Category: Personal

Morons in the news

Morons in the News: Zero-Tolerance: The 'Tolerance' Stands for 'Intelligence'. If there's one thing I love as much as I hate zero-tolerance policies, it's clever use of a system… [Morons Dot Org]

Oh. What a wonderful Catch-22. A 6 year old is facing expulsion for having a plastic butter spoon in his backback. A spoon he got in the cafeteria and wanted to take home. So if they press for expulsion, the parents will sue the school for provding a dabgerous weapon to their 6 year old. Zero-tolerance is for morons. I hope the parents get a ton of money. [A Man with a Ph.D. – Richard Gayle's Weblog]

Something to brighten your day

Expanding the boundaries of my ignorance

Brockman on “The New Humanists”. Arts and Letters Daily features this essay from a forthcoming book by John Brockman that explores “New Humanism”: new ways of understanding physical systems, and new challenges to basic assumptions of who and what we are and what it means to be human:

“We live in an era in which pessimism has become the norm,” writes Arthur Herman, in The Idea of Decline in Western History. Herman, who coordinates the Western Civilization Program at the Smithsonian, argues that the decline of the West, with its view of our “sick society,” has become the dominant theme in intellectual discourse, to the point where the very idea of civilization has changed… As a counternarrative to this cultural pessimism, consider the twofold optimism of science.

First, the more science you do, the more there is to do. Scientists are constantly acquiring and processing new information. This is the reality of Moore’s Law just as there has been a doubling of computer processing power every eighteen months for the past twenty years, so too do scientists acquire information exponentially. They can’t help but be optimistic. And second, much of the new information is either good news or news that can be made good thanks to ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient and powerful tools and techniques.

Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

A worthy upbeat attitude in the midst of so much other negativity. Consistent with the Dorothy Parker observation that I use as my tag line.

I used to use a simple diagram in some of my presentations. It represented knowledge as an expanding circle. What was interesting to me is that if you looked at the interface between what you knew and what you didn’t know, the “boundary of your ignorance” grew as you learned more. The more you learned, the more things to be learned you became aware of. That’s a very energizing prospect and a humbling one at the same time. It means I will always have a list of things to learn.

Weblogs and passion

I had an opportunity to listen to Mena and Ben Trott talk about Moveable Type last night courtesy of AKMA at Seabury Western. They sparked a good discussion around the role of weblogs in creating and sustaining community (two good live blogged accounts from AKMA and Gabe Bridger by way of Mike Marusin).

At least some of the power and energy behind the weblog phenomenon has to come from passion of the creators of weblog tools. All of the products supporting weblogs are labors of love; all grew out of individual efforts to scratch personal itches–Blogger, Moveable Type, Radio.

This is why weblogs will become important to knowledge management and knowledge sharing in organizations and why the big software players haven’t been a significant factor yet.

Organizations have recognized that knowledge is an essential part of the value that they create. Knowledge management efforts on the other hand have largely been a disappointment because they have tried to force knowledge into a product metaphor; trying to force what is fundamentally a product of craft into an industrial model of reusable parts (see knowledge work as craft work).

Discussions about knowledge management in organizations always raise the issue of sharing with the argument that people will be reluctant to share out of fear that their efforts will be appropriated by others. This is rooted in a industrial product metaphor of knowledge. See knowledge work as craft, however, and the sharing issue dissolves. Craft workers exist to share the fruits of their creating. A true knowledge craft product embodies something of the soul and personality of its creator. You share it with others not so they can copy it but so that they can find inspiration in using it in their own craft.

Weblogs hold so much promise in the organizational realm precisely because they amplify this connection between craft and creator. Your record is there to be seen and to be shared.

This is also why weblogs are so confusing in the organizational realm. You have to move beyond the notion of reusable and reproducible product as the putative goal.

