How far back does the “atoms vs. bits” idea go? Did anyone talk about it before Nicholas Negroponte in “Being Digital“?

Some specifications of what I’m looking for:

- It has to be actual bits, i.e., binary units of information. So, no fair tracing it back to Plato’s Cave.

- I’m not asking about Negroponte’s particular idea in “Being Digital,” which contrasted economies built on atoms with ones built on bits. I’m actually interested in the sense that there are two semi-equivalent realities, one built of atoms and one built of bits.

- I’m not looking for “Its are bits” physicists who say the universe is made of information. I’m looking for the idea that bits are different from atoms, but deserve to be on a roughly equal footing…at least to the extent that the phrase “atoms vs. bits” makes sense the way “atoms vs. weekends” does not.

Any pointers, corrections, or exasperated sighs are gratefully accepted.

[Tags: infohist bits ]

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Not that Doc needs validation by the mainstream media, but I still think it’s pretty cool that the Washington Post has snagged one of his photos off of Flickr to illustrate their article about Dean Elena Kagan being selected as Obama’s Solictor General. (Of course that’s Jonathan Zittrain behind her.)

Dean Kagan is beloved at Harvard Law. Deservedly.

[Tags: doc_searls elena_kagan harvard_law copyright copyleft flickr ]

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Habib Battah has an op-ed in Al Jazeera about the disparity between the American media coverage of the Israeli invasion and the Arab world’s. And there’s always Global Voices if you want to hear what bloggers in the region are saying.

[Tags: israel gaza palestine media news ]

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Sarah Perez at Read Write Web has a good post about a service that “understands” the meaning of of your tags (Zigtag) and another that suggests tags based on its analysis of Wikipedia (faviki). These services — I haven’t tried them — promise to making tagging yet more important by making it easier to apply tags and by letting us get more value from them.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous tags tagging folksonomy zigtag faviki sarah_perez ]

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A tweet from Jeff Jarvis:

My son says his problem with Twitter is too much Twittering about Twitter. Judging by today, he’s right. And I just added to it.

That used to be the case with blogging when it first started. Every other post (including mine) was about blogging. Blog blog blog blog.

If you want to get out ahead of the curve when the next new social writing phenomenon happens, be the one who never writes about it.

(BTW, I’m dweinberger at Twitter.)

[Tags: tic_tac_toe christmas ]

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I had a vivid dream last night. It was George Bush’s day off and for some reason that the dream didn’t care about enough to explain, I was the buddy accompanying him. We did this and that, and then visited a tourist attraction in a local mall. It was apparently based on Madurodam in the Netherlands, which is a miniature version of the country that you can walk through, with little replicas of the various landmarks. Almost immediately, George stumbled on Mount Rushmore, knocking over the Statue of Liberty, which set fire to New York, causing George to fall backwards, crushing the Grand Canyon, and so on, leaving the place a disaster. It was totally a Homer moment.

It was so obvious how the media were going to spin this that I actually felt bad for him. In the dream.

[Tags: george_bush dreams obama ]

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With only a few regrets, I voted in favor of the Massachusetts ballot initiative that decriminalized possession of less than an ounce of marijuana. That law went into effect yesterday.

I voted in favor of it for the standard reasons. And my reservations are also pretty much standard issue. But here’s my personal reservation.

It’s not because pot led to more serious drugs. I had friends for whom it was a gateway drug, although I’m not at all sure they wouldn’t have rushed through the gate, or hurdled it, or knocked it down, or routed around it, even if pot never existed. In any case, it didn’t lead to much else for me, beyond experimenting with the usual this and the scarier that.

No, my regret is that I wasted so much time. I smoked pot on a lot of my youth’s evenings because I was bored. But it’s not as if the world isn’t interesting enough. Being bored is your own fault.

For me, pot was artificial laziness. I regret the time I squandered.

