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| Wednesday, April 16, 2003 |
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Proposed: A barn-raising for civilization 
| | More than the burning of the library in Alexandria? This guy is in a position to know. Long after everything else from this war is forgotten... this is the one thing that people will remember, he says. |
| | Well, I'm thinking, we're part of civilization, too, presumably — "we" being everybody in the world who goes to the trouble of making it better. |
| | So here's an idea for the U.S. and British governments, for Coalition Forces, for anybody else in a position of authority in Iraq right now — plus the rest of us who care: |
| | - Devote one TV and one radio station in Baghdad entirely to the recovery of pilfered antiquities. Staff it with concerned Iraqi citizens, and put scholars on the air, where they can talk about (and show, if photos are available) these stolen artifacts and their importance to Iraqi and world culture. Do this by re-puposing old stations if they're available, or by creating whole new ones. There's plenty of equipment available. Commercial broadcasters in the U.S. shed old gear all the time. They could easily make tax-deductible donations of studio and transmitting equipment, and would be proud to brag about it on the air too, I'm sure.
- Create an .iq (isn't that a perfect country code... .IQ!) Web site devoted entirely to aggregating and displaying photographs of Baghdad museum properties, and of lost or damaged Iraqi antiquities. Perhaps the British Museum (which has already pledged help) or British Petroleum (its Web site sponsor) could run this thing — or fund somebody else willing to run the thing. Doesn't matter as long as it gets done.
- The rest of us should start aggregating (or choose the appropriate verb) cultureblogging around the same issue.
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| | It's barn-raising time for civilization, folks. Smart Mob Rulez at their best. Hunting down bad guys and offering cash rewards might be necessary moves, but they're highly insufficient. Let's do something sustained and positive to help the Iraqi people — and the rest of civilization — get back what's been lost. |
| | [Later...] Nice responses from Lance Knobel, Marc Canter (who pushes back a bit... I think) Jonathan, Dave, Tom, Dan, Sheila, Chattering Monkey, Heli, Brain Off, Xeni, Bear Flag Republic, Coyote Gulch, Long story; short pier, Shelley (who thinks it's a bad idea), Dean (who agrees with Shelley, but for other reasons) Michael, Illruminations, Synapse Chronicles, Bloggerheads, Sleepy-Head... |
| | I'm mesmerized with the point Doc makes about .IQ being a great domain. They should start selling it soon. Who wouldn't want a .IQ URL? |
May Decade
| | Coming up on MayDay, 2003, Halley runs across a 10-year-old Time Magazine with a cover story about The Future, and wonders: Where were you? |
| | Hmm... All our kids were grown and gone, while another was three years away from being born. Mostly I was consulting tech companies on marketing and hanging out on Compuserve and other online services (each a separate phone call), writing occasional stuff for magazines. Somewhere in there I participated in an email thread about the need for a "free software" magazine. That thread ended when Phil Hughes started Linux Journal. |
Nude News
| | Tony Collen points to CNN's formerly transparent sandbox site, where they worked out future stories about the deaths of undead notables and other fun future subjects. It's empty now. It tells a very interesting story about the vetting and supression of news clues, and the difficulties organizations like CNN are having in a world where untold zillions are in position to fact-check on all kinds of stuff. Including facts that aren't facts yet. |
The Upside on Red Herring
| | ...look at what went right. Born 10 years ago, Red Herring chronicled the rise of the personal computer, the unrelenting march of Moore's Law (which calls for the doubling of computer processing power every 18 months), and the amazing adoption of the Internet. |
| | What went right? How about the total number of households with personal computers in America surging from less than 20 percent in 1990 to more than 65 percent in 2002? |
| | It scrolls down behind a costwall after that. In any case, Om's right that there as lots to celebrate. Other than losing our shirts, of course. |
Geek Positioning System
| | If you happen to have an iBook running Mac OS X and also happen to have a GPS with a serial cable, and you think to yourself, "Gee, Self, wouldn't it be nice if I could use my GPS with my iBook? .. and your self replies "Yes!", so you decide to go to Fry's, and if while you're there you see the IOGear USB PDA/Serial adapter, tell yourself not to buy it, even if it's the only USB-to-serial device they have in the store. The packaging, in this case, is not out of date or incorrect: "Supports Mac OS 8.6 to 9.x" (as well as every Windows version) |
| | I've asked myself that question, and came more or less to the same conclusion as Larcher, also with respect to the Linux (Lindows/Debian) laptop, which is also unsupported by approximately everything. |
| | See, for several years I've had this DeLorme Earthmate GPS unit with a serial connection and a USB converter (that came with it), along with mapping software that requires a CD-ROM that disappeared a couple years back and I never replaced because it only ran (and slowly at that) on Windows and Mac OS 9.x. |
| | I see that the current Earthmate is smaller and comes with a USB connector, but... will it work with Linux or OS X? Well, Street Atlas USA 2003 works only with Windows (meaning they subtracted value from the old version that also ran on OS 9). Same thing with the (terrific) TopoUSA. XMap Handheld Street Atlas works with Palm and PocketPC. I have a Clié PEG-SJ30 (nice little unit). Might be interesting to see if that works. |
| | In any case, all this non-support crap makes me even more convinced that what the world needs — from the likes of Sony and (eventually) everybody else — is a universal and ownerless OS for laptops and handhelds, so the likes of DeLorme could write something once that truly does run everywhere. Or what will become everywhere after we're through screwing around with incompatible platforms. |
Timing
And Barry only has 5 home runs
| | The Giants keep winning. This is good. |
Tails of Bill
| | Says here Bill Clinton has a problem with America's new foreign policy. If you got an interdependent world, and you cannot kill, jail or occupy all your adversaries, sooner or later you have to make a deal. |
| | Says here he's "emotionally ready to start getting blowjobs again." |
Losings
| | The British Museum, funded by a private donor, is sending a task force of conservators and curators to Iraq, where, presumably, they'll be able to do... something. |
discuss
Copyright 2008 The Doc Searls Weblog
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art historian and archaeologist 