I had a conversation with Alan Kay a while back about Smalltalk and object-oriented programming that I now finally think I understand (conversations with Alan can be that way for those of us who are mere mortals). He was disappointed that the early commercialization efforts around Smalltalk and OO emphasized the idea of reuse. His goal had always been (and still is, take a look at Squeak and SqueakLand) to make it possible for developers to express what they were trying to do faster and more effectively. He was trying to make computers a medium for expressing certain kinds of thinking.

Weblogs accomplish something similar for knowledge workers. They lower the barriers to sharing ideas far enough that it becomes possible for nearly all of us to do so. Bring that inside organizations and you have a powerful tool for being effective as opposed to merely productive. Scary to the established order? Sure. But if value does truly depend on how well and how fast organizations can create and share new knowledge, then the winners will emerge from those who commit to making it work.

Model rockets as terrorist threat

Educational Flying Model Rockets Ruled Terrorist Threat. Model rocketry is educational, it’s cool, it’s safe, and it’s fun. It’s launched everything from science fair projects to the careers of NASA engineers and astronauts as well as that of at least one SFT writer. Too bad the already-passed and signed Homeland Security Bill is going to kill this great constructive hobby for kids and adults. On May 24, every employee of any shipping entity who could possibly touch a package of in-transit model rocket engines on their way to a kid’s mailbox or store has to be explosives-handling certified, fingerprinted and pass a criminal background check. UPS, some trucking and railroad firms have stopped shipping the motors; Fed Ex employees have indicated to some model rocket flyers they likely will follow suit in the coming weeks. “It is the heart of the problem we face. Because if manufacturers like Estes can’t get rocket motors delivered to stores, the hobby is completely dead,” according to Tim Van Milligan, president of Apogee Rockets in Colorado Springs, Colo. Jay Apt saw his first model rocket catalog at age 13 in 1962. and went on to fly four shuttle missions that included two spacewalks and a mission to the International Space Station. “If we are to keep challenging our technology-inclined young people, we need to keep the benefits of model rocketry in mind when we pursue a tendency, natural in troubled times, to restrict anything which might be abused,” Apt said. “It makes no more sense to restrict aerospace modeling than it would have to ban rental trucks after they were misused in Oklahoma and New York.” U.S. Senator Michael Enzi, R-Wyo., intends to introduce legislation as early as this week to make what’s being called a “technical correction” to the 1970 Safe Explosives Act so that the material used inside the small motors is removed from the “explosives list.” Perhaps you might like to send a copy of this SFT story to your Representative or Senator along with your thoughts? [Sci-Fi Today]

Why is it that reason and thought are such unpopular activities? It seems to be some deparate desire to “do something” that disconnects reason from action. I guess I’m showing my age, but “think before you act” still seems like better advice than “ready. fire, aim.”

In business settings, we rightly fear “analysis paralysis” and celebrate action. But the record shows that the problem is about paralysis not analysis.

North, HarvardMan, North

Come South Young BlogMan.

Dave Winer is debating which route to take on his trek East: “I talked about the northern route, below, now let’s talk about the southern route. Stop in Phoenix where I have a dinner invite, catch some baseball, then cross New Mexico and Texas, swing into New Orleans for some gumbo with Ernie the Attorney….” [Scripting News]

Yes, Dave come South.  The weather’s great, the food is outstanding (the crawfish are really great this year), and you can come stay at my house and let your new laptop soak up the Wi-Fi cloud that permeates my humble abode.

[Ernie the Attorney]

The southern route may sound appealing, but your destination is Cambridge and Harvard Yard. That means cold, gray, serious. New Orleans would only delay the inevitable.

North through Chicago, however, acclimates you to your new climate. After a stop in Chicago, Boston and Cambridge will feel springlike and appealing. You need time to thicken that Southen California blood after all those years.

Mucking about with this site

I’m mucking about with some of the code and design for this weblog. Mostly trying to move in the direction of better use of css and more leverage out of tools such as “activeRenderer” and “liveTopics” I’m sure I’ll manage to break a few things along the way. Please bear with me. I have added a Change Log to keep track of what I’ve been up to