Community suggestions

1. revalue US currency so $10 old = $1 new [post]
   
2. save-the-world social software? [post]
   
3. standalone emergency communication system that can be deployed instantly in a disaster [post]
   
4. NetScouts merit badges to encourage mastery of Web/Net skills
   

I'm an idiot about... mp3 players

i read dealnews regularly
waiting, among other things
for an mp3 player to drop down
to my price bracket

and so far
the cheapest by far
are the ones with no memory
that expect you to add
a memory card

but usb thumb drives
are cheap

so why can't a cheap
mp3 player module
plug into a cheap
thumb drive?

I'm still a musical idiot

this is a sequel to my panic-at-the-disco post

it was fascinating to watch that band for the 1st time

the theatricality of their video [qt]
exactly matched my original image of the band
as a bay area hipster theater troupe

but i'm still just as uncertain of my judgment
after seeing the video
as i was before

the song seems weak to me
the storytelling murky

they probably fall on the wrong side
of the hipster line
not guarded enough
not ironic enough

so that when i give my thumbs-up
i feel i have to
ready my deflector shields
(ditto with eg tATu)

but i hope they brazen it out
and dare to position themselves
in Queen's vacated
over-the-top niche




i was listening to the hipster
OffTheRecord playlist
as i wrote the above
and again i couldn't believe
how often i had to click skip-to-next
because what i heard was sheerly awful

though i know now
there's plenty of bands out there i like
so it's not a talent drought
(from my peculiar point of view)
it's a taste drought





i've never been much of a concertgoer

stadium rock is of course incomprehensible to me
infectious imbecility
the madness of crowds

but these hipster hits-lists
seem to throw out the artbaby
with the commercebathwater

honoring only those
who assert sheer awfulness

letting stuff-i-like thru
only by accident




the recent semi-scientific results
on tastemaking
confirm a strong herd-instinct

and perhaps what made
the late-60s-early-70s special
wasn't that the level of creativity was greater
but that the mass media briefly included
rather than automatically excluding
some unguarded art

which would imply that the
Sixties could return at the drop of a hat
if critics just diversified enough
to give the artists air




there was a point i meant to make
when i undertook this post
about being dragged off the street
into a bar
by a friend saying
you have to check these guys out

and how at that point
it's just you and them
and you don't ask for a slick show
you just let them lay it out for you

and maybe it rings your bells
or maybe it doesn't

but whether they're hipsters
or shiny clean folksters
or gospellers or popsters or whatever

your friend's enthusiasm
should be enough to carry you
past the genre preconceptions

I'm a musical idiot about... Panic! at the Disco

(i didn't actually miss last month)

i wanted to post an image here from PostSecret
but they already took it down

the postcard was a picture of an iPod
and handwritten
"i think my taste in music
is better than everyone else's"

because every creative genius
needs to nurture that faith
to create something so good
it fills a gap that's stood empty
since forever

but it may be unhealthy
to think your taste in
everything
music art literature movies politics philosophy
is all the best

so (eg) i have no idea how
my peculiar music tastes
fit into the worldscheme

when i started the jukebox
for blogging mp3s
i made sure to declare
loud and clear
my unhip un-cred

enya
and worse
mr bojangles
(a little poetic masterpiece
in my peculiar opinion)

but as i tapped into the online
reservoir
of indie music
i started to feel a bit more confident

although i'm still baffled by, eg
the best-of-2005 consensus
which leaves me entirely cold
(most often it's the male vocalist
who drives me away
bleating egos
faking an attitude)




the first time i heard
build god, then we'll talk (mp3)
by panic! at the disco (rw3)

i pictured a worldlywise
bayarea theater troupe
with unanimous critical respect

so it gave me pause to discover
they were catholic prepschool boys
from las vegas
trying to imitate queen
and
though their album has sold 20k
the critics are very ambivalent

and i got cold feet
wondering
why no one else heard what i heard

who cares if they're imitating queen
since they do it so well

and if they're just 19
more power to them!

