General/The Narrative

Burrito panelists judge local chains’ burritos – Boston.com

Posted on by charlie

“Emerging sub-culture”?

My ass.

I’ve been chowing down on burritos for a very long time, along with many others.

And in my day, it was hard to come by in Boston. I remember when Anna’s Taqueria opened, just before we moved out of town. It was close to work and I’d sometimes pick a set up for the family on the way home. Back then, my boy would share with us. Now he can eat more than one Super.

Every time I’m out in San Francisco, I make sure to pick up a burrito. I have my regular places, but I like the random one I might run across. Of course, I also head to the Mission.

When I was in grad school, out in Amherst, there was a tiny burrito place in Northampton called La Veracruzana. The owner was a hard-working bugger, from El Salvador, I think. Dang, my wife was there every day (I think I would never have married her if she didn’t like rice and beans). In short time, La Veracruzana crossed the street to a bigger and brighter place. Eh, the food was still great, but it lost some of that scrappy, desperate feel.

Boston.com tested a sampling of burritos from around town. There were a few names new to me. Looks like they preferred Anna’s. Now, why they didn’t get a burrito from Forest Cafe in Cambridge, beats me.

Link: Burrito panelists judge local chains’ burritos – Boston.com:

There is an emerging subculture dedicated to the unique and varied delights of the burrito, that most egalitarian of foods, which provides your protein group, your tortilla group, and your salsa group, usually for less than six bucks.

Strategy/The Narrative

Hmm, more on Facebook, social objects, personas, and so forth

Posted on by charlie

Stefan’s comment to my post on Facebook ("Facebook is a persistent Julie McCoy") got me thinking:

I regularly explain to people about how users have different personas for different services. Indeed, the way Stefan lists the services (see below), I’d even extend that to say that people have different personas for different social-object-centered services.

That then makes me think that maybe services should focus on a single social-object or maybe compartamentalize the activities around the social-objects they offer.

This then leads me to extend Stefan’s comment to say that Facebook is mixing too many disparate social-objects into one network, losing the focus and definition of that social network, the social-object that defines the network and how people portray themselves (personas).

Link: Lifeblog: Facebook is a persistent Julie McCoy:

Comment by: Stefan Constantinescu

I’m sure you’ve heard the founder of Jaiku give his speech on social objects. With that in context, back "in the day" when Facebook was closed and for college kids only I wold spend hours upon hours upon hours on it. College was the social object. The parties, the clubs, the get togethers, those were the days.

Facebook becoming a platform = let’s try and let developers create their own social objects! That is when it turned to shit because then Facebook lost all meaning.

Flickr = photos, YouTube = video, LinkedIn = professional network, Facebook = college? Not anymore.

Philosophy/Science/The Narrative

We’re moving into an oral culture on so many levels

Posted on by charlie

We’re rapidly approaching an oral culture. The fluidity of the Web seems to have many aspects of an oral culture in terms of how we can interact with so much of it in a non-literate manner – think videos, audio, images.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. But oral cultures had methods for maintaining what was transmitted orally. For us, everything is going digital. How will we preserve our digital memories?

The Long Now Foundation has been leading a lot of discussions around how to preserve digital records. They have countless stories of how, just in the past few decades, we have been losing data and access to information stored in digital format.

For example, they mention how on the USS Nimitz, opening older files in newer software showed slight differences in annotation and the like. Not a good idea on a nuclear powered war vessel.

In the same article, they bring up a great favorite of mine:

In 1986, for example, the British Broadcasting Corp. compiled a modern, interactive version of William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book, a survey of life in medieval England. More than a million people submitted photographs, written descriptions and video clips for this new ‘book.’ It was stored on laser discs – considered indestructible at the time – so future generations of students and scholars could learn about life in the 20th century.

But 15 years later, British officials found the information on the discs was practically inaccessible – not because the discs were corrupted, but because they were no longer compatible with modern computer systems. By contrast, the original Domesday Book, written on parchment in 1086, is still in readable condition in England’€™s National Archives in Kew. (The multimedia version was ultimately salvaged.)

The thing is, digital data requires software, in addition to hardware. And software is very difficult to recover to to its format, how it is compiled (software to make software), and how fast it changes relative to hardware changes.

In another article, they point out that the Society of American Archivists were going to delete their listserv data. Whoah. If the archivists are not keeping stuff, who will?

The Long Now Foundation asks:

Can anything last forever? The Long Now Foundation is micro-etching its 15,000-page Rosetta Project, an archive of data on human languages, onto a 3-inch metal disk it hopes will last at least 10,000 years. But we still may not have improved on 4,000-year-old technology. Asked what the most permanent medium is, Kahle doesn’€™t miss a beat: ‘€œThe clay tablets of the Babylonians. Their libraries are readable to us today.’€

Go and read these articles for more examples.

