“remixes”
39 posts under this tag.
Excuse’s user testing went so well I decided to improve it. The original strip had color but it was somehow so distracting that black and white looked better. Then I found about the burn tool in a Photoshop tutorial I chanced on. What a difference it made! There’s a lot more focus! Much better outlines. (No doubt about it, learning Photoshop would be one of the best investments of my time…)
I think the changes are for the better. And so, it’s time for phase 2 of the plan: the metacomic. Print the comic on hard paper and carry it in your pocket, tote, whatever. Next time you’re bored in the subway, bus, wherever, show it to your right-hand neighbor (in the absence of a right-hand neighbor, feel free to substitute your left-hand one). Let it be your excuse. Report on what happened. :)
I have always envied Alexander the Great, because he had Aristotle as a personal tutor. In those days, Aristotle knew pretty much everything there was to know. Even better, Aristotle understood the mind of Alexander. He understood which topics interested Alexander, what Alexander knew and did not know, and what kinds of explanations Alexander preferred. Aristotle had been a student of Plato, and he was himself a great teacher. We know from his writings that he was full of examples, explanations, arguments, and stories. Through Aristotle, Alexander had the knowledge of the world at his command.
With that, Danny HillisW, E introduces his idea for Aristotle, an AI tutor that will move in a smarter web he calls the knowledge web. I find his dream somewhat unconvincing, somewhat pedantically unrealistic and somewhat suspicious of oversimplification. (Even though he considers it but a steppingstone towards Neal Stephenson’s Young Lady’s Illustrated PrimerWP, ELZR, which I love.) It is from the eminent responses to his essay where there’s gold.
I’m sure I’ve seen the stats before, several times, but still I was disconcerted when I read this paragraph:
As of mid-1981, according to Steve Bloom, author of Video Invaders, more than four billion quarters had been dropped into Space InvadersWP games around the world—that’s roughly “one game per earthling.”
Four billion quarters seemed a wild guess, but four billion people? In 1981? Surely there was something wrong with the reference. But there wasn’t. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, that was the approximate number of people only 25 years ago.
More alarming still, my dad was born in 1957. World population was around 3 billion then. We’re 6.5 billion now and counting. That is, my parents’ lifetime has seen the world population double—3.5 billion new souls.
I had surely seen a similar graph several times before but somehow it never got through my thick skull. I was overjoyed to realize just to what extent the world had changed in less than 50 years. Frankly, I believe I’ve found the proof I’d been looking for that the world is getting better. Isn’t it unambiguously a good thing that 3.5 billion people have been able to be born? Yes, many will live in what are to us abysmal conditions. But there is no worst quality of life than not being able to live in the first place. Death is always an option, life is not. Most of this growth comes from the poorest classes of the poorest countries but that’s also heartening in a way. There was never before reason to counteract the “ignorance” that made them try to have as many children as they physically could—it wasn’t ignorance at the time, it was bet-splitting. Most of them died anyway.
Never have so many children had the luxury of extreme poverty, to put it bluntly.
The other number shock today was from a talk by Google’s Marissa Mayer, platonic love and Google’s VP of search products and user experience:
[Starting around minute 3.25:] Most people are familiar with the concept that computers get faster all the time, they get about twice as fast every two years. It’s a law inside of computer science. But it turns out the same thing is happening with hard drives. So, around every thirteen months you can store as much information in the same amount of space on a hard drive, because the technology has advanced. Which means that every ten years you can store a thousand times as much information. So I thought I would again try and give you a sense of, in everyday form, how much content that is or how much this could change things. What this means is that if you consider a typical iPod, which today can hold tens of thousands of songs, [it] means that something the size of an iPod could actually, in the year 2012, carry an entire year of video on it, playing nonstop without repeats. By 2015 it could have all commercial music ever produced. Imagine buying an iPod where all the music is already loaded on it and you just decide what you want to access. By 2019 it could carry an entire lifetime of video in the palm of your hand, 85 years worth of video will be able to fit in an iPod. And by somewhere in the years 2020 you’ll be able to have every content ever created, sitting in the palm of your hand. Hhmmm…huuumm. Hhmmm…huuumm.
Again, I’ve played with such numbers before. It’s just they had never hit me so hard.
Lo! I am weary of my wisdom,
like the bee that hath gathered too much honey;
I need hands outstretched to take it.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra EEM
Vaya, me tomo algo asi como 8 meses pero hoy por fin termine de transcribir1 Si la naturaleza es la respuesta, ¿Cuál era la pregunta? de Jorge Wagensberg. Estan ya en linea los 531 pensamientos que tiene el libro y el texto introductorio. Solo faltan los textos al principio de cada capitulo, que no he transcrito y que probablemente ya no transcriba.