I'm an idiot... about RDF (GTD edition)

"hi, i'm jorn, and i'm an idiot"
"hi jorn"

1st things 1st
i'll be promoting this essay to the
GettingThingsDone community

so
the root idea is that the 13th of each month
should be "i'm an idiot" day

where you pick the least embarrassing
of all the embarrassing things
you feel like you should understand
but don't

and post about it

because in the process of admitting
and trying to articulate
your confusion

(or even in the aftermath of that process)

you're likelier to make a breakthru
than if you kept silent




eventually we'd like to become so comfortable
with admitting our idiocy
that we can even interrupt a weighty seminar
with the stupid-sounding question
that everyone is secretly wanting to
but doesn't dare
ask

because this is a large part
of what keeps meetings
deadly dull




and even as we humiliate ourselves
we can keep one finger crossed
in the secret hope that it will turn out
we're not idiots at all
but rather a different (higher) order of thinker

so the patron saint of i'm-an-idiot day
is probably G. Spencer Brown [Wiki]
who firmly defends the independent thinker's right
to enquire according to their own inner light
at their own pace:

"To arrive at the simplest truth,
as Newton knew and practiced,
requires years of contemplation.
Not activity.
Not reasoning.
Not calculating.
Not busy behaviour of any kind.
Not reading.
Not talking.
Not making an effort.
Not thinking.
Simply bearing in mind
what it is one needs to know.

And yet those with the courage to tread this
path to real discovery
are not only offered practically no guidance
on how to do so,
they are actively discouraged
and have to set about it in secret,
pretending meanwhile to be diligently engaged in the
frantic diversions
and to conform with the deadening personal opinions
which are continually being thrust upon them."

most of my own idiot-topics
have something of this flavor for me

where i see a community on the other side of a fence
busily engaged in not-quite-comprehensible activity

but my inner voice holds me back from
submitting to their tutelage

(Candace Bergen memorably compared
co-hosting Saturday Night Live's original cast
to being kidnapped, like Patty Hearst
by the Symbionese Liberation Army)

so i've been suspicious of
the sgml-xml-rdf community
since way back in the mid 90s

they have a sort of true-believer attack
that sees my questions, perhaps, as threats

so every time i try to penetrate their worldview
i find my eyes glazing over, defensively

even though their domain broadly overlaps my own




we're all looking for the
fundamental
semantic buildingblock

which Lisp finds in cons-cells
and Prolog finds in horn clauses
and Cyc finds in CycL

the Semantic Web
if i understand at all correctly
sees in RDF triples

A and B have relationship C

and if you want to build
you must pile relationships on relationships

as Lisp piles cons-cells on cons-cells

but programs quickly lose their way
in the twisty maze of cons-cells, all alike

when the master-structure
that underlies All Of It
is a Tree in 4D space

all important entities having
at each moment, T
a position, XYZ

and all important stories
having the general form:
at time T, the relationships were R1
at time T+1, the relationships were R2

(when Prolog was considered hot AI, in the mid 80s
i bought Turbo Prolog
and tried to rewrite a little alife sim
in horn clauses

but horn clauses are about logical if-then
not narrative when-next)




so for each entity on the tree
we might fill out a form
describing its state at a given moment
T =
X =
Y =
Z =

and since we're representing heartrate, too
H =

and these can be dissected
into a twisty maze of RDF triples

which grows far twistier
when relationships between two branches
(A loves B, madly)
are required




(my counterproposal)

my counterproposal
is to start with the types
of the two related entities

(the basic types being
person, place, thing, motive, modality)

and to note that an entity of any given type
has one possible set of relationships
with entities of each other type

so (A loves B)
is first and foremost
a statement about a relationship
between a person and a person

and data/knowledge about such relationships
should be clustered at a specific person-person site
in our core data-structure

[more]

I'm-an-Idiot day (CSS)

i proposed below in passing
that the 13th of each month
should be "i'm an idiot day"

and bloggers on that day
should try to think of a question
they've hesitated to ask
for fear of looking stupid

and ask it publicly
in hopes that someone will answer
or that the act of asking will make it clearer
or will inspire the required research effort

so my idiot-question, a day early, is:

back when everyone on comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html
was promoting CSS stylesheets
their promise was that if i didn't like an author's page-design
i'd be able to substitute a different stylesheet

now i've got the latest version of firefox
but i don't see that function anywhere

