shared with other readers to date, is that comments and editing don’t yet work…

OLPC is having a flag day of sorts on Tuesday — a media event at the Media Lab with attendees from many countries where we are working, and presentations from a few of the government officials responsible for country deployments. It is unfortunately not open to the public, but I will do my best to publish summaries and link to any raw materials from the events on the blog; and to pass on any comments and questions you may have for country implementers and teachers.

Some of the country representatives will be in town for the rest of the week, for a project and learning workshop; stay tuned for points of interest for the community that come up. I am particularly looking forward to finalizing details of the educational blog project underway in Uruguay, with help from Greg Smith and Tarun Pondicherry, and the WebJournal project that Robson Mendonca will be working on this summer in Brazil with Juliano Bittencourt.

If you have projects you’d like to see pursued more actively, or data you would like to see from countries and schools, leave a comment here…

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.

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…)

My friend Zdenek is creating a local gallery of knowledge and photographs of documents and buildings from his hometown of Češnovice. The result is a lovely collection of local history that any city would be proud to have.

It’s funny to think that none of my hometowns have something similarly simple and to the point. Perhaps they do, and I just don’t know about it?.Perhaps this is easier to do comprehensively, with a passion, for a small town. Of course I would settle with this sort of history for any of the blocks or neighborhoods I’ve lived in, but they tend not to have the same cohesive history as a town fending for itself against the vagaries of war and time.

At any rate, enjoy. I particularly like the photos of Hluboka and of this building — with what seems to be yellow steel sculpted girders on the outside. I wonder : are they structural?

Off to Berlin in a few days for the Sea of Chaos. I’ll try to document the trip properly.

Kaltura.com does a dozen things right in one place; unusual for a modern creator/social-networking site, they focus heavily on creation.  Most unusually, they do all of this with video, the black sheep of the collaborative family : small clips, visualized; smooth remix process, with interface on the client and reasonably response time on the server without redrawing a whole screen; the best memes of history and authorship transparency realized with large-font rounded-corners elegance.

Now who is using it ? where are the transclusions for mediawiki instances?   I can’t wait to see the beta site develop.

Wikijunior has been quietly developing a number of great books since its founding, and has branched out into many languages.
It needs more editors and commentators; unlike most of the rest of wikidom, its editors are a bit separate from its audience, and its audience is often not active online.

The cast behind the lavishly told story of Thamesis — a social and political intrigue set in a world of vivid colors and sound — are more fascinating than the cast within the story itself… they remind me of the early thirteen‘ers, and of Great Big Pants (before I even knew of Worldwide Pants Incorporated).

I can’t get enough. I want the crew responsible for character and clothing design, those responsible for sociology and scientific resarch, and those charged with spicing up the interwoven threads outside the flash but within the site (the brand incubation, the public relations crew, those who loaned outfits and music), in more than living color.

I walked through the Yard early this morning, with a bag in one hand (filled with breakfast remains) and a phone in the other (filled with digital desid.), holding onto each only by fingertips.  There was a light breeze from the west.  For three breaths I was filled with a primal joy in friction.  Holding things felt particularly freeing.

It passed; in another minute I was trundling east at forty miles an hour; I jumped into conversation with Tariq Krim and a night’s century of mail and the rest of the world.

Sophie and Philip from Quebec learn how to repair an XO. Joel Stanley, working at OLPC over the summer, showed them how to take one apart; when it was put back together, the keyboard wasn’t working… they took it apart again on their own and managed to reseat it.

Joel managed to catch some neat montage footage, mainly from the first time around, and asked them to introduce themselves in English and French. With a little help from Jamendo, the video was spliced into a cute short… enjoy.

Today I stumbled across a luminescent painting, thanks to the fine taste of a fellow Wikipedian whose writing is so intimate and full of poetry that, despite never having corresponded, I imagine them an acquaintance. It was a portrait of a knitter, entitled Tricoteuse, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. I looked at it a few times, astonished by something about its honesty and quality of light that I could not quite place; and then astonished again by its unexplained orphanage — as it was included in no project pages save two user-space galleries across Wikipedia and her sister projects.

I inspected its central page on Wikimedia Commons to discover this last tidbit via the check usage tab… Commons also had a small descriptive page and gallery about Bouguereau and his works, where I found a second image similarly astonishing and underused. After marvelling on his works for a few long minutes, I realized I had found two extraordinary works in no time at all, and almost nothing of their origins; something was amiss.

