On Dec. 2 Steve went to Hong Kong to talk to TV execs and he has a few gem-like posts on his trip here, here, here and here. (How else are you going to find out why all those women were sitting on newspapers spread on the sidewalk?) [Tags: SteveJohnson HongKong]

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I’m flying to London tonight for a conference on Monday. So, any London-ish bloggers want to get together for dinner Sunday night? Indian food maybe? I’ll be jet-lagged and especially cranky!

My email: selfevident.com.

Ok, it looks like a small group of us will be eating at Preem, 120 Brick Lane, at 7pm on Sunday. Woohoo! (Please try to let me know by email if you’re interested so we can gauge the size. Thx.)

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I’m in Amsterdam today and half of tomorrow, talking at meetings set up by Edelman PR, to whom I consult. I had the afternoon off, so after falling into a state of unconsciousness deeper than that of the mattress on which I lay, I set out with nothing but a map and zero sense of direction.

I walked into the center of the city and then came back out and went to the Rijksmuseum for an hour. Most of it is closed for renovation, so they’ve concentrated the masterpieces into about ten rooms. Astounding. Too much. I had the sense that I could see the paint run backwards into the puddles of color on a palette, and then I simply could not imagine how the process ran forwards. I could almost hear the suck and pop as my attention pulled from one painting and attached to the next.

And I had an experience I never had before. There was a landscape — I amazingly didn’t bring a pen with me so I don’t remember who painted it — that wasn’t particularly attractive to me. It was somewhat washed out, perhaps by time but perhaps on purpose. An oak tree twisted itself up from a hill against a low Netherlands landscape and miles of gray clouds. The craft of the painting didn’t particularly strike me — I’m a sucker for craft — yet I felt a yearning to be on that hill on that bleak day. I actually felt sad that I couldn’t be there. The painting made me homesick for a landscape I’ve never been centuries before I was born. [Technorati tag: amsterdam]

Alert reader Peter Dawson figured out that it’s “Landscape with Two Oaks” (1641) by Jan van Goyen.

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I spent a fascinating day at the BBC yesterday, and much of the day before, researching an article for Wired. There is so much stuff going on there, both technically and culturally. The Beeb is making a serious effort to serve its constituency by moving beyond the traditional broadcasting model. Wherever it can, it’s using the digitizing of content to give control back to their audience: Control over the when, what and where of listening/watching (on-demand, interactive, on multiple devices)and control over what you can do with their content (remix it, redistribute it non-comercially). Rather than feeling beleaguered the way so many big media companies do when they look out over the Internet sea, the BBC-ers use words like “liberated.” Invigorating, to say the least. (Now all I have to do is figure out how to turn 75 pages of notes into a 2,500-word article.)

Today, after meeting with another BBC’er, I join a tour of the Linnaeus Society headquarters in Piccadilly. This is for my book (about which I’ll post some news tomorrow), which has something to do with what happens to how we organize stuff when we snip the connection to the physical. Linnaeus, the great classifier, had a sample specimen for each of the species he categorized, which is a very definite tie to the physical. But I’m not sure what I’m going to learn there. Which is why I’m going.

Tonight I fly home. Good. I miss my family. [Technorati tags: Linnaeus BBC taxonomy]

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It has been a long but wonderful day.

I woke up in Copenhagen unreasonably early and went for a walk aimlessly and maplessly; since I am so direction-impaired that I can’t even read maps, bringing a map doesn’t really help. I walked along the river and wandered down large and small streets. Because it was early on a Sunday morning, there wasn’t a lot going on. The city was quiet, empty and quite rectangular. And, as Doc pointed out last night, the streets are awfully broad given that they were created long before cars would come along to use up all that bandwidth.

