Buzz continues to keep us up to date on the view from the street in Florida. As Ernie says, Buzz is a great storyteller. I wish it took something less than a hurricane to get him posting regularly.
Charley…the second morning after…. Sunday morning, hot humid, but life seems to be creeping back to normal. Rumors that friends have power float by. Starbuck’s is jammed, bagel shops sold out, but grocery stores seem to be humming, particularly the take out food sections…. [buzzmodo]
A review by David Gelernter of The Invisible Century which examines how Einstein and Freud went about thinking. Definitely something I intend to check out.
Einstein and Freud Go to a Bar, and Freud Says . . .. Richard Panek argues that Einstein and Freud revolutionized intellectual history by running thought experiments, not interpreting evidence. By By DAVID GELERNTER. [The New York Times > Science]
Courtesy of David Weinberger.
Optical illusion. This one’s good. Click on the thumbnail below to see the fullsize, operational version (232K)….
I don’t get a whole lot of comments here, but when I do get them they are generally well worth sharing. I thought this one was worth elevating to the level of its own post.
Comment on post 4343 on 8/10/04 by mrG. Woody had more than a sense of humour, he actually lived what he preached, and as yet another proof, here’s a story I first heard from Utah Phillips and later had it confirmed from someone who had toured with and heard it from Steve Goodman: The story goes Woody and Huddie (Leadbelly) walked into a NYC music publisher’s office to sell a new song they’d written. The publisher heard their song and knew it would be a hit, so he started fumbling through his desk to find a standard contract. Woody and Huddie said, “No need for all that. Gentleman’s deal: You pay us $50 cash, we shake on it, the song is yours.” You can imagine. The NYC bigshot music publisher’s eyes lit up with dollar signs. He peeled $50 out of his own wallet, gave it to those yokels and they gave him the sheet music, and they shook hands and parted. The NYC bigshot music publisher was ecstatic: He’d just bought a sure-fire chart-topping double-platinum hit for $50. Woody and Huddie were pretty happy too: That was the fifth NYC bigshot publishing company they’d sold it to that morning … By the time the lawyers were through with it, nobody owned the song, it became public domain, free for all, part of the artistic commons to be freely sung and resung by anyone with a mind to sing it. the song was “Goodnight Irene”.
I would happily contribute to bribing this fellow to do more reviews of any movies where Hollywood butchers anything to do with science or logical thought, which ought to cover most films.
The day After Tomorrow – Best Review. Here is the review written by a paleontologist who bet the world that he would not see the film unless he was bribed $100 Another Gem by Jason… [Robert Paterson’s Weblog]
We need more reviews like this. A grassroots-derived review system. [A Man with a Ph.D. – Richard Gayle’s Weblog]
Aren’t you just a little bit curious about what is hiding on the back of those credit cards in your wallet? I see some soldering iron time in my future.
Stripe Snoop is a suite of research tools that captures, modifies, validates, generates, analyzes, and shares data from magstripe cards. The data is captured through different hardware interfaces (or stdin), the contents decoded into the correct character set, and then a CDDB-like database attempts to figure out what the contents mean.
Originally a proof of concept for an interfacing project, and then a spin off from a research project, Stripe Snoop has matured in the definitive software for accessing and understanding magstripes.
Just the ticket to refocus on a warm afternoon in Boston. Go check it out.
Friday Fun: A One-Minute Vacation — In case you can’t manage 2 1/2 weeks, the quiet american: one-minute vacation might help…
Surely you can spare a minute to clean your ears? Take a one-minute vacation from the life you are living. One-minute vacations are unedited recordings of somewhere, somewhen. Sixty seconds of something else. Sixty seconds to be someone else.
Stick your earbuds into the audio out on your internet reading machine and try out this mp3…
may 24, 2004 – 800 KB — The recording was made in the back garden of my house in Manchester, UK, on the first of June, 2003, at around 9:30 p.m., when it was still light. This is one of those rare, fortuitous moments which will probably never happen again, at least to me. I had just switched on the MD and gone out of the back door to record the birdsong, when just at that very moment it started to rain. So I stood underneath our oaktree and kept recording. You can hear, amongst other things, blackbird, swifts, starlings, blue tits, and of course the rain on the leaves, gradually getting heavier. The equipment used: a Sony MD Walkman MZ-R700 and a Sony ECM-MS907 stereo mic. You must believe in spring indeed.
