This blog is back

This blog had been gone for quite a while, a while in which I never stopped writing, it’s just that I saved it to a local text file. You see, I wanted (and want) something quite different from this blog than what it is now and I was experimenting with new formats. I was close to figuring out what I wanted but then this whole wonderful Imagery media blitz got a hold of me and I’m focusing all my energies on it. So the new blog will be another while coming and I thought that it was pointless (and rude of my part) to not publish anything in the mean time.

Most of what I’ve been doing this past month or so has been reading my ass off. Oh boy, have I good taste or what:

• Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability

  As we build our Internet of objects, the permutations of sociosemantic metadata will create new avenues of findability. Where has this object been? Which objects were in close proximity to this object? Who touched my object? Where are they now? The era of ambient findability will overflow with metadata, as every object and location sprouts tags: social and semantic, embedded and unembedded, controlled and uncontrollable.

  Imagine the sensory overload of a walk in the park. Every path shimmers with the flow of humanity. Every person drips with the scent of information: experience, opinion, karma, contacts. Every tree has a story: taxonomies and ontologies form bright lattices of logic. Desire lines flicker with unthinkable complexity in this consensual hallucination of space and nonspace, a delicious yet overwhelming sociosemantic experience.

• Fernando Savater’s Mira por Donde

  En resumen: noto como si aumentase la insipidez y por tanto tuviese cada vez mayor dificultad en saborear lo que siempre me ha parecido sabroso. Para nuevas delicias, tengo poco paladar. Y eso me asusta, me asusta de veras. Empiezo a darme cuenta de que quizá acabaré triste, como cualquier imbécil. Pero os juro que hubo una alegría dentro de mí, incesante, una alegría que lo encendía todo con chisporroteo de bengalas festivas precariamente instaladas en las oquedades de la gran calavera… Unas cuantas todavía alumbran mi entorno. No sé hasta cuándo. Preferiría apagarme yo antes de que se extinguieran del todo.

• Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind

  To recap, three forces are tilting the scales in favor of R-Directed Thinking. Abundance has satisfied, and even oversatisfied, the material needs of millions — boosting the significance of beauty and emotion and accelerating individuals’ search for meaning. Asia is now performing large amounts of routine, white-collar, L-Directed work at significantly lower costs, thereby forcing knowledge workers in the advanced world to master abilities that can’t be shipped overseas. And automation has begun to affect this generation’s white-collar workers in much the same way it did last generation’s blue-collar workers, requiring L-Directed professionals to develop aptitudes that computers can’t do better, faster, or cheaper.

• Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom

  Unfortunately, the assurance people derive from this belief that the power which is exercised over economic life is a power over matters of secondary importance only, and which makes them take lightly the threat to the freedom of our economic pursuits, is altogether unwarranted. It is largely a consequence of the erroneous belief that there are purely economic ends separate from the other ends of life. Yet, apart from the pathological case of the miser, there is no such thing. The ultimate ends of the activities of reasonable beings are never economic. Strictly speaking, there is no “economic motive” but only economic factors conditioning our striving for other ends. What in ordinary language is misleadingly called the “economic motive” means merely the desire for general opportunity, the desire for power to achieve unspecified ends. If we strive for money, it is because it offers us the widest choice in enjoying the fruits of our efforts. Because in modern society it is through the limitation of our money incomes that we are made to feel the restrictions which our relative poverty still imposes upon us, many have come to hate money as the symbol of these restrictions. But this is to mistake for the cause the medium through which a force makes itself felt. It would be much truer to say that money is one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by man. It is money which in existing society opens an astounding range of choice to the poor man — a range greater than that which not many generations ago was open to the wealthy. We shall better understand the significance of this service of money if we consider what it would really mean if, as so many socialists characteristically propose, the “pecuniary motive” were largely displaced by “noneconomic incentives.” If all rewards, instead of being offered in money, were offered in the form of public distinctions or privileges, positions of power over other men, or better housing or better food, opportunities for travel or education, this would merely mean that the recipient would no longer be allowed to choose and that whoever fixed the reward determined not only its size but also the particular form in which it should be enjoyed.

• Charles Petzold’s Code

• Douglas Engelbart’s Augmenting Human Intellect

  There is no particular reason not to expect gains in personal intellectual effectiveness from a concerted system-oriented approach that compare to those made in personal geographic mobility since horseback and sailboat days.

• Murray Rothbard’s For A New Liberty

  As the great abolitionist of slavery and libertarian William Lloyd Garrison explained: “Urge immediate abolition as earnestly as we may, it will, alas! be gradual abolition in the end. We have never said that slavery would be overthrown by a single blow; that it ought to be, we shall always contend.”

• Jeff Hawkins’s On Intelligence

  The astronomer Carl Sagan used to say that understanding something does not diminish its wonder and mystery. Many people fear that scientific understanding entails a trade-off with wonder, as if knowledge leeches the flavor and color out of life. But Sagan was right. The truth is that, with understanding, we become more comfortable with our role in the universe and simultaneously the universe becomes even more colorful and mysterious. Being a tiny speck in an infinite cosmos, alive, aware, intelligent, and creative, is far more interesting than living on a flat, limited Earth at the center of a small universe. Understanding how our brains work does not diminish the wonder and mystery of the universe, our lives, or our future. Our amazement will only deepen as we apply this knowledge to understanding ourselves, building intelligent machines, and then acquiring more knowledge.

• Sherry Turkle’s The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Best title ever)

  We are surrounded by machines. We depend on them. We are frightened by how powerful they have become. Our nuclear machines have the power to destroy the world. We are suspicious of the new “psychological machines” and fear the hacker’s intimate relationship with his object. Its control over him is disturbing because we too feel controlled. We fear his sense of becoming a “device” because most of us, to one extent or another, have had that feeling. We fear his use of the machine as a safe companion because we, too, can feel its seduction.

All the above quotes were actually OCRed. Figuring out the software was one other thing I worked on and it has been quite a pleasant surprise (talking about OCRing, don’t miss Kevin Kelly’s recent Scan This Book! article — it’s long but boy ain’t it worth it). It’s all an important part of this new blogging idea I’ve been thinking about (for insights into where I’m heading, check out this post from Steven Johnson).

Future reading is quite more modest, mostly just Agile Web Development with Rails Second Edition (I’m not about to stay behind the Rails curve.), Tufte’s Envisioning Information (you can hear my heartbeat rising, can’t you?), Faulconnier’s and Turner’s The Way We Think and any two or more words on Javascript I can find (I’ll be damned but Imagery‘s next release will push the state of the art… and kick Microsoft’s Live.com image searching ass).