The Longest Now

Today was a horrifying day for Boston – our annual celebration of pride, unity, and Spring put on hold for bombs and ambulances. My thoughts are with those who have been injured or killed.

We have these strange interplays of increased safety and increased risk at large public events – it seems to me there is more we could do to shift the equilibrium towards safety in numbers. Even in the face of anonymous attacks from a distance.

But today we mourn.

With a beautiful backstory.

ᔥᔥ FAFP

Life does not seem to have a monopoly on the attention of the gifted.

A brief commemoration, from a community in mourning.

From the “too good to be true (but it is)” dept: OneWeirdKernelTrick.com

↬ YanZhu

See John Baez’s Open Questions in Physics.

We haven’t resolved systemic biases yet, but this is one sign of the value of focusing on neutrality and a common goal:

Being ‘Wikipedian’ trumps party affiliation, study finds

The study results were discussed among researchers back in November.
ᔥ the L.A.Times

Read the Big Data and the Topologist series, from the “low-dimensional topology” blog, written by 5+ budding topologicians.

They maintain a handy list of open problems they have discussed.
↬Michael Stone.

I had never heard of the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy before they started harrassing and legally threatening my friend Mako Hill. But they are clearly an organization that understands neither cross-cultural communication nor diplomacy.

There is also no possible outcome of this dispute that is in their favor. The Streisand effect can’t be reversed by filing law suits. Filing law suits will never make a diplomacy institute look good. And Wikipedia policy isn’t structured in such a way that it could ever have an article about them after this without mentioning the drama in the first place – even if enough editors one day changed their minds about notability.

Update: Cory D. was thoughtful enough to put up a note about the case on Boing^Boing.

From the latest issue of the UK magazine red pepper. With photos by Sage Ross from a memorable Boston Wikipedia meetup in 2009. Click on the pages for higher resolution:

The various threads around Hypothes.is, the Open Annotation spec, and the campus-wide annotation projects at MIT, Yale, and Harvard are starting to converge. It’s nice to see a future pillar of the global web take shape – with no less friction but a more diverse audience than gathered to create the early Internet specs.

I’m at the Convergence Workshop at Harvard on the topic today, and will be at the iAnnotate workshop in San Francisco in 3 weeks. Consolidating notes on a “Hypothesis XXX” hackpad. [Btw: We dearly need a fully open hackpad equivalent with more reliable uptime than piratepad et al.! I default to HP when I have a doc that needs to sustain heavy editing and be guaranteed available during a narrow window of time at a conference… but I would much rather use a Wikimedia or similarly hosted service, with a more explicit guarantee of ongoing availability, at no cost ever.]

From a recent discussion about Web 3.0 and the far future, on the AIR-L list:

In fact, the Web is currently developing Web <30, to be rolled out
with Chrome 25, Firefox 20, Opera 15, and IE 10 later this winter.

If you are interested in cutting-edge research and convolving
observation with participation, you can take part in the design of Web
<30 yourself. It is being developed through a massively
multistakeholder open online crowd-refined platform generation
(MMOOCRPG) design.
Building on the exponential success of past
efforts, the development mailing list includes a periodic
distributed auto-immolating critique of its own work, where the future
web is continuously redefined as its own dual.

Sue Gardner, the Wikimedia Foundation’s amazing Executive Director, recently announced plans to step down later this year, and has launched a search for her successor. She is one of the most insightful and collaborative voices in the movement, and a good friend. And she has led some of our most ambitious organizational and financial shifts: our focus on individual fundraising, the transition to a community-led funds dissemination process, and a growing attention to grantmaking. It is hard to imagine the Foundation without her…!!

We have been discussing this internally among the Board for a month now; and the transition planned is gradual: the search is expected to take til the end of this year. But I am still getting used to the idea; it has been a long and wonderful road we have travelled during her tenure. We are also reaching the end of our first round of long-term planning, so this year and next will be a good time for a new ED to help shape the Foundation’s future and how we frame our work.

A rundown of outside news coverage:

SinIdentidades Tumblr.

↬ sebastian ᔥ M. Popova

Java-Logs exist. They’re just like firestarters but they smell nice and are made of coffee grounds; wrapped in paper just like regular firestarters. Coffee machines produce lots and lots of grounds that get thrown out (ideally into compost but usually not. often they just sit around, uncompacted, and grow mold.)

So: someone should design a “Coffee Presser” add-on to traditional popular coffeemakers – and standalone for dumping the dregs from your French Press – that produces mini Java Logs and wraps them so you can hold then when spit out. Perfect for those climes suitable for both lots of hot coffee and nightly fires.

Jorn Barger, Mortimer Adler, Patrick Gunkel, Vince, Misha Herscu, Popova: what do all of these people have in common?  Exploring the densely textured space of possible ideas,  the mereology of existence, learning to see implied, hidden, missing, combinatorial spaces.

Ideonomy is a dream of structuring that work; embraced by Gunkel in lists and charts and drawings, never fully realized.  Modern tools and languages bring us closer to being able to explore such spaces computationally and comprehensively, to come up with questions about idea space and experiments that can resolve their answer: not in the naively space-filling method of the Library of Babel, but in the equivalent populated entirely by meaningful and informative works.

The well-scripted life: Colbert counsels Patinkin “It’s pretty nice!”  (around 15:00 ).

…poetry should be written on the run, on the sly, during the time not accounted for…

metaresources for teachers finding materials:
Conan the Cybrarian (web 1.0 linklist)
Literacy and Learning Resources (doc list)
700 Ed+Tech events, late 2011 (doc list)
OER for German Schools (doc)

edgy:
crisis of excellence
crisis of exmil (ST6)
An unknown future and a doubtful present: on mobilizing nations

data:
foia.me – Google.org support for civic foia
Y Worlds knowledge teams – projects and systems for a new millennium?
Data Synthesis: $100 of awe from Common Crawl, via Lucky Oyster

wiki:
Strategy ideas
Governance reform
Medical translation task force

science:
Nerdfighteria! (wiki)
Waste Heat and speciation (metafilter ← Saurabh?)
Best thesis ever (PSU)
Frost flowers in the Arctic teeming with life

Carl’s speech at the Internet Archive memorial.