The Narrative

The most famous pillow book of the 20th century is getting revised

Posted on by charlie

Here’s a great article (link below) on the book “The Joy of Sex,” which is getting updated for the 21st century (and women).

It’s really interesting to think of the world that gave birth to the book compared to the world we live in now. The old book is full of interesting stuff, but feels quite anachronistic, both in style and attitude. An update is indeed due.

In so many ways, I aso think a book like this is still needed to loosen up the tensions that still exist when talking, thinking, and having sex. Folks are still so stuck up.

Looking forward to the new edition.

Link: Revising the 20th century’s most famous sex manual – The Boston Globe

WHAT WAS THE most influential book of the 20th century? Perhaps you’d vote for “Relativity,” by Albert Einstein. But for my money, the book that blew the lid off the century could only be “The Joy of Sex.”

The Narrative

Do media endorsements of candidates mean anything

Posted on by charlie

I’ve been watching Obama rack up the endorsements. But, a quick check of the last presidential election shows that Kerry far outstripped Bush in getting endorsements from major news outlets (and including a huge number of folks who endorsed Bush in 2000).

Do endorsements make sense any more?

Link: 2004 Media Endorsements – dKosopedia

As of 10/26, our list below represents 97 endorsements for Kerry, 58 for Bush, and 6 who declined to endorse. Of the Kerry endorsements, 25 (25.8%) endorsed Bush in 2000, and 49 (50.5%) endorsed Gore in 2000. Of the Bush endorsements, 38 (65.5%) endorsed Bush in 2000, and 4 (6.9%) endorsed Gore in 2000. Of the “Declined” endorsements, 6 (100%) endorsed Bush in 2000. Using these figures, Kerry holds a 6-to-1 advantage over Bush in endorsement switchers, however that doesn’t include the 6 papers that switched from Bush to nobody which E&P does not track. If you include those, then it’s an 8-to-1 advantage.

The Narrative

Political and economic turmoil driving info-obsession

Posted on by charlie

Ok. But, are we just passive? Has there been an uptick in activism as well?

Link: Too Much News? – NYTimes.com

And the news is not just consequential, but whipsaw-volatile. Financial markets swing hundreds of points within an hour; poll numbers shift. This means that news these days has an unbelievably short shelf life, news addicts said. If you haven’t checked the headlines in the last half-hour, the world may already have changed.

(and why does the NYT always have a gratuitous link to the Jeebus-phone?)

Announcements/The Narrative

The ‘Quiet’ post

Posted on by charlie

07082008956-1

Every so often a site has the ‘oh, sorry for being so quiet’ post. This is sort-of one of them.

Stream of bookmark consciousness

I used to have the delicious auto-posting feature set up to share bookmarks right here, but as you can tell, it seemed to stop long ago (maybe around their big change?) and I can’t get it going again. So, if you want to know what I’ve been thinking, you can get a glimpse from my delicious stream (also see in left side-bar).

<http://del.icio.us/cschick>

Work writing

I think most of you know that I have been running Nokia Conversations.

<http://conversations.nokia.com>

Yeah, lots of my writing energy is going there. It’s been interesting and we’re trying to see how far we can go before getting fired. So far, there have been a few hand-taps, but we haven’t had to change or take anything down. My boss’ boss keeps telling me to try harder. As my wife says, ‘If you aren’t falling down, you aren’t trying hard enough.’

Visual contrails

The other place I have been quiet has been my Flickr stream (and my folks are upset).

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/schickr/>

The main reason is that my phone got munged by a car door and I stopped taking photos. I did get another camera phone, but it was a lower resolution and I was too snobby to use it (though it was more than enough a few years ago).

Well, I started taking photos again recently and will upload a few.

Another thing that has been affecting my online life is me toying with various aspects of my 1100 Club thought – moving over to a text-voice phone for a while. By removing some of the habits I have gained with a net-connected phone, I wanted to see what would be affected. And it’s been interesting.

<http://conversations.nokia.com/home/2008/09/announcing-the.html>

Internal machinations

I’ve been holding onto the thoughts that remain once I dump them into Nokia Conversations, partly because I am not feeling the urge to share them here (sorry). Oh, I have been sharing them in real-life with folks I meet up with, so, if you are interested, please seek me out. 🙂 And maybe get me a beer. Heh.

General/Science

Tracing paths in woods nearby

Posted on by charlie

Google EarthI’ve moved to a new neighborhood and there’s a forest nearby. Today, to get a better idea of all the trails, the dog and I wandered every trail we could find. I also has Sports Tracker on to see what a trace of the ramble might reveal.

The resolution of the GPS kept some paths that I walked over more than once from being overlaid, showing two parallel paths.

But, for me, it gives me an idea of all the paths I can walk there.

Innovation/Science/Strategy

Swimming the sea of knowledge (the Concept Web?)

Posted on by charlie

KnewcoI’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how to find, navigate, recombine, and contribute to … what’s out there, though mostly focused on science and the next generation of science ‘publishing’ (in quotes, since it’ll be quite different from traditional publishing, more back in the hands of the scientists like in the old days).

A friend pointed me to this cool site called WikiProfessional, where they have these cool info navigators. A quick perusal suggests that they focus on the ‘find’ and ‘navigate’, though I think they also have a wee bit of ‘contribute’ through the addition of semantics as you navigate and annotate.

There are a ton of collaborators working on this and I dug a bit deeper into the main one, Knewco, It was on their pages that I stumbled upon the image to the right, about the Knowlet, trademarked, but spot on representing what knowledge really is: a concept with a cloud of facts, co-occurring items, with a few predicted concepts thrown in.

I like.

UPDATE: And here’s a paper that goes into the details.

I like. A lot.

Philosophy/Strategy

The Electric Knife Syndrome

Posted on by charlie

2385188275 E3Cdf33A89I’m at the Mobile 2.0 conference in Barcelona. I was talking with Mark Kramer, and Bryan and Stepanie Rieger about the things we usually talk about. I had mentioned how I was at a conference where the enthusiasm for the ‘technology’ made folks forget to use simpler and better solutions. That led Mark to tell us about his stay in Albania where he saw someone using an electric knife to cut bread at a shop. There was no reason to use the electric knife, a regular knife would have sufficed. Mark suggested that it was using the ultimate tech to be cutting edge.

Another example of this came up later in the discussion. I then realized that we were discussing what could be called the ‘Electric Knife Syndrome‘, where the tech used is subtly inappropriate in relation to existing solutions. This is slightly different from Post-Optimal Objects, where the solution itself is useless. But I think the Electric Knife Syndrome occurs more frequently and we forget a simpler solution is available.

Image from tizzle