Juan Enriquez gives a long historical perspective on human intelligence, reminding us of the fragility of our (and every) historical position. He says that the difference between us and chimps is primarily that we can learn from one another without having to be physically present. We are about to make a leap similar to that occurred with advent of literacy because of our understanding of genetic information. Biological inventions, he says, are now the most numerous type of patents.

His point: If you give up on the pursuit of science and technology, your culture will be eclipsed. E.g., Japan gave up guns because they disrupted the samurai code that unified the island; that worked fine until Perry showed up with three gun ships. (Juan references Giving up the Gun, a wonderful book.)

What bothers me: This orange, he says, is a book about where it’s been for the past billion years. “It’s a diskette.” If you drop it on the soil, it runs a program: “TACCATAGG: Make a root.” Well put. But why is it that, while recognizing the power of the info view of life, I struggle against its implicit reductionism…even though it’s a reductionism of great (and paradoxical?) richness?

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I’m at PopTech for the third or fourth year. It’s an eclectic mix of people and topics in a tiny, perfect Maine coastal town. (It’s a tourist town and is thus a tad too perfect.) The speakers are almost all excellent and it’s a great bunch o’ folks who attend.

PopTech is, arguably, the opposite of FOO Camp, the O’Reilly sleep-over I was at last week. PopTech has all of us sitting in a beautiful opera theatre listening to speakers on a stage. FOO was more of a roll-out-of-the-bed experience, except that it was a sleeping bag, not a bed. Both are exceptional.

Ernie “The Attorney” Severson is here and blogging…

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I’ve just posted a new issue of my newsletter, Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization.

It’s free and it wouldn’t kill you to subscribe, you know.

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Live bloggery from the DigitalID World conference. Denise is doing her usual superb job.

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RageBoy is broke, as in shut-down-the-phone, sell-your-laptop, no-more-meds broke. It’s no joke.

If you want to help, buy some RB stuff (thanks to Gary Turner.) RB gets about 75% of the cost of the items you guy. So far, items available include:

2004 Calendar

Men’s T-Shirt

Women’s T-Shirt

The Classic RageBoy Commemorative Thong

Or, if you prefer to donate more directly, Euan has set up a PayPal account via a link on his homepage.

These are short-term fixes. Long term, has it escaped the world’s notice that not only is RB a fabulous writer of manic screeds, he is also a superb Web designer who can help give voice to what’s interesting about your company?

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Jock Gill at Greater Democracy raises that pesky problem: Once our e-campaigning has won the e-lection, how can we use the connectedness of the Net to e-govern ourselves e-better?

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Huh Corporation is somewhat funny. (Thanks to Peter Kaminski for the link.)

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While I certainly spend enough time playing on-line games, including team-based ones such as Battlefield 1942 and Unreal Tournament 2003’s version of RollerBall, I find massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as EverQuest massively boring. If the game companies want to woo me and my two friends (ok, my one friend, and even that’s being optimistic), they’ll have to do something different: Build an MMORPG that comes to an end when one side wins.

Imagine, if you will, an epic battle being fought by tribes or nations. Imagine that eventually — a few months, maybe a year — one of the sides will win. Imagine, perhaps, that the sides represent actual human factions: a USA vs. France death match set in a science fiction world with maces, phasers and rail guns as weapons and races such as American Blue Oxen and French Nouvelle Cuisine Artistes. Imagine the increasing excitement as the tide starts to shift.

Oh, there are details to work out. Are you assigned to a side by the game in order to keep them relatively balanced? Are you allowed to switch sides? Can you be a spy? When you die, how dead are you? But those are mere gameplay details, questions of balance, i.e., the really hard stuff. Get it right and we just might have ourselves a virtual Olympics.

Don’t forget the Terranova blog that studies virtual worlds as if they were sorta real.

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I’m greatly enjoying Windows XP Hacks by Preston Gralla (from O’Reilly). There are at least double that number of hints and tips. These are mainly ones I’d never heard of. And to think all these years I never knew about the Group Policy Editor! (Type gpedit.msc into the Run menu.)

Note: “Get a Mac” does not count as an XP hack.

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1. Despite some bad experiences recently with their customer support, I like Dell’s computers. And their prices are now officially insane: I paid $360 for a 2gH machine with 256MB RAM, 40GB drive, and all the accoutrements except a monitor. But, a few days after placing the order, Dell called. Because I’d placed it as a small business (businesses don’t get much smaller than me), they said the PATRIOT Act now requires them to get my federal ID number. Since I was on the road, that slowed down the process by a week. But that’s not what bothers me. The Feds are now tracking us when we buy computers? Guilty as charged!

2. I am a fan and booster of X1 (formerly Find), a desktop indexer that I use every day to find messages in my stack of 77,000 and to find documents in my multiple gigabytes worth. Great product and I recommend it with only one reservation: X1 insists on loading its index into RAM so that it can do the gimmicky thing of showing you hits even as you’re typing in the letters of your query. Cool little marketing demo, but not actually useful. Plus, it takes up 117MB of RAM in my case. I wish they’d put in a switch to make that optional.

And now for a fly in a not very good ointment: TigerDirect’s extended warrantee support continues to suck. A month later and I still haven’t been shipped the box in which I can ship my laptop in for repair. Aaarrgh.

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