By accident, I walked into a park that turned out to be the huge churchyard cemetary for notables. The “You are here” sign listed Soren Kierkegaard as one of the residents (“You are here, but these guys ain’t leaving”), so I paid him a visit:

Somehow I don’t think Kierkegaard — whose name means “church yard” — would have been tickled pink to find out that he is such a popular dead guy that he gets his own direction sign:

Then it was off to the airport for the 1.5 hour flight to London. Traveling in coach with us normals was a heavy metal band, complete with road managers and handlers. I thought someone said they were Iron Maiden, but the Maiden site says they’re traveling from Italy to Switzerland today; Copenhagen would definitely be a wrong turn. It seems not to have been Iron Butterfly either. (Man, in the photos on their site do those guys look old, i.e., my age! Who’d believe that after one hit in 1968 they’d still be touring, especially since that hit is unlistenable unless you are massively stoned.) Metallica is traveling between Austria and Germany today. (My fantasy was that one of the Metalllicans would sit next to me and I’d explain why file-sharing is good for them. Even in my daydream I lost the argument.) Motley Crue seems to be off the road, although their site tempted me to send $40 to join their fan club so I could get my own motley.crue.com email address. Anyway, whoever those folks on the plane were, they seemed to be very nice young men, albeit nice young men who aren’t so young and now are doomed to remind people initially of Spinal Tap. (By the way, here are some spare umlauts for you sprinkle appropriately over their names: …………)

I got to my hotel in London at 14:00. (Modulo 12 to get the real time.) It’s a lovely little hotel, picked by Wired’s travel agency because I’m here writing a story on the BBC. But the Internet connection at the hotel has been down for two days and they aren’t doing anything to bring it back up. That’s like having a hotel room without a telephone or a TV. Or blankets. So I asked them to find me another hotel. As a result, I’m in the Hilton across the street for precisely the same room rate. The Internet works in the Hilton…but it’s 15 pounds a day, or almost US$30. Oy veh!

I went out for a 3.5 hour walk, up through Picadilly, to Leicester Sq., then beyond, then down a little, and then some curlicues around some statute of someone on a horse, then swoop up past a very large green swath, then catch the end of a demonstration that my first reaction to is “Gosh, I hope it’s against us,” then some doglegs and a loop around the back 9, up through a really crowded bit, then a cone of soft ice cream that tastes like blackboard eraser, then a zig here and zag there, past Buckingham Palace, head in the wrong direction entirely, cross the big yard in front of the Palace waving all friendly-like to the quaint locals as they make a big show of saving the Queen, and finally back to my hotel.

I love walking in London. It’s like NYC but with elbow room and history.

Before you go bopping me upside my head for hoping the demonstration was against us, let me explain: I’m against us — at least against how we’re fighting the “war on terror.” I acknowledge, though, that seeing another nation’s people denounce the US is painful, even when you agree with them. No, you want to say as they chant, it’s more complicated than it seems from the outside. We need more of that nuance that our President so despises. [Technorati tags: copenhagen london]

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Jonathan Peterson at Way.nu points to UNESCO’s World Heritage list of irrecplaceable world treasures and notes the one’s he’s been to. Having “tons of memories,” as Jonathan says, sure is a good spur to caring about the preservation of these places.

He’s also created a technorati tag called worldheritagelifelist so we can all compare notes… [Technorati tag: worldheritagelifelist]

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Strap yourself into your Envy Chair and take a look at this handful of photos from Capri…

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I’m actually writing this on the 9 hour flight home because I have been unable to get on line since yesterday afternoon. I realized that my need to be online roughly synchronizes with the Italian grad students’ need to step outside and smoke. Ah, one sweet lungful of bits is all I crave.

Anyway, yesterday was quite wonderful. After breakfast with Derrick, class started again at 10AM. We talked about Internet time (threads vs. moments), whether the experience of the Web will universalize or localize knowledge, and other topics like those. Have I mentioned how lucky I feel to be allowed to participation in such discussions?

At lunch time we went for one last meal at the same ol’ delicious restaurant (Hint: Real Italian restaurants make The Olive Garden look silly) where I learned that my participation was over; after lunch the students and Derrick were getting together to talk about what we had talked about. I felt bereft. I had only been with these people for 1.5 days, and yet I was sad beyond my expectation. Yes, they are all bright, but I don’t usually choke up leaving bright people. Because of some combination of their seriousness, openness, the connection of their beliefs to their personalities, and the integration of those beliefs with what matters in the world — also, they’re a fun and warm group — I felt I had come to know them in just a couple of days.

