The Jay-Blog

Hidden connections

Author/physicist Fritjof Capra is talking about networks, ethics, communities of practice, cloning, living systems, 80 MPG hybrid cars, and other matters on a local radio station. It's streaming to me on mp3 playing over Windows Media Player.

His book, The Hidden Connections: Integrating The Biological, Cognitive, And Social Dimensions Of Life Into A Science Of Sustainability, posits that if we understand the long-term consequences of our current actions, humankind would stop behaving foolishly. We have to see how things hang together.

I wish he were right. In my worldview, not thinking ahead or reflecting on the past are the fundamental dilemmas confronting humankind, and logic alone is not about to change the situation. I'll try to peruse the book when I visit Mechanics Institute Library later today.

The front page of today's New York Times has a story and photo of America's only "automated convenience store." It's a monster vending machine, fronted by a 12' x 7' window, that sells soap, condoms, Kleenex, and other 7-11 staples.

This is an example of William Gibson's observation that the future is here, "it's just not evenly distributed."

In 1971, Uta and I lived in Wiesbaden-Biebrich, Germany. Across the street from our apartment was the same vending machine that today's Times finds newsworthy. People used the machine when German blue laws forced the little grocery store behind the machine to close. It's great to be able to buy a loaf of bread or a cold bottle of beer at 2:00 am.

Don't train 'em

Over lunch with JSB today, I was bemoaning the short-term thinking that pervades American business. That's clearly a big factor in corporate disregard for investing seriously in training.

John brought up another aspect: free ride paranoia. Corporations fear that if their people grow, they will demand more money. Or jump ship for a higher offer. Executives ask themselves, "Why should we pay to groom people for the competition?"

Interestingly, the issue is not as prominent when it comes to sales people. Since they are paid for performance, the better they do, the more they make. The flaw in the system is that other people are NOT paid for performance. If someone's market value goes up, do they deserve more remuneration? Or, if we could measure it, would anyone not be paid for performance?

Scientific American's current issue is

Scientific American's current issue is about TIME.

"Punctuality comes from within, not from without," writes Harvard University historian David S. Landes in his book Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. "It is the mechanical clock that made possible, for better or worse, a civilization attentive to the passage of time, hence to productivity and performance."

A team from France and the Netherlands set a new speed record for subdividing the second, reporting last year that a laser strobe light had emitted pulses lasting 250 attoseconds--that's 250 billionths of a billionth of a second. The strobe may one day be fashioned into a camera that can track the movements of individual electrons. The modern era has also registered gains in assessing big intervals. Radiometric dating methods, measuring rods of "deep time," indicate how old the earth really is.

Business, the Ultimate Resource This

Business, the Ultimate Resource

This one may take me a while to read. It's two thousand pages of concentrated articles and checklists and factoids that make up what Daniel Goleman, in the introduction, calls "business intelligence."

I'm becoming a fan of these Cliff's Notes business books. I've read Consulting Demons and The Witch Doctors, each of which boils down and denigrates management consulting jargon and fads. The Guru Guide heaps praise on many of the same people. I'll write a review of the utility of this new one after digging into it.

I could use some exercise, and

A New Kind of Science

PRSA on Blogs Pitching Blogs:

PRSA on Blogs

Pitching Blogs:
Latest Type Of Online Media Vehicle May Provide Valuable PR Opportunities

By Lloyd Trufelman and Laura Goldberg

Having only emerged on the scene a few years ago, a growing audience of Web-savvy newshounds has quickly taken to getting their news and views from blogs. This trend has caught the notice of established Internet news sources, which have joined in the game. Recently, our client MSNBC.com (www.msnbc.com) unveiled a collection of blogs on its site. In addition, our agency handled press for the successful launch of the pop culture blog Plastic (www.plastic.com), which was begun by the editors behind the Webby award-winning e-zine Feed (www.feedmag.com).

Publicists have long sought means for reaching highly targeted audiences, including media reps, in order to drive buzz about their clients. With the kind of traffic and targeting that any of the aforementioned sites generate, topic-specific blogs can fit the bill.

The most important thing a publicist can do before pitching a blogger is to carefully read his or her blog. Unlike beat reporters at typical news outlets, bloggers are extremely idiosyncratic in choice of subject matter and slant. In order to begin a conversation with one - and it should be viewed as a conversation, rather than a pitch - it is vital that you are well-acquainted with the interests of the blogger. Many of them still consider their sites to be personal forums for their views and perspectives, and are wary of corporate or PR interference.

Bloggers blog because they suspect the mainstream media of being swayed by the wily publicists. They present an alternative, personal viewpoint. They are proud of their independence. They're going to have fun skewering flaks who call to seek placements.