Chill out in these dog days of summer. [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance]
Somedays the thing I worry about most is the total loss of humor that seems to infect lawyers and accountants, particularly those in the vicinity of intellectual property. In a world this complex, humor and perspective are more necessary than ever. Ultimately, this is why I expect the hacker mentality and ethic to prevail.
JibJab Threatened Over Use Of Woody Guthrie Song. For the last few weeks, the JibJab site and their amusing political parody of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” has been getting passed around the net. It’s well done, and deserves much of the praise it’s been getting. However, it appears the folks who own the rights to Woody Guthrie’s music are anything but pleased, and are demanding that JibJab stop distributing the flash movie. Their biggest complaint seems to be that “This puts a completely different spin on the song,” which will “damage” the song. Anyone who can’t see how utterly ridiculous this is has no job watching over Woody Guthrie’s music. Guthrie, after all, is the same singer who once put the following copyright notice on his work: “This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.” Apparently, no one told the folks at the humorless Richmond Organization. [Techdirt]
More insight from Weinberger. A while back one of my former Diamond colleagues, Lynne Whitehorn-Umphres made the observation that over the last twenty years, the rato of metadata to data has gone from 1 in 100 to 100 to 1. I didn’t really appreciate where she was going with that point, but Weinberger helps me understand.
Database design was a problem of getting the answer right the first time and ahead of use. It was driven by the cost and complexity of storage and of development. That strategy worked adequately for transaction systems, but fails for management information and knowledge work needs. What Weinberger makes clear is that the solution is twofold. One is to use metadata profligately. But the other, and more interesting, part is to not try to get the right answer once and for all or in advance. Rather, it is to postpone the answer until some particular user has a particular question they need to answer.
I used to think that the request for “flexible” information systems reflected laziness on the part of users. I was young and na ve. Weinberger points out what that request is actually seeking, why, and how to go about addressing it.
The Three Orders of Organization.
David Weinberger on the different orders of classification: “If you recall, we were all supposed to be lifeless at the bottom of an ocean of information by now. Why have we survived the information tsunami so confidently predicted in the late ’80s and early ’90s? Those predictions assumed that the principles of organization wouldn’t evolve. But they have. Rapidly and profoundly.”
He goes to explain by his three orders of organization:
- First Order: You arrange physical objects: You shelve books, you file papers, you put away your silverware.
- Second Order: You arrange separate, smaller objects that contain metadata about the first order objects: You create a card catalog. You make entries in a ledger. You index a book. You now have a second organizational scheme (e.g., the books are shelved by subject but the cards are arranged alphabetically), and it’s physically easier to navigate.
- Third Order: You create electronic metadata so you can organize it in ways that simply weren’t feasible before.
He gives emphasis on this third order, which is like a faceted classification scheme, as it gives more power to the users: “Keepers of the first two orders carefully build organizational schemes and taxonomies. Practitioners of the third carefully create metadata so that users can create their own schemes and taxonomies.”
I’ve been experimenting with making both of these tools part of my default environment. This is for when I need it.
Firefox problem with FeedDemon? Here’s the fix..
If like me you’re using Firefox as your default browser, you may have run into a problem recently when using it with FeedDemon. Several FeedDemon users (and users of other tools that rely on Firefox) have reported that every time they try to use Firefox as an external browser, they get a message that Windows cannot find the URL.
Luckily, a FeedDemon customer posted the solution in the FeedDemon support forum:
- Open Explorer
- Select Tools and then Folder Options
- Select the File Types tab
- Select Extension: (NONE), File Type: HyperText Transfer Protocol
- Click Advanced toward the bottom of the window
- In the Edit File Type window, select open and click Edit
- Clear the DDE message box (which should contain “%1”)
- Click OK, Click OK
- Repeat for File Type: HyperText Transfer Protocol with Privacy
By Nick Bradbury. [Nick Bradbury]
