This arrived today:

Hello Sir, i got your email address from your website. I am translating an English short story into Chinese, and have to ask a English native two questions in understanding the story. Can you do me a favor?

It is about a woman relied on her sense of humor to get her through mastectomy. The context is that the heroine has large breasts and later had one removed. I have two questions: 1. ?Two years after the first mastectomy, I took the preventative measure of having my other breast, followed by breast reconstruction surgery.? —- Does this mean that she has her other breast removed? I think yes.

2. The context is after having only one breast, she bought a prosthesis and she describes how funny her mastectomy bra looks. ? To achieve the most realistic effect, the prosthesis is tucked into a special mastectomy bra. Huge, with wide, ugly straps, meters of hooks and eyes and pockets to stop one?s prosthesis causing a faux pas at parties by falling on the floor, they are hardly built to flatter the ego-or the body. ? Although the bra and its cargo looked ugly without my clothes, once I put on my jumper I looked fantastic. And it certainly beat the pants off the aprons with big breasts that Rob and I had laughed about buying instead. ? —— I can not understand the last sentence? I don?t know what kind of thing she is talking about.

Thank you very much for your help and I look forward to your reply.

Adele

What’s the scam? Or am I just too jaded by the 550 spams I’m now getting every day?

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Like many of us, I’ve been waiting for the day when we stop capitalizing the Internet, a sign that it’s been absorbed enough to be taken for granted. But there’s a change I want to suggest first:

Suppose we were to start calling it “our Internet” instead of “the Internet.”

It feels sort of good to me.

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My friend Paul English is back from 10 days in Cuba as an inquisitive tourist. He reports:

I came away from my trip very anti-Castro. I did not expect the degree of this. When I planned the trip, I knew about the good things in Cuba today (music, health, education, lack of crime etc) but had been perhaps naive about the level of bad things to discover. This was jarring to experience in person.

For those of us who consider Castro to be villified in the US — the bad exaggerated and the good ignored — this is an uncomfortable piece to read. But, hell, that’s why we have an Internet, isn’t it?

Lots of photos, too.

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A friend of mine is doing some work for TV Allowance, a device you plug your TV or PC into that requires a PIN before it will turn the appliance on. Then it turns off the appliance after little Johnny or Debbie has used up his/her allotted hours.

I’m not going to buy one since in our family we still prefer the traditional method of half-expressed shame: it leaves no marks but it lasts forever. But I can imagine families that would want to use a device like TV Allowance.

So here’s my point. When it comes to controlling access to the Internet, TV Allowance is an “edge” device: if you want it, you can buy it and use it, and if you don’t, then you won’t. The opposite approach would be to build a monitoring system (logins, account monitoring) into the Internet itself. And that’s the approach — the wrong approach — being taken by the Big Content industry and their governmental lackeys when it comes to controlling not how long we’re online but what we’re able to access and use.

I mention this just in case you were looking for another “World of Ends“-ish analogy…

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After two friends asked me to join Friendster, I finally gave in. It’s a well-designed site that enables friends to explore one another’s social circles and make new friends. Yet I resent it and other sites like it. I think now I know why: I don’t like it when a site assumes that what’s implicit can be made explicit without loss. Friendster asks me to do so twice over.

First, to jump into Friendster, I have to make explicit a social network that at its heart and at its best is implicit. There’s an online social network lying unearthed in my inbox and outbox. Why do I have to reassemble it, person by person, for Friendster? And if Friendster doesn’t work out, do I do it again for the next attempt? That would be a pain in the ass, but because it involves persuading my friends to sign up, it’s asking others to get pains in their asses.

Then Friendster asks me to describe myself. Gender, age, occupation all are no problem. But then there are my interests, my favorite music, favorite TV shows and “about me.” I don’t actually have an internal list of favorite music so I can’t simply make explicit what was implicit all along. I’d have to fabricate a list and do so pretty much without context. Bach? Ellington? Beck? Two measures of a Keith Jarrett improvisation that took me totally by surprise? The time I cried when listening to kd lang even though she never moved me again? The song I whistle (“Octopus’ Garden”) in the shower even though I don’t like it?