It was no surprise to discover that his legacy had been somehow submerged for over half a century. Many compare him with Rembrandt, ignored for far longer and more actively in his own lifetime. Wikipedia had a short biography which alluded to this, and the first artsite I found with a page about him had a rant-like paean at once upholding his fine qualities and denouncing slanders that had kept him from public texts and encyclopedias and hidden his work from entire generations.
I then added his Tricoteuse and portrait of his future wife, Elizabeth Gardner, to the Wikipedia gallery dedicated to his works. Only as I was leaving that gallery did I realize I had seen — and bookmarked — one of his images before: a work of Nymphs and Satyr, again so striking that without remembering the artist’s name I had brought it to mind on a few occasions. And is this delightful piece entitled L’enlèvement de Psyché or Le ravissement de Psyché ? Rapture seems to suit it better.
At any rate, time spent with Bouguereau’s works is time well spent. Enjoy!

The best 4-minute love paean ever.

On Love …

This is hands down the sexiest portable tech I’ve ever seen.  Spain’s version of the $100 laptop – only $99 (or is that 99 Euros?), and in its own briefcase!  Better than a briefcase water-desalinator : a Steampunk (Plaspunk?) OLPC –  complete with 3.5″ drive, monochrome display, and a taupe cold war-era shell.

Unbelievable techno-lust fills my heart… who is behind this?  Whoever brings me one of these laptops will receive a custom-laser-etched red XO 1.5 and my thanks. (updated, since my lust has not abated)

Take a look at the sundial-stopping hot technology promoted by Zapatero‘s government.

(Update: pulled from the Archive, as the original news reports are now all offline.)

España creará un PC de 99,99 euros

El Gobierno español se compromete a desarrollar un equipo informático de bajo coste en su lucha contra la fractura digital en el mundo.

Redacción – El Gobierno Zapatero anunció ayer que el PC de “99,9 euros” será uno de los proyectos estrellas que conformaran el plan contra la pobreza que fue presentado por el propio presidente en la reciente sesión plenaria de la ONU. Fue el pasado 17 de diciembre cuando Rodriguez Zapatero anunció la entrada de España en el Programa de Desarrollo de Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo (PNUD) aportando 528 millones de euros a iniciativas vinculadas con proyectos de desarrollo para el tercer mundo. Entre los distintos proyectos que pasaran a ser financiados por este Programa figuran algunos relacionados con la sociedad de la información, la ruptura de la brecha digital y otros vinculados con la Alianza de Civilizaciones, promovida por el Gobierno español. Con el PC de “99,99” euros, el gobierno español intentará conjugar en un solo proyecto estos dos puntos con la Alianza de Civilizaciones al promover un ordenador que sea desarrollado conjuntamente por expertos e investigadores de los países que dan apoyo a esta iniciativa. Nuevo software Ayer mismo se iniciaron los primeros contactos para poner en marcha un grupo de trabajo multicultural que tendrá como primera tarea definir los ejes básicos del sistema operativo bajo el que funcionará el nuevo ordenador. Por el momento no parece claro que pueda estar basado en Linux ya que el desarrollo principal de este sistema está localizado en los EEUU y este hecho despierta algún resquemor entre algunos sectores. Los primeros expertos contactados dijeron que el nuevo SO deberá evitar lenguajes provocadores y violentos referentes a las creencias de otros pueblos y a sus símbolos sagrados y que introducirá en su CORE un sistema de reconocimiento encriptado de palabras y términos que bloqueará su uso a aquellos que lo utilicen con ese fin. El nombre clave del nuevo equipo será el de “Talante PC” Desarrollo independiente El nuevo ordenador competirá con los proyectos de Negroponte y el de Intel de equipos de bajo coste. El Gobierno español confía que los países del tercer mundo abrazaran más fácilmente un equipo que respeta su identidad multicultural que aquellos que han sido diseñados desde la metrópoli para ser entregados a las naciones en desarrollo. Además, el objetivo es que al igual que el avión europeo, distintos países fabriquen partes del ordenador y que este sea finalmente ensamblado en un país en concreto facilitando, también, de esta manera la introducción de industrias tecnológicas en estos lugares. Por el momento no han dado a conocer los plazos de desarrollo, pero el Gobierno español dijo que “es un largo camino” y que no conviene apurar los plazos que, por prisas, conduzcan a entorpecer el camino iniciado.