“web”
143 posts under this tag.
David Friedman ELZR introduces a fascinating classification of human cooperation in The Machinery of Freedom ELZR. There’s
force (imposing my end on you),
trade (“I’ll help you achieve your end if you help me achieve mine”),
and love (“making my end your end”).
The definition of love alone is, I think, a great achievement. It surely doesn’t include everything we mean by that impossibly burdened word (it doesn’t mention romance, liking or sex) but it does reveal one of love’s most important yet often implicit threads. It is abstract yet the more likely we are to call a love pure, the more likely it is about A caring about B for B’s sake alone.
An interesting exercise came to mind after reading the classification: What human activity/field corresponds to each kind of human cooperation?
The first two kinds are straightforward loosening words up a bit: Politics is the exercise of force. Economics is the exercise of trade. With love, I stumbled for the longest time. I have an answer now.
The exercise of love is… technology. A tool is the purest embodiment of love, of making someone else’s end your end. That’s why technology is so ambiguous, its ends are its users’ ends. Giving you a tool is the ultimate act of love, the more so the more control of it I give you, because by doing that I make my end your end, whatever your end may be—defending your life or stealing. Think of the geeks that cobbled up the internet, ignoring wtf the thing would be used for, coding only so that it would allow for it.
Don’t dismiss this as one geek’s techno-euphoria. There’s something deep in here. Technology is the exercise of love. “If you want to do good, work on the technology, not on getting power.” Nothing less than the meaning of our lives could be here.
Enough is enough. I don’t overmuch care for my looks but as Scott Adam says: “physical appearance is for the benefit of others.” It’s been years now and them comedones (white- and blackheads), papules, pustules, nodules, cysts, and milia ain’t getting any better by themselves. I’ve buried my pimpled head long enough!
I’ve tried several treatments over the years but nothing has really made any difference. Now, I’m going to start following the regimen suggested at Daniel Kern’s Acne.org, where I’ve found hope and, to my surprise, perhaps the best online store I know of.
More than a store, it’s a community and a resource for people fighting acne. A real community and a real resource, not like those crappy, dishonest spamsites parasiting the web. It’s usable and helpful, aesthetically pleasing and modern yet not flashy. Huge effort has been put into countless details across the website—you can tell by being pleasantly surprised at every turn. It’s enormously didactic, deploying at once both excellent copy, ingenious photos, superb diagrams, detailed videos, in-depth tests, and subtle yet effective graphic design.
Overall, the most amazing thing is that in this cynical spam-full age, you (at least I) come to believe Daniel Kern honestly cares about fighting acne.
So, check out Acne.org if you have acne, if you’re interested in online commerce/communities, or if you’re interested in the future of retail medicine.
(Peter Morville narrates an interesting, similar experience finding a kooky cure to his back pain thru the web in Ambient Findability, p 163)
As part of our WUXMs (Weekly User Experience Meetups, a tiny event of fine people), Chris crafted Tonight Radio, a very cool mashup to listen to the bands playing in town tonight, this week, this month; the idea is to make it easier to find and sample new cool bands to go watch live.
I was going to wait announcing it until I got my Caltrain timetable redesign finished but today Tonight Radio won mashup of the day and I couldn’t hold any longer.
Grouped under the ARG, Alternate Reality Gaming, label for lack of a better term. I think all 3 exemplify something new, unsettling, and fascinating that I don’t yet have a word for.
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Little BrotherELZR, now available as atoms and bits, has a glorious climax of hundreds of vampires invading San Francisco’s civic center, messing with general paranoia.
> RULES FOR VAMPMOB
> You are part of a clan of daylight vampires. You’ve discovered the secret of surviving the terrible light of the sun. The secret was cannibalism: the blood of another vampire can give you the strength to walk among the living.
> You need to bite as many other vampires as you can in order to stay in the game. If one minute goes by without a bite, you’re out. Once you’re out, turn your shirt around backwards and go referee—watch two or three vamps to see if they’re getting their bites in.
> To bite another vamp, you have to say “Bite!” five times before they do. So you run up to a vamp, make eye-contact, and shout “bite bite bite bite bite!” and if you get it out before she does, you live and she crumbles to dust.
> You and the other vamps you meet at your rendezvous are a team. They are your clan. You derive no nourishment from their blood.
> You can “go invisible” by standing still and folding your arms over your chest. You can’t bite invisible vamps, and they can’t bite you.
> This game is played on the honor system. The point is to have fun and get your vamp on, not to win.
> There is an end-game that will be passed by word of mouth as winners begin to emerge. The game-masters will start a whisper campaign among the players when the time comes. Spread the whisper as quickly as you can and watch for the sign.
> M1k3y
> bite bite bite bite bite!
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Freezing Grand Central, a most elegant improv piece (via Alan).
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That great Free Hugs campaign a while ago:
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Got more samples along these lines? I wanted to quote something from SFZero but I’m still too new to it…
oSkope many views are a nice, rich way to browse Amazon (for other engines it isn’t nearly as successful) but this simple diagram in particular —plotting book covers against price and sales rank— is genuinely useful. Shame there’s no option to choose your axes. How about price vs stars? Stars vs. length?
Apropos of trusty old Cartesian planes, ain’t it weird they weren’t with us 500 years ago? What could be more straightforward than a coordinate system?
Amazing how compelling a dollop of interactivity an underwear catalog makes. (via reddit)
I figured someone had to have done something like this for hardcore porn. Apparently, the Virtual sex with.. series is just that. (Via NYT) Anyone tried it?
Or how about a 360 interactive a la Apple product showcase? Someone has to have done something like that but my google fu fails me. Anyone knows of something like that?
Whoodathunkit? Yahoo!’s omg! gossip rag is one of the most enticing and innovative web interfaces I’ve seen in a while.
Jump Point’s presentation the other day neither captivated nor disappointed me. Author Tom Hayes rapid-fired commonplaces for every enticing bit. About to forget it as yet one more glib futurist book, I saw it again today at my B & N, added it to my skimming pile (oh, the joys of American bookstores: they’re even better places for free reading than public libraries), and stumbled on a quote that took my heart away:
 ..they simply believed anything was possible and that the path forward would reveal itself eventually. When they hit a wall, they turned to the Internet, to the crowd, for help.
Their story is not an uncommon one. Everywhere you look, you can see entrepreneurs and true believers hurling themselves into the unknown, fortified only with a faith that the “net” will catch them, that small acts by many everyday people can be as useful as the influence of the connected and powerful.
To the Internet-based cognitive tools that are changing our lives — Wikipedia, Google, and the others of their kind, now and in the future.
his phrase. In 20 something words he nails down the present and future I want to contribute to, belong to.
In the spirit of Little Brother I’ll post about a password stealing idea I’ve worried about for a while now: using email addresses as login names. It’s now a very widespread practice among webapps and the reason is they’re a convenient way to eliminate having to come up with and remember a unique identifier and in the process they make you give your email address away, which is a boon for marketing and for easily authenticating you. In itself there’s of course nothing insecure about the practice but the problem is that they make registrations so simple and straightforward that suddenly they’re everywhere and you don’t think twice about them.
And the true problem is that a lot of people use one password everywhere and the chances are high many will choose the same password for the webapp du jour as for their lifelong email account.
So imagine an unscrupulous webapp maker who creates a popular webapp requiring registration and doesn’t hide from himself user passwords (there’s absolutely nothing but his own conscience preventing him). It is now a simple matter of running a script to test each email address password pair for him to coolly break a good bunch of email accounts.
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