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January 6, 2009
Suw Charman-Anderson has started a pledge at PledgeBank that asks 1,000 people to agree to blog about a woman in technology on the birthday of Ada Lovelace, March 24. [Later: Oops. That’s not her birthday. March 24 is just a day Suw chose at random because Lovelace’s birthday is too far away to wait.]
[Note: I’ve closed the comments on this post because it’s become a spam magnet. – May 13, 2009]
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.
January 5, 2009
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.
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.
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.
January 4, 2009
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.)
January 3, 2009
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.
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.
January 2, 2009
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.
January 1, 2009
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.
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