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Fresh from last August (so I’m a little slow) comes the Demake competition, in which you’re asked to turn a high-power computer game into a weenie side scroller or less. Grand Theft Auto becomes Large Scale Vehicular Stealing. Portal becomes Super 3D Portal for the Atari 2600, which could not be any less 2D if it tried (well, literally). S.T.A.L.K.E.R becomes S.T.A.C.K.E.R, a version of tetris.

Quite droll.

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This systems seems really good. You cast your vote using a computer, but the computer prints out a paper document. This prevents the ambiguity that inevitably occurs when users directly fill out paper ballots, such as when a voter fills in one circle by mistake and then puts an X through it. The resulting paper ballot shows the choices the voter made and includes a bar code for optical scanning. The software is entirely open source. It uses off-the-shelf, inexpensive components.

By the way, open source paper ballots is the leading idea in the Tech Policy section of Change.org’s contest.

[Tags: egov ovc voting ]

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1. Heath Ledger for Best Actor Oscar? Not once you’ve seen Milk.

2. Trying to rank superb actors in vastly different types of roles is pretty ridiculous.

Please pick #1 or #2. They’re inconsistent, but I’m pretty sure one of them is right.

[Tags: heath_ledger sean_penn oscars milk dark_knight ]

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As 2008 amazingly still finds ways to get worse and worse right up until the ball drops, I pick up my spirits by setting aside a moment every day to think about what it would be like if we were facing the inauguration of John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Ahhhh. Doesn’t that make you feel better?

[Tags: obama ]

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Great set of user-chosen top animal videos of the year over at the Wired blog.

It makes you realize how inadequate our categories are for understanding animals. For example, is the gibbon “playing”? There’s no way we can answer that question, because if the gibbon could speak, we couldn’t understand it.

But the videos are durn cute!

[Tags: animals videos wittgenstein ]

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Ed Felten offers a brief and useful taxonomy of Net neutrality. The discussion in the comments is helpful, too. So are David Isenberg’s additional thoughts.

Before the anti-NN folks pounce on the admitted ambiguity of the term, I have two comments.

First, free speech is even harder to pin down and apply, but it’s still a principle worth supporting. (Preemptive defense: No, I’m not saying free speech and NN are equally important. I’m making a point about the logic of the argument.)

Second, as far as I’m concerned, the core of NN, and underneath all three of Ed’s flavors, is the idea that the network should be equally open to all ideas. Or, put differently, those who provide access to the Net should not be allowed to favor some bits over others. Put thirdly, no one should be allowed to decide for others what the Net is for.

None of these formulations are easy to apply. Even doing a first-in-first-out prioritization favors some bits over others. But, this is exactly the same sort of argument one has about free speech: “Oh yeah, Mr. Free Speecher. So you think spies ought to be able to blab state secrets, and there shouldn’t be laws against perjury…?” NN is the right principle. How it’s applied is a matter of justice and politics.

[Tags: net_neutrality ed_felten david_isenberg ]

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The Obama transition site has started up a second round of “Open for Questions,” in which anyone can pose a question, we get to vote on our favorites, and the transition team responds.

Here’s the first round.

I like the symbolism of this. It signals not only an interest in open government, but a trust in citizens, a willingness to experiment, and a desire to put technology to use. But, I hope this time they answer more of the questions.

[Tags: obama egov change.gov ]

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Bill Kristol is affable. He’s a good guest on The Daily Show. But he’s been a disappointing addition to the NY Times roster of columnists.

For example, his second most recent contribution is vapid. It’s not just that it rambles so much that it achieves a Zen-like topical emptiness. When he alights for a moment on an actual issue, he’d rather be counter-intuitive than coherent. Here’s how it opens:

O.K., O.K. … you don’t have to. But consider this exchange with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday”:

WALLACE: Did you really tell Senator Leahy, bleep yourself?

CHENEY: I did.

WALLACE: Any qualms, or second thoughts, or embarrassment?

CHENEY: No, I thought he merited it at the time. (Laughter.) And we’ve since, I think, patched over that wound and we’re civil to one another now.

