Digitalize Your Walk

"The Wonderful Power of Storytelling"
Bruce Sterling at the Computer Game Developers Conference, March 1991, San Jose CA

But our riches of information are in some deep and perverse sense a terrible burden to us. They're like a cognitive load. As a digitized information-rich culture nowadays, we have to artificially invent ways to forget stuff. I think this is the real explanation for the triumph of compact disks.

The real advantage of CDs is that they allow you to forget all your vinyl records. You think you love this record collection that you've amassed over the years. But really the sheer choice, the volume, the load of memory there is secretly weighing you down.

By dumping the platform you dump everything attached to the platform and my god what a blessed secret relief. What a relief not to remember it, not to think about it, not to have it take up disk-space in your head.

The unintended consequences of digitization are really interesting to me. Cellphones had lots of of those. They sewed together a net, made of everyone you know, and they used it to catch us all. I resisted getting a cellphone for years, but that doesn't matter now.

{paraphrase of me in 2004}
Civilization is based on the strength of the individual, the strength of silence, of thought and calm. And cellphones will devour our solitude. Our quiet times, when we meditate in our steps, and over many miles grow as people.
{/paraphrase}

wikiNTERJECTION: The old theories of evolution said that we were the monkey that got smart, but Lucy indicated, we were the monkey that learned to walk.///

{paraphrase of me in 2004}
Cellphones create a false sense of community; of a net ready to catch you. But this isn't any traditional community, it is a digitized one; made up of people who are abandoning reflection; becoming bytes, able to interrupt you at anytime; without obligation or responsibility to anyone.
{/paraphrase}

There would be no more Alone, I protested.

wikiNTERJECTION: The pillars of the French discipline Parkour are escape and reach. Is this the definition of freedom?///

Now I have a cellphone and soon it will have the internet. Reach. And Escape?

Run OLPC's "Sugar" under OS X

According to a post on BoingBoing, the OLPC developers have released an app to let your computer emulate the Children's Machine.

I'm going home to try it right now.

update:

Might have jumped the gun a little, now that I'm home I can try to elaborate.
The developers have been posting [disk] images of the Sugar OS, and it looks like they've been doing it for some time (possibly since the Beginning) ...

Anyway, so the deal is, you can download an emulator from these fine people, who've developed a virtual machine (a la parallels, but free), then run the olpc image of your choosing under your new vm. Not a new idea, not an OLPC-released app, and not nearly as point-and-click as I initally thought. However, I have calmed down some from my initial enthusiasm -- and I'm still excited. Of course I'm still excited!

Sadly, I do hear it's kinda sluggish under Q (those attempting under parallels had more promising results). But I'll see for myself shortly.

It looks like I'm getting my first taste of the Children's Machine much sooner than expected.

OLPC Specs

[LINK]

Memory Palace

In ancient advice, the loci were physical locations, usually in a familiar large public building, such as a market or a church. To utilize the method, one walked through the building several times, viewing distinct places within it, in the same order each time. After a few repetitions of this, one should be able to remember and visualize each of the places in order reliably. To memorize a speech, one breaks it up into pieces, each of which is symbolized by vivid imagined objects or symbols. In the mind's eye, one then places each of these images into the loci. They can then be recalled in order by imagining that one is walking through the building again, visiting each of the loci in order, and viewing each of the images that were placed in the loci, thereby recalling each piece of the speech in order.

A reference to these techniques survives to this day in the common English phrases "in the first place", "in the second place", and so forth.

Method of loci

Breaking News: LIBBY GUILTY

Libby Found Guilty On Four Counts

N.E.D.

"The richest country in the world can afford whatever it needs for defense."

Scoop Jackson in 1960, campaigning for Kennedy

Last night my friend Sean told me about the CIA's adaptation into a non-governmental organization called National Endowment for Democracy, which might be responsible for essentially all the democratic revolutions over the past twenty years. Short form: The CIA became an NGO called NED and kept doing what they love to do.

What is that they love to do? Best to start on the right and move left, as this seems to be the trend of the future.

Loose Cannon: The National Endowment for Democracy
by Barbara Conry, a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.
This article's from 1993, but it's from the Cato Institute thus providing an interesting conservative take. The take: expensive meddling in countries we don't care about.

Wikipedia - National Endowment for Democracy

Current and former directors of the Endowment's Board include
Lee Hamilton of the 9/11 Commission,
former Congressman Richard Gephardt,
Richard Holbrooke,
U.S. Senator and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist,
Frank Carlucci of the Carlyle Group,
General Wesley Clark,
Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research,
Dr. Francis Fukuyama of Johns Hopkins SAIS, and
U.S. Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, former chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council.

SourceWatch
A new site for me, it's operated by The Center for Media and Democracy which describes

"a collaborative project to produce a directory of public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests."

So this is my reading list. I need to really sit down sometime and read it all and follow all the threads, but do I even want to? According to SourceWatch:

NED was created with a view to creating a broad base of political support for the organization. NED received funds from the U.S. government and distributes funds to four other organizations - one created by the Republican Party, another by the Democratic Party, one created by the business community and one by the "labor" movement.

The AFL-CIO is very much involve in all this, so are some Democrats, so are some Republicans, so is big business. When I was into the Skull & Bones (and who wouldn't be after seeing this) I first realized how scary the CIA is. Presidents come and go and people watch them, but these appointees and their damn secrets. It's really terrifying. To see what they have done, and what they are doing now, ignoring all our national discussions, guided by values unknown, intimately involved with all the parties of power, well, it kind of makes our democracy look pathetic. These men and their secrets make chumps of us all.

The Bridge to the 21st Century should have come with a gate. Why couldn't Bill have built a gate to keep these bastards out? Why did he ask Congress for more NED funding than they were willing to give him? Is anyone ever going to really stop these guys? Turn on the lights and the roaches just hid, then there always back later. John McLaughlin says 2008 will signal a massive shift of the nation to the radical left. Here's hoping.

WikiLists or WikiGold?

List of English Words of International Origin

And if you want to see lists of famous people by cause of death, or a list of people known as The Great, check out the Lists of People.

WikiLists are becoming my new favorite thing about the internet, it's more information than I could ever hope to devour. But not so much information that I couldn't peruse it all, if I could see it all at once.
We need some WikiAlchemists to transmute this lead into gold. Lead's useful, but gold's more fun.

EDIT:
More mind numbing list fun:
Countries & Age Structures
Unfortunately the structure is based on working age, not voting age. (0-14, 15-64, 65+)