(there's a page-style submenu under 'view'
but it doesn't offer any subtitutes)

so were we sold a bill of goods [yes]
or is this function still on its way
or what? [workaround]

(don't say greasemonkey-- that's javascript)

(sage does allow it,
globally for all rss-feeds)

Idiots Alert: $100 laptop

Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab
has been touting a $100 laptop all year
and everybody seems to lap it up
probably because he's from MIT

but MIT's Media Lab is a joke
whose outstanding talent is hype
and whose greatest success is Lego Mindstorms

and the product he's describing
will cost $500 minimum with today's technology

so his $100 boast is whitehot air
a pricepoint chosen not because it was realistic
but because it's barely imaginable

and the fantasy that such a price breakthru
could arrive first via the Media Lab
and be distributed first to the needy

is as believable as UFOs arriving any day now
to take us home to the mothership

Idiots Alert: Dave and Raina

i'm still exploring how to use this expanded forum
and one thing i've been planning
is critiques of links i think are stupid
that get propagated unskeptically

so here's the first:
a longish 1pg autobiographical comic
about a couple getting engaged
which would be a classic if they were writing it 20 years on
but which, coming this soon,
is just bragging, begging for trouble


there's an irish tradition
that's apropos
where the couple calls each other by their last name
"Mr Kelly" and "Mrs Kelly"
because if the leprechauns ever heard the love in their voices
when they spoke each other's first name
they'd be so jealous they'd steal the beloved away

Napster for URLs, or p2p del.icio.us

This long post should ultimately clarify my "crystal tags" protocol
but it will take a circuitous path getting there

As the title implies, crystal tags can be viewed as Napster-for-URLs
or as a p2p version of del.icio.us
but the same principles will also apply to images (flickr), music, email, etc

To explore del.icio.us in particular
I'll consider what Robot Wisdom Weblog (RWWL) will be like
if I ever start posting it there, item by item, at del.icio.us

But first I want to admit that del.icio.us is still mostly baffling to me

(Could bloggers declare, say, the 13th of each month to be "I'm-an-idiot day"
and try to post that day about some topic that they secretly feel
everyone understands better than they do?)

I could fairly easily let del.icio.us take over the RSS version of RWWL
but it would feel a little like taking my string of pearls
and breaking the string
letting them scatter before strange swine
since most del.icio.us readers will see the items individually
with no context

and it feels too like I'm trusting my pearls to a site
with no visible means of support
who get nothing back from the bandwidth I gobble
except one tiny popularity-vote for each URL I post
and whatever useful tags I trouble to add
so I wonder will they stick around in the same format
or will they add gross ads...


What I'd gain back is the chance to scan my own blog there
and see how many others linked each URL, and who
and so possibly subscribe to their 'blogstreams'
(though so far I feel uneasy about this,
since I don't think most del.icio.us-ers
expect to be subscribed to this way)

This function is sort of a cerebral 'matchmaking system'
and it oughtn't be too hard for del.icio.us-the-site-itself
to find users with similar url-streams
and 'introduce' them

But this means everyone has to be self-conscious about what URLs they post
so maybe there needs to be an optional 'personal del.icio.us'
maybe "Del.icio.us Desktop"
that works the same but keeps less-public URLs offline
(your porn sites,
your secret identities,
your obscure specialties)

Flickr too could offer "Flickr Desktop" for private images
and Google could offer a "Gmail Desktop" that mirrors in synch
your online mail archive
but allows you to delete the online copies of your most sensitive mail


But if all these Web 2.0 online apps are going to be echoed offline
we'll want the possibility of allowing p2p access to friends,
with special permission-levels

so that your secret Olsen-Twins Fanclub can swap urls or pix or posts
or so you can let your new girlfriend explore your more private sides

And once we get this working a lot of the centralised functions of
del.icio.us/flickr/Gmail
become secondary
because you can swap directly via your own buddy-lists


On del.icio.us every URL is a (wasted) potential conversation
between everyone who linked it
and this function of hosting chats
on every topic under the sun
is a tricky one
because you generally want to keep the chat as open as possible
but then someone has to police for griefers and spam

But obviously, policing such chats is not a centralised function
it's a distributed one, with each chat having its own moderator(s).

16Sep: [reply]