So, they went back to the meeting room and I went to my hotel to try to figure out what to see on the island. I would have gone to Marina Piccola (the small harbor) because it is less touristy, but, there were no buses in the afternoon from Anacapri to there. So, I took a bus to Capri. The person in the hotel had at first recommended that I walk from the Capri bus stop to Arco Naturale (all spellings approximate!), a natural geologic arch. But they said it was 2 hours each way. I pointed to my flab and explained I wasn’t up for a 4 hour walk. So they suggested the Giardini di Augusto.

To get there, you walk from the center of Capri, with its ridiculously swank stores, to the other side of the island, and then north for a bit. It’s only about ten minutes. The garden is nothing special when it comes to flowers, but the view is spectacular. You are on a promontory looking down some knee-trembling distance to the sea. To the left are the famous rock towers protruding from the sea. To the right is Marina Piccolo. On the map it looked like Marina Piccolo is about 5 minutes from the Garden. What the map doesn’t tell you is that town is down hundreds of feet. To get there, you can either plummet over the edge or walk down a set of switchbacks that would make a mule dizzy. I opted for neither.

So, I instead tried to find another site the hotelier had recommended, about ten minutes away. But along the way I saw signs for the Natural Arch and decided, what the heck, I can walk part of the way.

The streets start out by taking you up and then up some more, through residential areas that are only lovely and fascinating, not spectacular, inhabited by the locals serving in the aristocrats’ wonderland. As you walk further, you see actual agriculture, albeit on small plots. Along the way, I sat on a couple of benches, watching a cloud circle Capri’s highest peak, and, frankly, writing a poem too awful to share.

Soon the land becomes cliffs with conifers sticking up and nasturtia falling down. To get to the Natural Arch you have to decide to go down an indefinite series of steps. With a sigh I began and in only a few minutes was at the top of a natural rock arch that seemed about the size of the one in St. Louis. A more determined tourist would have gone down to its base, but I figured looking at up it wasn’t all that different from looking down on it. After a few minutes of staring I felt I had exhausted the experience, so I climbed back up and went to a cafe/restaurant (Trattoria le “Grottelle”) notched into the cliff along the path. You hear and smell a pine forest, but you are looking at the sea. I had an plain bottle of beer that was one of the best I ever drank.

Cafes at the end of walks are uniformly among my fondest memories. I don’t remember much about being in the Lake District in England with my wife-to-be 27 years ago, but I do remember the small tea shop at the end of a long walk through two green waves. Great tea. Great place to be in love.

The way back into Capri brought me through its Medieval District, a zone of twisty, hilly alleys (not all the same) that take you past the real stores of the village. I even found a hardware store.

Then I hung around the town center, shopping for little souvenirs for my children — “Here’s something for you to remember a trip you didn’t get to come on, kids! Enjoy!” — waiting to join Derrick for dinner with one of the deans of the University of Napoli, my host. Eight of us all together went to Paolino’s, an outdoor restaurant with a natural roof formed by the fruited branches of lemon trees. Somewhat spectacular. Much of the conversation was in Italian, of course, which I valiantly tried to understand, usually getting a few words and trying to figure out how, say, “New Pope,” “children,” “balcony” and “slap” could have been used in a sentence. It was a lovely evening.

This morning, I awoke at 6 to take a bus to the boat to the train to the train to the plane to the plane to the taxi home. Total travel time should be about 22 hours, if all goes well. But, unlike usual, I’m not complaining. I’m only sad to leave Italy — although I am jumping out of my skin as I write this two hours into the transatlantic flight, eager to see my wife and children — a place to which I have no historic or genetic connection but which always feels oddly like home. [Technorati tags: italy capri]

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Another difficult day to capture, which are, of course, the best days to have. (And the worst.)

I wandered through the perfect little town of Anacapri as work was beginning. It is carefully kept, in the manner of towns that live by creating memories. The buildings are small and many of the shops are quotidian, although others sell tourist gimcracks and the artifacts of fashion. Every turn offers at least one loveliness: Yellow flowers poking through a gray bamboo wall, a gate that opens up the aromas of a garden, a modest church newly painted a brazen white.