No spin. No doubletalk. A cogent defense of his action — and one that shows a well-considered sense of justice. (”I thought he merited it.”) Indeed, if justice is seeking to give each his due, one might say that Dick Cheney aspires to being a just man. And a thoughtful one, because he knows that justice is sometimes too harsh, and should be tempered by civility.

Does that last sentence make sense given that Cheney is refusing to apologize for his lack of civility? Does Kristol really want to stand by a vice president telling a senator to go fuck himself? If I were the NY Times, I’d worry about a columnist that left readers wondering if he’s mistakenly left out a “not.”

His latest column is a series of things he likes about the planned inauguration. It’s nice to hear this sort of bipartisanship, but the column is really a series of cheap shots at liberals and Obama. And that’d be ok if the cheap shots were amusing or particularly insightful. Instead, it comes off as passive-aggressive and lazy.

It’s not enough for a columnist to define himself as out of place on the NY Times op-ed page. We need some content, some argument, something worth disagreeing with. Surely the Times can find a conservative columnist who gives a damn. [Tags: william_kristol bill_kristol ny_times nyt media ]

[Later] Call me fair and balanced, but here’s Glenn Greenwald’s appropriately scathing criticism of David Gregory’s softball questioning of the Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on “Meet the Press” this Sunday. Glenn doesn’t bother pointing out that Gregory went on to question David Axelrod mainly about Gov. Blago and Pastor Wright, and then remembered there was this little problem with the economy that was maybe worth mentioning.

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In his important 1996 book, Using Language, Herbert H. Clark opens Chapter 7 by analyzing two lines of conversation between ” a British academic” and “a prospective student”:

When Arthur says “u:h what modern poets have you been reading -” he doesn’t want Beth merely to understand what he means — that he wants to know what modern poets she has been reading. He wants her to take up his question, to answer it, to tell him what modern poets she has been reading. She could refuse even though she has understood. To mean something, you don’t have to achieve uptake, and to understand something, you don’t have to take it up. Still, Beth’s uptake is needed if she and Arthur are to achieve what Arthur has publicly set out for them to do at this point in their interview. p. 191

My first response, and probably yours, is: Well, duh But that’s the point. The fact that Clark has to explicitly state that we ask questions usually in order to get a response is evidence of just how deeply we’ve adopted the information-based paradigm that says that communication consists of the transfer of messages from one head to another. Language is a social tool used by embodied creatures to accomplish complex and emergent projects in a shared world. The transfer of messages is the least of it.

[Tags: herbert_clark language information communications conversation ]

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Jason Linkins is once again snarkalicious.

[Tags: media_jason_linkins ]

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Like every New Yorker reader, I am perpetually behind. But I’ve been greatly enjoying reading issues from before the election. Knowing how it turns out relieves all the stress.

It also deepens the joy. Thomas Mallon has a terrific article (book review, actually) in the Oct. 13 issue, about how our view of Lincoln has changed over the years. For example, when the Lincoln Memorial was first opened, in 1922, Lincoln was celebrated as the Great Unifier, not the Great Emancipator. Here’s how the article concludes:

In 1909, the Reverend L. H. Magee, the pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Springfield, Illinois, voiced his disgust at the exclusion of blacks from the town’s centennial dinner, but he imagined that by the time of the bicentennial, in 2009, racial prejudice would be “relegated to the dark days of ‘Salem witchcraft.’ ” Next year’s Lincoln commemorations in Washington will include the reopening of Ford’s Theatre, restored for performances for the second time since 1893, when its interior collapsed, killing twenty-two people. Congress will convene in a joint session on February 12th, and on May 30th the still new President will rededicate the Lincoln Memorial. The look and the emphasis of the occasion will have changed—measurably, for certain; astoundingly, perhaps—in the fourscore and seven years since 1922.

