|
Saturday, January 14, 2006
I'm already a Cherryholmes fan 
| | The best thing I've heard so far this year on the radio is the Weekend Edition story of Cherryholmes, the eponymous bluegrass band that began as a homeschooled family in Los Angeles. Not only are they damn good, they're highly original and lovely to listen to. If you can get the NPR "listen" link to work, it will be worth your while. (I can't, but I've already heard it.) |
Uncle, maybe?
| | Dave: I cringe when people call the leader of a community a father. Or worse, grandfather. |
The visible hand
| | Lessig: Broadband is infrastructure — like highways, if not railroads. If you rely upon "markets" alone to provide infrastructure, you'll get less of it, and at a higher price. (See, e.g., the United States, today.) |
Blame St. Andrew
| | Here's a pile of pictures I took on my last two trips from OAK to LAX en route to SBA: from Oakland to Los Angeles to Santa Barbara. I didn't mean to moosh then all together, but I'm too sick (yes, still) and busy (work carries on) to fix it. |
| | Because these flights trace the San Andreas Fault, many of the pictures are accompanied by digressions on geology, which is a fascinating subject for me. California is a work in geological progress. If you could stand in the foothills of the Southern Applalachians or the Ozarks, look up at the mountains, turn the clock back three million years and the scene wouldn't be much different. If you could do the same in California, all of it wouldn't be there. You could say the same if you turned the clock back just half a million years. |
| | There's a quarry in the Santa Cruz Mountains that you can see lighting the sky when you drive up 280 from San Jose. It's enormous. Looking down into it, you can see much of the Franciscan Formation: the portfolio of sea-floor rocks that comprise most of the Bay Area. Manufactured by a "spreading center" between two plates, like the ones that now produce Iceland, the mid-atlantic ridge and the Gulf of California, these rocks, called ophiolites, consist of peridotite (mantle rock), serpentine (mantle rock intruded by sea water — also the California state rock), diabase (including basalt "pillows"), and a coating of limestone or chert, formed from lithified marine animal remains. Here and there you also see the remains of "black smokers" grown around steam vents on the sea floor. It was finding some of these in our back yard in Woodside that got me started studying geology. From this elevated vantage, it looks like the top layers of the quarry are cherty (reddish, like Candlestick Hill, by the ball park in San Francisco) while the deeper layers are probably derived from the igneous rocks form the ophiolitic suite. All of these, by the way, were scraped off the Farallon Plate, which was gradually shoved (subducted) under the southwestern North American plate (while the Kula plate did the same under what's now Canada). Much of the Bay Area in those times (which lasted perhaps fifty million years and ended just a couple dozen million years ago) was a trench: a deep valley at the bottom of an abyssal sea. The rest of the plate melted beneath North America, pushed up the rockies and came up as a series of plutons forming batholiths: solid subterranean igneous rocks ‹ the breed of granite called granodiorite. The largest of these was lifted and exposed in just the last couple million years. We call it the Sierras. |
| | So, in the Bay Area, we live and work on land that once filled a trench and failed to become the Sierras, among other things. To look down from fifteen thousand feet on this quarry, and then out at the Sierras on the horizon, is to begin getting what geologists call "the picture": a four-dimensional portfolio of former scenes in a world where, at our longest, we only live for a geological moment. |
| | By the way, in Rising From the Plains, my favorite among the books that comprise the Annals anthology, McPhee writes, Plate-techtonic theorists pondering the Rockies have been more than a little inconvenienced by the great distances that separate the mountains from the nearest plate boundary. When I first read that, I thought, What if the plate wasn't subducted down into the mantle, but rather shoved under most of western North America like piece of plywood under a rug? I didn't give the matter much more thought until I read this a few minutes ago: |
| | In a recent paper published in Nature geologists from Princeton University and the University of Texas have used seismic tomography to assess the characteristics of the mantle up to 1500 km deep beneath North America in order to evaluate the history of the Farallon and Kula Plates... |
| | It appears likely that ... American Rockies are characterized by significant continental uplift in response to the shallow subduction of the Farallon Plate. |
| | I'm no geologist, but I still feel validated by that. |
Supply and command
| | DRM is immoral because it requires delegating your human moral responsibility for whether or not to copy a piece of information to a machine that is not capable of making that judgment. |
| | DRM uses mechanically enforced rules to micromanage the copying of information. Some uses of information that are morally permitted, or even required, are not expressible as mechanically enforced rules. |
| | A non-evil DRM system requires the construction of an artificial intelligence that passes a Turing Test on a moral level. |
| | Note that Don's talking about how DRM is used today by producers to limit what consumers can do with "content". This is why I believe that when individuals have some control about the sharing of data about themselves, in the form of a user-centric identity system, it would be a mistake to call control "DRM". |
New worlds
| | Tim Oren likes Google Earth for the Mac. So do I. Google Earth gets my vote for the Best Program Ever. Now if they can just get it going on a Linux box, the achievement would be complete. I'm not holding my breath. |
| | We had actually looked at Keyhole, the company that originated this technology, prior to the Google acquisition. The discussion never went far, as they were visibly struggling with the go-to-market issues associated with using the technology as a point solution. As an element of an information organization and management platform, however, it's come into its own. A case of real synergy in an acquisition, Google is to be commended for both insight and execution. (Now why haven't they done so well with Blogger, one wonders...) |
Rock end roll
| | So I decided to look up Salem Communications and see what they are about (since they starred in my dreams last night — see below). Interesting... they seem to own a pile of former landmark Top 40 stations: WMCA/570 and WWDJ/970 in New York, WFIL/560 and WIBG/990 (now WNTP) in Philadelphia, WKAT/1360 in MIami, KCBQ/1170 in San Diego, WIND/560 in Chicago, WITH/1230 in Baltimore. Not sure what that means, but there it is. |
A Tylenol testimonial
| | I've been sick. My head began getting stuffy on my plane flights from Oakland to Santa Barbara the day before yesterday. Then yesterday a fever came. By evening it was a just under 103 degrees and I had become useless and miserable (the former bothering me more than the latter). The fever might have been worse, since my normal body temperature is around 98 degrees. |
| | So I called my doctor's weekend on-call number (why do these things always come on weekends?) and eventually got a call back from a doctor I didn't know. She recommended extra-strength Tylenol, which we were lucky to have laying around the house. (It's probably about 10 years old, but... whatever.) |
| | I'd always believed Tylenol was aspirin for wussies. But I had already taken some aspirin and nothing happened. With the Tylenol, I began feeling better within an hour — good enough to sleep, which I had been unable to do before that. (My head hurt too much, my nose was too stuffy, and I felt digestive problems coming on.) |
| | I'm sure I was still fevered, since my sleep was full of long strange dreams (mostly, for reasons I don't know, about Hugh Hewitt and Salem Communications). |
| | I also got a case of shaky chills when I got up in the middle of the night, but at least I was able to go to sleep again. Then, at about 5am, I began feeling fevered again (by now I had lost the thermometer, so I couldn't take my termperature), took more Tylenol, and began to feel better again. |
| | It's 5:50 now. I'm not feeling good yet (now I have hot sweats, and my vision is still blurry), but I'm doing okay, considering. |
| | Anyway, it's clear to me that Tylenol made a difference. And I can't think of anything else to write about. |
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