After breakfast with the course professor, Derrick de Kerckhove, at our lovely little hotel, the Bella Vista, we went back into the town to a 100-year-old building recently redone as a meeting center. The eleven of us filled the main room, its windows facing the sea. The grad students are engaged in projects concerning the sociology and philosophy of the Internet, topics such as the nature of scientific knowledge on the Net, the semantics of the Web (which embraces but is not the same as the Semantic Web), the Web as a public sphere, and the nature of space and time on the Web. Over the course of nine hours, broken by three hours for lunch together and time apart, we talked about whether there is a morality implicit in the Web’s architecture, why we talk about the Web in spatial terms, how the Web is affecting the nature of the self, whether we should understand history by looking for patterns or emergent phenomena (or both or neither), and more.

We went straight from the meeting room to Capri, a ten-minute bus ride through hairpin turns, each of which caused me to hold my breath involuntariliy. (I am not a fan of heights, so I want credit for, during the break, walking up the remnant of the mountain on which Anacapri sits.) We wandered through the center of the town, which caters to a social class several rungs up from Anacapri’s visitors. I wasn’t terribly comfortable in what little I saw of Capri. It seemed to be an Audrey Hepburn sort of place, selling clothes I wouldn’t wear at prices I can’t afford. But, I don’t want to judge a town by its swankiest part. In any case, the 11 of us sat on the veranda of one of the central hotels, drinking champagne we’d bought to toast the death of the Broadcast Flag. We were gently chased out by a young waiter who said that he was glad we had cause to celebrate, but that he would get in trouble if he let us stay.

So, we came back to Anacapri, had dinner in the same family-run restaurant as before. Topics included: Favorite Tarantino films, Half Life 2 and Steve Johnson’s new book, why marijuana is still illegal, comparative attitudes towards homosexuality, why flirting is no longer a social norm in the US, why it’s worse to get a blow job than to start a war, and how scientific learning is being liberated by metadata that expresses its degree of credibility.

To my surprise, we then all took a midnight walk along a path that led us to a scenic (= terrifying) view down the mountain and across the sea and up to stars as close as I’ve ever seen them. [Technorati tag: capri]

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Yesterday, my second day in Italy, was overwhelming. All I can do is list my itinerary, especially since I have only a few minutes this morning before day 3 officially starts.

Yesterday I was in Naples. The day began with an an early walk in the area around my hotel, which is a few blocks from the Piazza del Plebescita. (All spellings approximate!) I went up the small alleys as the city was getting started. I wished I had brought a sound recorder just to capture 5 minutes of street sounds as the small stores cranked open and the children were walked to school. Then Derrick, my host, interviewed me for an hour for the U of Naples TV; it was a more philosophical interview than I’m used to, and was invigorating because of that.

Then Derrick dropped me at Herculaneum. When Vesuvius blew up, the wind carried the ash to Pompeii, but 50 feet of mud covered the much smaller town of Herculaneum. A third of the town has been excavated. I walked through it for 1.5 hours. You get a lively, and moving, sense of how humane and social life was there (well, slaves excepted). I won’t attempt to do justice to the experience of being a chronological voyeur.

Then, after an excellent lunch (pasta arrabiata and some excellent pizza), I gave a talk at the university, with non-simultaneous, interactive translation. I talked about – guess what? – how the miscellaneous, which traditionally is where the structure of knowledge fails, is becoming in the digital world where knowledge begins.

Then Derrick, eleven grad students and I took the 40 minute ferry ride to the isle of Capri, where we had a late (11pm) dinner at which I spent more time talking about Heidegger than I have in 20 years.

It was dark when we arrived so I had no sense of the place until this morning when I went on a short walk through Anacapri, where we’re staying. Anacapri is the “anti Capri,” although unfortunately not in the Opposite World sense…it’s just on the other side of the island. I’m not going to try to describe it because I’m too new here, and, besides, I have to go join Derrick for breakfast. What I saw this morning, though, was impossibly lovely, so lovely that I don’t yet trust my reaction.

Even I am envious of myself.

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