Lo mejor de transcribir todo el libro fue poder releer y pensar lentamente cada una de las frases. Hay muchas todavia que no entiendo y algunas que me parecen equivocadas, pero en cambio hay demasiadas otras que no agoto por mas que las repienso (y he puesto en negritas las mejores). He dicho ya que suelo juzgar una frase en medida de su «permanencia». Estas son de las mejores frases que conozco.
Lean este libro. Tardarán poco, y después les quedará toda una vida para repensarlo.
Javier Sampedro, El PaÃs
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these the homeless, tempest-tossed to me;
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Verse engraved on the base of the statue of liberty.
Until the middle of the 1920s,this country followed a general policy of unrestricted immigration; except for some exclusion of orientals, anyone who wanted to come was welcome. From 1905 to 1907, and again in 1910, 1913, and 1914, ,over a million immigrants a year came. They and their descendants have created a large part of our economic and cultural wealth. It would be hard to find any major public figure willing to argue that this policy was a mistake.
It would be almost as hard to find a major public figure who would advocate a return to that policy. Recent debates have been on how we should allocate and enforce our limited immigration quota among different nationalities, not on whether the quota should exist
In my opinion, the restriction on immigration is a mistake: we should abolish it tomorrow and reopen the most successful attack on poverty the world has ever seen.
One danger in this policy is that poor immigrants might come with the intent of somehow surviving until they became citizens, and then going on welfare. I therefore include in my proposal the condition that new immigrants should face a fifteen year ‘resi¬dency’ requirement before they become eligible for welfare. I also suggest that the federal and state minimum wage laws be altered so as not to cover new immigrants, or, better yet, be repealed.
We would receive a vast flood of immigrants, probably more than a million a year, possibly several million. Most would come from Asian and Latin American countries. Most would be poor. Many would work as unskilled labor for the first generation, as did most of the previous immigrants. They would bring with them levels of education, nutrition, and health, which would appall our social workers; they would live, by our standards, very badly, but they would live well by their former standards, and that is why they would come.
Unrestricted immigration would make us richer, as it has in the past. Our wealth is in people, not things; America is not Kuwait. If a working wife can hire an Indian maid, who earned a few hundred dollars a year in India, to work for her at six thousand dollars a year, and so spend her own time on a 30 thousand a year job, who is worse off?
As long as the immigrants pay for what they use, they do not make the rest of the society poorer. If increased population makes the country more crowded, it does so only because the immigrants produce wealth which is worth more to the owners of land than the land is worth, and the immigrants are able to use that wealth to buy the land. The same applies to whatever the immigrants get on the free market; in order to appropriate existing resources for their own uses, the immigrants must buy them with new goods of at least equal value.
The immigrants will get some governmental services for which they will not pay directly. They will also pay taxes. Given present conditions, I see no reason to expect that they will cost government more than government will cost them.
The new immigrants will drive down the wages of unskilled labor, hurting some of the present poor. At the same time, the presence of millions of foreigners will make the most elementary acculturation, even the ability to speak English, a marketable skill; some of the poor will be able to leave their present unskilled jobs to find employment as foremen of “foreign” work gangs or front men for “foreign” enterprises.
More important than any of these economic effects is the psychological effect on the present poor; they will no longer be the bottom of the barrel, and as Liberals have pointed out with some justice, it is where you are, not what you have, which defines poverty. Mobility will be restored; each generation of immigrants will be able to struggle up to a position from which to look down on their successors.
A policy of unrestricted immigration would bring us more than cheap unskilled labor. It would bring a flood of new skills, not least among them the entrepreneurial ability that has made Indian and Chinese emigrants the merchant classes of Asia and Africa. Once the new citizens become familiar with the language and culture of their adopted country, they will probably work their way into the great American middle class just as rapidly as did their predecessors of eighty years ago.
It is a shame that the argument must be put in terms of the economic or psychological “interest” of the present generation of Americans. It is simpler than that. There are people, probably many millions, who would like to come here, live here, work here, raise their children here, die here. There are people who would like to become Americans, as our parents and grandparents did.
If we want to be honest, we can ship the Statue of Liberty back to France or replace the outdated verse with new lines, ”America the closed preserve/That dirty foreigners don’t deserve.” Or we can open the gates again.