“Making explicit” rarely means simply unearthing what’s lying there unearthed. It means creating something new. That’s why the best service technicians aren’t necessarily the best teachers: there’s no such thing as humans doing a “data dump.”

I know this sounds like a rather abstract reason for not liking a well-designed site such as Friendster. But the abstraction is from a very concrete experience: facing a Web page that wants me to list my favorite friends, my favorite books, my favorite music. I can’t because I don’t really have an internal set of bookmarks I can simply externalize. And I wouldn’t if I could.

I am well aware that in another blog entry today I refered to “Art and Illusion” as one of my favorite books. But that doesn’t imply I have a list of favorites. In fact, when confronted with Friendster’s demand that I list favorites, “Art and Illusion” didn’t occur to me.

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Gary muses on the nature of these online friendships we’re forming. I like his contrast between “knowing someone” and “knowing of someone.” As Gary says, the Net certainly adds many shades of gray between those already off-white hues.

And, I too struggle with what to call people I’ve never met physically to whom I feel attached emotionally. Over the years, I’ve gotten comfortable referring to some of my equaintances (yes, it’s a yech-y term, so come up with something better) simply as “friends” because I’ve known them longer and more deeply than some RW people I call friends. And yet there are still differences: my interaction with my e-friends tend to be topic-based, more intentional than the rather random RW meetings, intermittent, and, I suspect longer-term because they are not subject to the vagaries of the RW.

BTW, I’m flattered that Gary uses me as his example. This came about because he and I have been talking a bit about Friendster, an artificial friendship network that seems to be catching on. I’ll blog about it later today. I love you, too, Gary.

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I’ll be on the noontime syndicated radio program “Here and Now” today, talking about Everquest and economics. My segment will probably air at about 12:20pm EDT. This marks the return of my biweekly segment, which in turn means that the War Is Over, at least until Operation Syrian Fealty begins.

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An article by Carey Goldberg in the Boston Globe today discusses research on seeing:

”It used to be thought that perception was about us creating a copy of our environment inside our heads,” something like a recording videocamera, said Ron Rensink, a noted vision researcher at the University of British Columbia.

But now, he said, scientists increasingly realize that perception works more like a Web browser: People can take in and store only a tiny portion of the scene around them – just as only a bit of the Web fits onto one computer screen – but they can gain access to an enormous array of information by choosing to focus on any piece of it.

Ignoring the rather random use of a Web browser as an analogy, this further confirms what we already knew: as my dissertation advisor, Graeme Nicholson, says, seeing is reading, i.e., it’s an interpretive act. This is the point of Gombrich’s Art and Illusion as well, one of my all-time favorite books.

The Globe article (the link to which will rot in a few days) points to Rensink’s Web site where you can take some of the “change perception” tests yourself. Unfortunately, the link was broken as of 8:30am EDT this morning. But in searching for a replacement, I found a couple of excellent places. At AmoebaWeb there are tons of links to psychology articles and gadgets, including a link to some Flash animations by Mark Newbold that are kinda optical illusions. Not a replacement for Rensink’s page, but a very nice distraction. And isn’t that what the Web is all about?

John Rakestraw has the right address for Rensink’s site. Thanks!

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I’m sure this is an ancient idea in SF circles, but how far we from having smart sunglasses that not only dynamically adjust to the light conditions but that also do cool and maybe even useful things like adjusting contrast, enhancing edges, dimming background objects, and making the entire world look like a Peter Max painting?

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That’s the headline in today’s Boston Globe and it’s big news, but not just because it’s a sign of the importance of wireless networking. No, it’s big news because the Globe doesn’t spell it “Wi-Fi.” Once the mainstream press start spelling it without capitals we’ll know that wifi has truly arrived.

(Note: The link to the article in the Globe will break in a few days.

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