[Tags: lincoln slavery racism obama hope good_writing ]

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You win this type of quiz, invented by my friend Paul English, if you come within an order of magnitude of the right answer.

1. In Boston, the going rate for a dental crown seems to be $1,200-$1,600. That’s just for the crown, not for the labor. What is the dentist’s markup on the crown? That is, how much does the dentist pay the lab for it?

2. How much does the New York Times pay the creator of one of their daily crossword puzzles?

The answers are in the first comment. So is the prize for winning, i.e., nothing but the answer.

[Tags: quiz dentist crossword ]

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I love mornings. The hour before my family gets up is so quiet and calm. No phone calls. Just a cup of coffee and a keyboard. Ahhh.

That’s how the days before, during and after Christmas feel to me as an American Jew.

Oh, I could do without the cultural assumption that we all celebrate Christmas. I could do without the decorations in every mall and in most towns. I could do without the endless cycle of Christmas jingles. Most of all, I could do without the secret belief that Jews really do enjoy all that Christmasy stuff. The truth is that this Jew does not.

But, at least it all culminates in a couple of days of quiet and calm. Christmas is a lovely time of the year for Jews in America, not because of all the decorations and the ho-ho-ho’s, but because it takes the Christians off the streets and shuts the whole place down. While Christians focus on the sweetness of their faith and deal with passive-aggressive fruitcakes, our calendars are empty and our cellphones are mute. Beautiful.

(PS: NBC has carefully removed the perfect SNL short, Christmastime for the Jews, by Robert Smigel, from YouTube for copyright reasons, thus immensely benefiting NBC’s bottom line. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Jerks. (And if NBC has in fact posted it, I hereby preemptively apologize.) [Ten Minutes Later: See Comments 1 and 2 for the apology])

[Tags: christmas jews ]

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On the Radio Berkman podcast this week, Persephone Miel, lead author on the Media Re:Public paper series, talks about what’s missing from the new journalism landscape. Then, Patricia Aufderheide, Director of the Center for Social Media, discusses the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video. Finally, Jessica Clark, Director of the Future of Public Media Project gives her top five predictions for digital media in 2009. All in 25 minutes.

Radio Berkman will be back next year, thanks to Daniel Jones, the producer, who has been doing a fantastic job with it.

[Tags: berkman media citizen_media participatory_media we_media podcasts ]

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The national media syndicate GateHouse Media owns 125 local newspapers in Massachusetts, and runs the Wicked Local local news sites. The Boston Globe is not part of GateHouse Media. The Globe has started its own local sites, such as this one in Newton, MA. The Globe’s local sites run lots of news from the Globe, but they also aggregate local headlines from other sources, including from GateHouse. Those headlines link to the original sites, of course.

So, GateHouse now has sued the Globe’s parent for copyright and trademark infringement, because GateHouse would prefer that no one know about or care about what it writes.

GateHouse is apparently unsure of how this whole Web thang works. Plus, the company’s lawyers skipped class the day Fair Use was discussed. Bad combination. Bad for GateHouse. Bad for the Web.

By the way, the title of this post is the headline from the Newton Tab, a GateHouse publication.

PS: There’s some feisty coverage of this in Cape Cod Today. [Tags: copyright copyleft boston boston_globe gatehouse fair_use ]

Later: Dan Gillmor raises good points, unsurprisingly. He usefully complicates the issue.

Later: Berkman’s Citizen Media Law Project has written up some preliminary thoughts. These are some topnotch lawyers and legal writers, so that’s the pond in which you’ll want to do your initial dives.

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The University of Huddersfield is making publicly available the metadata about the circulation of its books — 3 million transactions — over the past thirteen years. This includes a book’s ISBN, number of times it’s been checked out, by which academic department. (It does not include information about individual borrowers.)

BTW, the library used LibraryThing’s ISBN lookup service to derive some of the ISBNs, and it includes “FRBR-ish” data, i.e., other books that may be closely related.

(Thanks to Seb Schmoller’s post for the tip.)