David Friedman, The Machinery of FreedomAM – Open The Gates
The American flag.. is worthless except as a symbol, a symbol of men achieving their ends by voluntary association, cooperating through mutual exchange in a free society. Capitalism.
David Friedman, The Machinery of FreedomAM – Might have been
People, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other’s values; media is the landscape where this interaction takes place; literacy is the ability to participate consciously in it.
..what we have to do first then is understand the nature of stories and why we tend to believe them, why we mistake our stories and our myths for fact, and that’s going to be the beginning of how we can dissemble them. The moment that I got this, was, I guess I was a freshman in college when the third, and probably still worst of the Star Wars movies came out, Return of the Jedi. Luke and Hans get captured by those little teddy bear creatures, the Ewoks, on the moon of Endor, do you remember this? And the Ewoks are having their little barbecue party or whatever they’re doing, princess Leia is allowed to be free, because she’s a girl, whatever, but Hans and Luke are tied up. Do you remember how they get out of captivity? C3PO and R2D2 tell the Ewoks a story. C3PO speaks perfect Ewok, and he’s all golden, they think he’s a god. He starts telling the great story of the wonderful rebels, Luke and Hans, and how they’re fighting the imperial starship. R2D2 starts projecting holographic images of this battles, and you see the little Ewok eyes going back and forth, going “Oh my god!” They’ve never seen holographic technology, they’ve never heard a story told this well. The story so wins them over that these Ewoks not only release Hans and Luke, but they fight a war on their behalf. They fight a war against those big robot things. In which Ewoks die. What I thought at this moment—as an emerging little media theorist—was: what would have happened if Darth Vader had gotten down to that moon first and told his story, with his special effects? They’d have fought for him, I promise you! They’d have fought for him.
...and the style of narrative changed too, we started to get shows like The Simpsons, which were no longer this [the traditional crisis, climax, sleep narrative]; we didn’t care of Homer, what, is he’s gonna live or not, is he gonna lose his job or not. No, now what we’re doing in this big chaotic fractal-like media-space where we’re all talking and exchanging ideas with each other, giving away software to each other, now it’s about making connections. It’s about finding patterns in this media space. When you watch The Simpsons, the reward is not the cookie that you get for making it through the story, the reward is making an association. Oh, here they’re satiring Alfred Hitchcock. Oh, this is a satire of that commercial. Here’s, that’s… Connections, connections and openings, connections and openings. It’s no longer a beginninzg, middle, and end: it’s a series of connections.
17% of Americans believe the world will end in their lifetime and only 23% believe in evolution. Why? Evolution gives you a way out, evolution gives you an alternative to this. Rather than the preordained story, we can write another one, we can change, we can evolve, something else can emerge. The frightening thing about having an emerging narrative is that it means there’s no pre-existing story. It means maybe we weren’t put here with meaning at all. Maybe there was no intent. Maybe meaning is something that we do. Maybe meaning is something that we make, not a pre-existing condition. That meaning is made. But how? Through collaboration. Ain’t gonna get no meaning alone, it can’t be done alone in a series of consumer choices. We’ve tried that one. If you could do it that way, would we be doing this conference? No. You can’t. You only get meaning by connecting with other people. Through the discovery of connections and interrelationships.
Question: Something that resonated with me was a comment you made about [how] we need to develop a new kind of story through collective ownership and collective authorship, and there’ve been a lot of news stories that have come through various different individuals. The example was given from the X-Files that the authorship was taken over by a collective of individuals. My question would be, where do you see that threshold point where it’s taken from an individual and moved into the collective?..
The bane of my existence this question, for a long time. Because the main thing I’m studying these days is narrative: why do we construct narratives on reality? why do we need narratives? and then, how can we develop new narrative structures? I think some of you got this novel I wrote called Exit StrategyAM, and the challenge with that was I wanted to create some kind of an open-source collective experience, but I didn’t want to have the situation were if you’re letting a whole group of people write Star Trek with you, one kid kills Spock on the second page, and then you’re dead. So far I’ve found that the easiest way to do collective narrative experiments is to let the collective recontextualize the story.. the Talmudic process really.. There has to be a certain amount of agreement at the beginning: we’re going to play with this myth, we’re going to play with this story.
As I mentioned a week ago, I am just starting to feel my way around McKinsey’s Quarterly but it’s been impressive so far. I recently finished reading the three complimentary articles I was granted upon registering (which is free) and they were all remarkable.
I used to dig Greek mythology as a pimpleless child and one of the myths I recall more vividly is the one of ArachneWP—I still remember my childish confusion and anger at the Greeks’ twisted moral sense.
|
RSS
email
