Now, I'm not a Radio user but this theme for Radio that Cristian has just released makes me wish for a moment that I was just to try it. Looks really cool. I probably wouldn't use it directly, but there are many elements in it that I find intriguing. Ahh if only I had some time to do a full set of CSS options for d2r…
[d2r]
I've been thinking of shifting to a new theme. Certainly, Cristian's is well worth looking at.
One of my favorite observations, which I first heard from Alan Kay, was that “point of view is worth 80 IQ points.” Now, Alan is a very clever fellow, and it’s only just occurred to me now, but Alan never specifies a sign for those IQ points. It’s just as likely that a wrong frame of reference acts as an 80 point penalty as that a right frame provides an 80 point bonus.
This places Alan firmly in the Six Sigma camp long before the movement existed (Alan always has been a leading edge kind of guy).
I've been hosting comments here for the past few months, largely at the urging and encouragement of Denham Gray. While I don't get tons of comments, the ones that I do get are generally very high quality.
As you might suspect, given my enthusiastic support for RSS as a tool to make my life as a knowledge worker easier, there is an RSS feed for my comments. I host it at a “Manila” site, provided by the great folks at Weblogger, which is a site I'm holding for a future development project. Anyway, please feel free to subscribe to that comments feed in addition to my regular RSS feed.
One of the fundamental pleasures of blogging and of having an eclectic subscriptions list is that someone out there is going to point you toward something you would never find on your own that you enjoy immensely. The following comes from Richard Gayle’s weblog and fits that aspect of blogging perfectly.
My mother sent me a link to some interesting essays by author Jane Haddam. One has a great title Why I Don’t Vote Republican which is actually a more mild and well thought-out essay than the title would suggest. Be sure and check out the sidebars: The God Thing, The Money Thing and The Stupid Thing. Her other recent essay, Jane’s Rules of the Road, offers some very good points about online discussions. I enjoyed reading all of them. [A Man with a Ph.D. – Richard Gayle’s Weblog]
We live in a world that denigrates thinking. With blogs you can surround yourself with those who revel in it. It’s a gift economy where the gifts are thoughts, ideas, and perspectives that can widen your horizons if you’re willing to accept the gifts as they appear on the threshold of your aggregator.
| One of the reasons posting has been light this week is that I’ve been catching up from last weekend’s adventure. My younger son and I spent the weekend at Space Camp in Huntsville, AL. As you can see, we managed to enjoy ourselves. I’ll leave it to you to imagine a similar picture with Dad in it. |  |
The last few days in my aggregator have been discouraging. Today’s nonsense was this from Gizmodo:
Airlines on the look out for gadgets. In light of the recent discovery a whole panoply of gadgets in al Qaeda hideouts that had been converted into weapons or bombs (like camera flashes that turned into stun guns), the Department of Homeland Security is issuing a warning to airports to be pay extra close attention to passengers with computer equipment and consumer electronics. So maybe bringing two laptops, a digital camera, a Pocket PC, and a WiFi detector with us on our current trip to California wasn’t such a good idea after all. [Gizmodo]
Boing Boing is full of similar distressing items ranging from:
TSA adds “sarcasm” to list of aviation risks
A kid who put a note telling TSA snoops to stay out of his luggage was busted on trumped-up “bomb-threat” charges for penning the following and putting it in his bag:
”[Expletive] you. Stay the [expletive] out of my bag you [expletive] sucker. Have you found a [expletive] bomb yet? No, just clothes. Am I right? Yea, so [expletive] you.”
Boy, good thing the eagle-eyed, sticky-fingered underwear fetishists on search-detail were on their toes, otherwise, this kid might have been able to board an airplane with a deadly sarcastic note in his checked luggage.
to John Gilmore’s recent experiences as a “suspected terrorist.”
As I read these and other tidbits offered up through my aggregator and through news channels, I fear we are a civilization that has abandoned the capacity for rational thought.
Fortunately, my aggregator also brings me gems such as Seb’s recent post on the late Edsger Dijkstra’s efforts at what I’ve described before as thinking in public (plus parts 2, 3, and 4). The whole post is well worth the effort, but let me focus on the last section of it.
The end of the article offers a great quote from Dijkstra on the struggle to accurately observe and steer one’s own thinking:
“The need to get some sort of verbal grip on your own pondering will by sheer necessity present your ponderings as something in which, as time progresses, patterns will become distinguishable. Once you have established a language in which to do your own pondering, in which to plan and to supervise your reasoning, you have presented a tool that your students could use as well, for the planning and supervision of their reasoning.”
I completely agree with Chalmers who writes about that quote:
Geek that I am, I find this passage incredibly touching. It’s the combination of Dijkstra’s searing integrity and his humility and willingness to make a complete ass of himself, by actually standing up and pondering aloud in front of his students, for their sake, that gets me every time. I wonder if the success of the scientific method does not depend on exactly this combination of integrity and humility? Dijkstra doesn’t just advocate it. He models it.
Here, for me, is the secret promise of blogs. They lower the barriers and make the practice of writing widely accessible. Which increases the chances we will begin to start thinking again.
Writing is the fundamental tool of reasoned argument and what we need as individuals, organizations, and civilization is as much reasoned argument as we can get. In the blogosphere you get to watch good writers at work as they develop ideas. Thanks to aggregators those ideas appear in a form that makes them natural raw material to kindle your own thinking. The combination of blog technical features (public distribution, short posts, chronological ordering, permalinks) with social practices (personal identification, generous linking, blogrolls) highlight the development of ideas as a social phenomenon over time.
Here’s a Gedanken experiment. How would activities at the TSA change if they published a daily weblog with real stories of the best and worst of what they had encountered that day? Not likely to happen, but worth thinking about.
Today’s NY Times story on back channels at conferences has provoked lots of interesting commentary around the web today. One tidbit to pass along. The story includes the archetypal conference blogging story of the impact of Doc Searls and Dan Gillmor sharing a link from Both “forwarded by a reader in Florida.” If you want the story behind the story, go check out Buzz Bruggeman’s blog buzzmodo. Buzz was that “reader in Florida” and he describes his near 15 minutes of fame.
Project Management and Horses.
Spotted this gem on Anders site:
The tribal wisdoms of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that ‘when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount’. However, in many companies as well as in the UN and NGO community a range of far more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:
1. Changing riders
2. Appointing a committee to study the horse …
It just gets better from there.
It does.
My computing life centers around my laptop computer. And I usually grumble when I have to fall back to dial-up connectivity. That was until Monday when we got to our summer place to discover that no dialtone is significantly more difficult to live with than slow dial-up.
Just when I had finally gotten the backlog of items in my news aggregator down to zero, I end up with three days of no connectivity whatsoever. At least everything was there for me to scan through (all 800 some odd items). I’ve got the backlog down to about sixty items that I want to spend some time thinking about and reacting to. something to keep me occupied over the weekend.
A problem when using empty titles has been fixed in the NewsGator posting plug-in for Radio Userland. The updated version is available for download at http://www.newsgator.com/plugins.
[NewsGator News and Updates]