[Tags: libraries everything_is_miscellaneous librarything metadata ]

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Two of the hands are especially good. This is a fun video.

[Tags: guitar youtube ]

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BugLabs has named a breakout board after Eric von Hippel, open innovation guru and Berkman Fellow. Here’s an interview with Eric, in which he says, among other things: “Users are becoming the dominant innovators”:

[Tags: innovation berkman eric_von_hippel breakout_boards open_source copyright copyleft ]

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Joe Trippi is doing a chat at FireDogLake. Here’s one of his responses:

I think we are about to see the first “Connected” presidency. JFK was the first Television president — Obama will be first “connected” president — and congress is going to be the big loser in all this — because I think we are going to see a President directly connected to more Americans than any other President in history — and when 25 members of Congress are standing in the way of health care reform — they are going to find themselves standing between Barack and a hard place — between the President and millions of Americans organizing to pass his agenda. On the other hand the Obama administration is the Wright Brothers now — no one has ever done this before and there is a lot they could get wrong — being too careful and listening too much to the Washington establishment.

[Tags: politics e-democracy e-government joe_trippi obama ]

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Here’s a cute photo of the squirrels in our neighbor’s house, which is quite adorable for him except for the squirrels.

[Tags: photos squirrels cuteness rodents ]

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Here’s what my Chumby looked like last Channukah when I got it:

It was sort of fun, but priced about three times higher than its worth, at least to me. And, amazingly, the single most obvious widget — the one that might make it price competitive — doesn’t exist: Plug in a USB drive and have it show the photos that are on it. (It does show photos from your Flickr account.)

Anyway, my Chumby died yesterday, almost a year to the day I got it. I performed a Chumbectomy but was unable to resuscitate it. Here are its innards, for those of you who’ve wondered:

[Tags: chumby ]

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Did I ever mention Tic Tac Two? It’s a version of Tic Tac Toe I invented about ten years ago (which probably means 15 years ago), that has only two twists on the original. First, you have to have two counters in a square to own it. Second, once per game each player can deploy two counters in a single turn. I suppose there’s a variant in which you can deploy the two in separate boxes.

Anyway, Tic Tac Two is more fun than Tic Tac Toe, although so is counting.

(Way back when, I wrote a program to let a computer play against a human. The only interesting thing about it — and I was very proud of this — was that the computer automatically played 10,000 random games with itself to determine what the winning moves are in every situation. Purely for flash, when it was going through this data-building exercise, I had it display its moves, so that it looked like that scene from WarGames, except in this version, Global Thermonuclear War looked a lot like Tic Tac Toe.)

[Tags: games tictactoe tic_tac_toe ]

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Well, hate is too strong a word. But so is love.

Anyway, here’s a segment I did for the public radio show [Tags: kindle ebooks amazon everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Last Friday, Berkman hosted a panel discussion among some of the founders and leaders of Creative Commons: Jamie Boyle, Joi Ito, Molly S. Van Houweling, and Lawrence Lessig. The conversation was guided by Jonathan Zittrain, who is brilliant at this and quite hilarious. Here’s the video.

Don’t forget to support Creative Commons.

[Tags: creative_commons berkman copyright copyleft ]

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GlobalVoices needs your help. Need convincing? Check out GV’s bloggage about the Mumbai attack. Or, perhaps more important, check GV any day. The world speaks at GV. Worth a listen. Worth some support. [Disclosure: I'm a volunteer adviser.]

[Tags: berkman globalvoices gv global_voices blogs bridgeblogs ]

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The RIAA has announced that it’s not going to sue music downloaders, although it’s holding open the possibility of suing the most egregious offenders.

I like to think it took one look at Charlie Nesson’s case and fled with its short tail between its legs.

This is good news not only for those who have felt the full, brutal force of the RIAA’s whim-driven prosecutions, but because it helps the clear the ground for a longer, more considered redressing of the balance of rights and values.

[Tags: