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Friday, June 29, 2007
Art attack 
| | I took one of the first flights after all aviation in the U.S. was shut down on 9/11/2001: a short one from Santa Barbara to San Francisco. (I wrote about it here — an interesting post in light of what has happened since.) During the flight one of the flight attendants compared the ceasing of aviation to a heart attack. |
| | Now comes this amazing video of air traffic across the U.S. as well as in and out of it. This, even more than graphics of Internet activity, shows how connected we are — and how dependent, in a remarkably fragile way — on air transportation. |
Eat, rate and be merry
| | Foodio54 is a new service for finding and rating restaurants. Simple, focused, straightforward and new. Also in beta. Check 'em out. |
| | By the way, what I'd like is for my restaurant reviews to go to any number of services like Foodio54, with those services competing with each other by doing the best job, rather than by each trying to be the only place where I carry out the activities they support — requiring me to duplicate my efforts at each competing one. That would be the VRM approach, I would think. It would also apply to anything else I review, from music to movies to products of all kinds. |
Palm reading
| | While the wi-friendly iPhone goes on sale today, news comes that Palm has "decimated" (that would be reduced by 1/10, technically, but still) its wi-fi team. Not clear yet if that's because the team failed or because Palm is bailing out of including wi-fi in its phones. |
Piece meal
| | Time and CNN put Paris Hilton's interview with Larry King through the Cuisinart, and come up with a word count. These include: alone, 5; attention, 6; new, 8; jail, 16; people, 32; me, 40, really, 44; like, 48; my, 61; you, 66; I, 285. |
Grounds for optimism
| | I like #10: Stories never end. Though I think the better way to put it might be Stories live longer and die a natural death. |
The Vonnegut Vector
| | What's happening here isn¹t about amateurs and professionals. George Washington was an amateur politician. Charles Darwin was an amateur scientist. Wallace Stevens was an amateur poet. Talent cannot be classified; it¹s an individual trait. What's happening here isn¹t even really about expertise or its absence. The decisive factor is not how we produce intellectual works but how we consume them. When Gorman says we must cherish "the individual scholar, author, and creator of knowledge," I can wholeheartedly agree (as most people would) and still believe that he's missing the point. The millions of people who consult Wikipedia every day are not pursuing any kind of anti-expert or anti-scholar agenda. Their interest is practical, not ideological. They go to Wikipedia because it's free and convenient. They know its quality and reliability are imperfect, but that's a tradeoff they¹re willing to make as they hurriedly fill their market baskets with information. It's our mode of consumption that is going to shape our intellectual lives and even, in time, our intellects. And that mode is shifting, rapidly and inexorably, from page to web. |
| | George Dyson, in his book Darwin Among the Machines, quotes the British biologist J. B. S. Haldane: "Evolution will take its course. And that course has generally been downward. The majority of species have degenerated and become extinct, or, what is perhaps worse, gradually lost many of their functions. The ancestors of oysters and barnacles had heads. Snakes have lost their limbs and ostriches and penguins their power of flight. Man may just as easily lose his intelligence." The automation of physical labor did not make our muscles bigger. Are we to assume that the automation of mental labor will make our brains smarter? |
| | When Sergey Brin said that "the perfect search engine would be like the mind of God," he was neither hyperventilating nor blaspheming. He was giving us a peek at the future. We get the God we deserve. |
| | Interesting to find that the vector of Nick's pessimism points to where Kurt Vonnegut has already been, with the novel Galapagos. Told one million years in the future by the ghost of Kilgore Trout, it's the story of how unhappy land-dwelling creatures with big brains become happy sea-dwelling creatures with little brains and flippers. Good book, as I recall. |
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