Entries Tagged 'The Future' ↓

Someone please help me out with this dilemma.

How can one balance thinking that pushes the envelope with regulators’ penchant for confusing speculation with corporate policy? How can you speak your mind when a couple of sentences played back in court could destory your reputation?

One email can put you behind bars.

Investment banker Frank Quattrone was indicted and tried twice for obstruction of justice for forwarding an email to subordinates suggesting they clean up their files. He could have gotten 25 years in prison.

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Dick and Jane.

I remember them all too well. My primary school teacher made us focus on this drivel. I have a learning disorder: impatience. “See Spot run” held my attention for a few minutes. Then I went back to cutting up. I was bored silly. I almost flunked second grade.
My mother bought me Classics Illustrated comic books. Jack London, Edgar Allan Poe, Richard Henry Dana, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alexandre Dumas, Sir Walter Scott, Daniel Defoe, James Fennimore Cooper, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells became my teachers. And in time I became an avid reader.

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What a great way to learn: spend a day and a half with friends you really respect having a free-flowing group conversation with fifty or sixty people who yearn to change but are mired in the last century’s clutches. Marcia, Eugene, Ross, Jerry, Clay, David, Mark & I tried to help “the Agency” reconcile secrecy with Web 2.0 & collaboration.

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I am an exploration junkie. I have tried countless software downloads. My websites are continuously morphing, oozing around like a light show at the Fillmore. I am torn between wasting time with yet another way to do the same old stuff and missing something very cool because I‘ve habituated to the rut I am following.

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When I was a poker player in college days, the only table I refused to join was one where a player did not understand the rules. One guy could ruin a game for everyone by doing things so stupid that no one expected them. Which brings me to the U.S. Patent Office.

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What do we see when we look through a computer? by Stephen Downes, National Research Council Canada, May 30, 2006. Click ‘em.

This morning I came upon this wonderful introductory paragraph to Information Technology and Internet Culture by Wesley Cooper, The University of Alberta

The Internet is a magnet for many metaphors. It is cyberspace or the matrix, the “information superhighway” or infobahn or information hairball, a looking glass its users step through to meet others, a cosmopolitan city with tony and shady neighborhoods, a web that can withstand nuclear attack, electric Gaia or God, The World Wide Wait, connective tissue knitting us into a group mind, an organism or “vivisystem,” a petri dish for viruses, high seas for information pirates, a battleground for a war between encrypters and decrypters, eye candy for discrete consumers of a tsunami of pornography, a haven for vilified minorities and those who seek escape from stultifying real-world locales, a world encyclopedia or messy library or textbook or post office, chat “rooms” and schoolrooms and academic conferences, a vast playground or an office complex, a cash cow for the dot.coms, The Widow Maker, training wheels for new forms of delinquency practiced by script kiddies and warez d00des, a wild frontier with very little law and order, the glimmer in the eyes of virtual-reality creators, a workshop for Open Source programmers, a polling booth for the twenty-first century, a marketplace for mass speech, a jungle where children are prey, a public square or global village, a mall or concert hall, a stake for homesteaders, a safari for surfers, a commercial space much in need of zoning, the mother of all Swiss Army knives, a tool palette for artists, a lucid dream or magic, a telephone or newspaper or holodeck, a monster that has escaped DARPA’s control, The Linux penguin, sliced bread, an addiction, the Grand Canyon, and on and on.

(Heraclitus) of Ephesus wrote, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. Everything flows and nothing abides. Even sleepers are workers and collaborators on what goes on in the universe. If we do not exepect the unexpected, we will never find it.” He was ahead of his time.

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Four of us got up way too early this morning to drive down to Stanford to join 2,200 others at the Singularity Summit, a free pow-wow to discuss Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology.

Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and FacePlace, was MC. Chess-playing computer programs appeared in the late 70s. In the 80s, people said computers would never play chess at the master level. Then it happened. In ‘96, IBM’s Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov, a grand master and world champion. Chess, now something a machine could do, lost is lustre. (Sad for Peter who had impressed folks with his play on the Stanford chess team.)

Ray Kurzweil. Applying exponential math to change. Awesome list of awards. The Singularity: A hard or soft takeoff?

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Playing around with BozPage, a flexible, web-based aggregator.

PRO: displays feeds as cloud, river, or list; very pretty, easy to use, 100% web, open source, FREE

CON: page URL changes whenever you change content, visited posts do not disappear, really slow if you overload it with sites

Starting whittling down Stephen’s list to site that meet my needs. This entails stripping out some school sites, most non-English sites, sites that haven’t posted in a couple of months, and so forth. That site is here.

A former iteration, containing all of Stephen’s feeds is here.