Stevey’s Home Page – Effective Emacs
Bash Emacs Editing Mode Cheat Sheet – good coders code, great reuse
And I’ve switched from Aquamacs to Carbon Emacs Package for the time being.
Author Archives: Karl
Technorealism? Social Software thought of the week
I had a GED, was struggling with homelessness, and was a telemarketer at Sears Product Services selling maintenance agreements. But I had access to Compuserve, AOL, and Usenet via dialup accounts work and at home. For me, the Net was an important route to a new life – a career I love – software engineering.
You would think that I would be a techno-utopian. A true believer that the Web, the Net, will be a tool that will help lift humanity out of its troubles by helping us be better informed and connected.
And I was for a while there. But time and experience has tempered my enthusiasm with a recognition that human nature is a hell of a lot more robust then we give it credit for. That, as Dave Rogers might say (and has I think), that technology may change what we do, but not who we are.
Now, for me, recognizing that, doesn’t eliminate my belief in the Web’s potential to enrich our lives and be an instrument of tremendous positive change. But it does force me to ground it – the Web is a reflection of who and what we are, the good, the bad and the ugly. Whenever I recognize successful social software it reinforces this to to be true to me.
What brought about this round of reflection?
Author and blogger Nick Carr wrote a provocative cover article for this month’s The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”.
It’s worth a read. It’s over the top for sure. But maybe it needed to be so in order to draw attention to the fact that all is not as rosy with the Web’s potential as we’d like to think.
This same discussion has cropped up again and again, only to be dismissed by not only the digerati, but the mainstream media.
An example, in the wake of the publishing of David Shenk‘s “Data Smog”, back in 1997, a small discussion formed around similar concerns, that some branded as a movement called Technorealism. Read Newsweek’s put down of the discussion – labeling it as not worthy to have. As “glorifying the obvious”.
If it was so obvious, then why so much vehemence and venom in the face of it?
Related:
Kevin Kelly: Will We Let Google Make Us Smarter?
Andrew Sullivan: Google is giving us pond-skater minds
Rebecca Blood: Is the Internet making us stupid?
Burningbird’s RealTech: Timing
Infothought: Nick Carr: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, and Man vs. Machine
AKMA: Au Contraire
Publishing 2.0: What Magazines Still Don’t Understand About The Web
Slate: David Shenk: Was I right about the dangers of the Internet in 1997?
NYTimes: Excerpt: Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut
Tough article in MIT Technology Review
Bryant Urstadt, in MIT Technology Review, challenges the conventional wisdom about Social Networking and profit.
George Carlin gets the last word
His family and friends share his funeral wishes.
Four music links for today
LATimes: Sunset Strip Music Fest Photo Essay, Night One via tony pierce.
WNEW.com: Founding Father: Howlin’ Wolf
Mirror.co.uk: Interview: Iron Maiden: “That’s one of the reasons we’re now bigger than ever,” smiles Bruce, “whereas a lot of bands and people in general worry about what others think of them and change accordingly.” “We don’t because we’ve never really cared what others think. We always thought that if people don’t like it, that’s tough – we’ll just have to do it for a smaller audience. But the opposite has proved the case.”
Reuters.com: Q&A: Motley Crue still calling its own shots
Three Scalability related links for today
Dare Obasanjo: Dark Launches, Gradual Ramps and Isolation: Testing the Scalability of New Features on your Web Site
“Esoteric Curio”, the blog of Theo Schlossnagle, author of “Scalable Internet Architectures”.
b-list: Media and performance: There’s simply no way around this.
Cremation and Catholic Faith – Research
Ever have “that talk” with your family or loved ones? The one where you discuss how you want your funeral to be? Yeah, it’s a morbid topic to be sure, but following are some links I want to read when I get the chance:
American Catholic: Cremation: New Options for Catholics
American Catholic: Cremation and the Catholic Funeral
USAToday: Catholic parishes yield to cremation trend
Catholic Culture: Cremation Ashes to Ashes
Writing a simple proxy in Python: Some related links
Programming and Development links for today
PIBlog: Building a Python Web Application, Part 1
A Student’s Guide to Software Engineering Projects – Free eBook for Students
Raible Designs: Building high-content web applications (I wonder what we can share from work? I need to ask…)
Raible Designs: Spring MVC vs. WebWork Smackdown at OSCON (likewise, I need to check what we can share from work).
IBM developerWorks: An introduction to Model Driven Architecture
The earth sings
Mark Morford, at SFGate, in April, wrote a lyrical, powerful piece about music the Earth itself is generating: “In other words, you love loud punk? Metal? Jazz? Deep house? Saint-Saens with a glass of Pinot in the tub? Sure you do. That’s because somewhere, somehow, deep in your very cells and bones and DNA, it links you back to source, to the Earth’s own vibration, the pulse of the cosmos. Oh yes it does. To tap your foot and sway your body to that weird new Portishead tune is, in effect, to sway it to the roar of the universe. I mean, obviously.”
As he mentions, scientists have been debating the source (or sources) of the ‘hum’ for a long time, a sampling:
Space.com (2000): Source of Earth’s Hum Revealed, Space Symphony Possible (Inaudible sound waves in the lower atmosphere that push and pull on the ground).
NPR: Detecting the Earth’s Hum for What It Is (it comes from the globe’s largest oceans during winter, apparently the result of powerful winter storms)
New Scientist (2007): Earth’s hum linked to coastal waves
LiveScience: Earth’s Hum Sounds More Mysterious Than Ever (might be caused by forces shearing across the world’s surface, from the oceans, atmosphere or possibly even the sun)
Mark Morford says this is the kind of thing, in our day to day driven world, we don’t take a moment to stop and ponder: “This is the kind of thing that, given all our distractions, our celeb obsessions and happy drugs and bothersome trifles like family and bills and war and health care and sex and love and porn and breathing and death, tends to fly under the radar of your overspanked consciousness, only to be later rediscovered and brought forth and placed directly in front of your eyeballs, at least for a moment, so you can look, really look, and go, oh my God, I had no idea.”
He’s right. My friends shake their heads at me sometimes and tease me for being a bit of a “hippie” for pondering this stuff. But it’s these kinds of mysteries that take my heart to flight, sing to me, and lighten my step as I think about the wonderful world we live in.