Doc posts a nice blow-up

Doc posts a nice blow-up of the different rates of change from the Long Now Foundation:

Lots of my applications (Outlook,

Lots of my applications (Outlook, Mozilla, Outlook Express, etc.) had begun crashing my main machine here at Internet Time World Headquarters, so this morning I took the drastic step of slipping my Win XP CD into the computer and telling it to reformat my hard drives. To my utter surprise, it worked. None of the nasty surprises reinstalling Windows used to throw at you.

A few hours later, I am reinstalling Office, PaintShop, camera drivers, and a number of old favorites. I stashed my content on a network drive during the formatting stage, so that was simply a matter of copying it back into place. The system appears to be stable. And faster. Whew! Messing with one's hard disk feels like a high-wire act without a net.

Incoming email

Incoming email

Stopping SPAM Takes a Village

Stopping SPAM Takes a Village

On a typical weekday morning, my incoming email includes a hundred pieces of Spam. I could set my email program to filter out messages with the subjects of free, sex, hot, credit, viagra, breasts, insurance, and !!!, but that would stop neither the viruses that spewi forth Spam with random names nor the deviant Spammers who title their crud "Please help me" and the like. Me against a rising tide of scurrulous Spammers? I've got other things to do with my time. I'm outnumbered. I'd lose.

What if, instead of each of us trying to engage the Spammers one-to-many, we were to link arms and even up the odds. Think Napster in reverse. If a bunch of us agree that a piece of Spam should not get through, it will be diverted from our incoming email. That's precisely the idea behind a free service called Cloudmark.

36,000 of us have become members of Cloudmark's SpamNet. Of 5,000,000 emails processed today, SpamNet tagged 1,700,000 of them as likely Spam. Not messing with these saved us nearly 5,000 hours collectively.

A few minutes ago I fired up Outlook. Items flowed into my Inbox. Two out of three would flash and disappear (as they were stowed in my Spam Folder.) More than half of what's left is still Spam. Instead of deleting this Spam, I click a button to "Block" it. This moves the message to my Spam Folder AND sends a message back to SpamNet casting my vote to blacklist the sender.

All for one and one for all!

Makes me wonder what other problems computer-mediated community action might tackle.

In Sydney I visited an

In Sydney I visited an amazing bookstore, Books Kinokunita. Racks and racks and racks of books, and then you find there's an entire other wing filled with Japanese books and Chinese books. Deep section on design and graphics. Absolutely fantastic and if you're a booklover, not to be missed.

Doc Searles pointed me to Adina Levin's Bookblog. One way to squeeze more out of a book: read what other people are saying about it.

Another notch on the gun: On Dialogue, an essay in free thought by Robert Grudin. His premise: dialogue, even in one's own mind, is consciousness-raising and liberating, and hence that dialogue is an essential component of liberty.

"Pathways, designed for swift access from point to point, ignore the untrodden areas between and beyond them. Systems of any sort tend to grow self-protective, unfreindly to the new. Vast systems that seem just and effective can turn out to be huge conspiracies of collective ignorance, or cynical artifices of power."

"...the mind cannot be liberated from constraint until it is freed from its own inner tyrannies."

"When we see and move linearly, we are actually in the midst of another life, multidimensional and oceanically rich. Sometimes this other life makes itself visible to us, in a natural event or family tragedy or rite of passage or sudden flow of emotion. But monstly it remains hidden, obscured by the rush of our daily affairs, our lack of practice in focusing on it, our shyness in confronting its vastness. Yet this obscurity does not annul its power. Indeed, the multiple dimensions of our lives often exert a power over us that is directly propoortional to our ignorance of them."

"The dialogic mind is cosmopolitan in terms of ideas. It accepts the premise that a given idea or experience can be viewed from a variety of perspectives and that while some of those various perspectives may be mutually complementary, others may disagree with each other. The dialogic mind derives it sophistication, its play of irony and excitement, from acceptiong this variety and stress."

Some subjects, however, do not always admit of inclusive and coherent treatments. They are what you might call shaggy subjects: topics so ful of contradictions and ramifications that it would be barbaric and unfair to package them in essayistic treatments. Free thought and dialogue are among such subjects."

"They misunderestimated me." -- W

"They misunderestimated me." -- W

"It's not the way America is all about." -- W

Disaster can be liberating.

Disaster can be liberating.

Outlook, probably the least favorite program on my hard disk, just vaporized all of my email and calendar files for the last year.

Down the tubes go all the reminders, passwords, messages to follow up, requests for information, and pointers. Poof! Nothing there. "Cyclic redundancy check."

Now I'm beginning to see my empty mailbox as a clean slate. Those old reminders and obligations are down the tubes. It's a new day. If something's important, I'll remember it. Maybe I should flush my email every day!