Link: Long Views » Blog Archive » The Digital Ice Age

Link: Long Views » Blog Archive » Publish or Perish

UPDATE 03mar08: I’m not the only one thinking of this (Steven Johnson).

Innovation

Seen: Add to Friends Shirt | Facebook

Posted on by charlie

STan and Alexis from Semapedia.org are at it again. THey’ve set up an easy way (link below) to add a friend on FaceBook. The catch is, you do it by reading the the friend’s QR code on their shirt.

Quite interesting.

Link: Add to Friends Shirt | Facebook:

Should I talk to the stranger that just passed me on the street? The girl in elevator, the guy in the bookstore … Everybody knows those moments where you wish you would have done something.

How about wearing a shirt that lets people get in touch with your facebook persona. We of course encourage you to talk to people, but sometimes there is just no opportunity. Scan the QR code on the shirt with your cellphone and add them to your facebook friends. Maybe they noticed you before too.

BTW, did I mention that here at Nokia you can now get a 2D barcode on your Nokia business card?

Announcements/Long Now/Science/Strategy

Craig Venter giving a Long Now seminar today (25feb08)

Posted on by charlie

Dang, I was not able to finagle a trip to SFO to see this talk. But, if you live in the Bay Area, don’t miss this!

Link: Long Now Seminars

Craig Venter is on a roll these days.  He has revolutionized science twice already—with the human genome project and with metagenomic analysis of whole microbial populations.  He is about to do it again by creating a new life form with a wholly synthesized genome.  His memoir, A LIFE DECODED, is a thrilling read.  He has shocking new perspectives to report every time he speaks in public.

Last month in Germany he said, "In one milliliter of sea water, there’s a million bacteria and ten million viruses.  In the air in this room—we’ve been doing the air genome project—all of you just during the course of this hour will be breathing in at least 10,000 different bacteria, and maybe 100,000 viruses….  This is the world of biology that we live in, that we don’t see, where evolution takes place on a minute-to-minute basis…. The air that we breathe comes from these organisms. The future of the planet rests with these organisms.  And the question is: If we take over the design of these organisms, does that really shift the balance in any way?  Or is it such a small portion of what’s out there that we’ll only affect industrial processes, not the living planet?"

"Joining 3.5 Billion Years of Microbial Invention," Craig Venter, Herbst Theater, San Francisco, 7pm, MONDAY, February 25.  The lecture starts promptly at 7:30pm.  Admission is free (a $10 donation is always welcome, not required).

The Herbst Theater is downtown at the Civic Center on Van Ness at McAllister (inside the War Memorial Veterans Building).

Long Now/Science

Another great Long Now seminar: Juan Enriquez “Mapping Life”

Posted on by charlie

Saying that the Long Now seminars are great is starting to feel repetitive. So, please go out and listen to ALL of them.

I’ve caught up with all the seminars that have been made available. One that I want to point out is Juan Enriquez’s seminar on biology, politics, evolution, and science (link to post on seminar, below).

Wow.

He’s such a low key speaker, but delivers such strong points. (though if you look at some of the comments in the post linked below, some folks were not as pleased)

There were a few items he mentioned that were pretty interesting:

1) He’s friends with Craig Venter and traveled for a time on Venter’s yacht, Sorcerer II, which was traveling the oceans, sampling micro-organisms every 200 miles by sequencing the whole she-bang. It’s one more amazing Nobel-worthy thing Venter has been doing that has absolutely upended biology, genomics, and science. Enriquez called it the age of Metagenomics.

Of note, off all the organisms that they sequenced, about 75% were absolutely new. That’s 75%. New. It really made clear the prevalence of microorganisms in the ocean and points to microbes being half the biomass on Earth. And these organisms are critical to the health of the planet and we are risking up-turning the cart through warming and acidification of the oceans.

2) In his lateral thinking way, Enriquez pointed out that the gas in coal mines is due to bacterial digestion of the coal. He said that mining is so dangerous, why don’t we just use bacteria and pipe the gas out safely? It sure would be better than strip-mining. Heh.

3) He went off on superbugs, bacteria that are resistant to every antibiotic we can throw at it. He blames it in part to our (inevitable) cleanliness in hospitals. As we wipe everything down, only the hardiest can survive. And then, we provide these bugs a great chance to infect people as we hack them open in the very same areas.

Made me pause and think about how we do medicine.

4) He also had a good comment on the decrease in the number of new drugs pharma has been able to come out with. He ascribes that in part to the mounting difficulty in passing safety standards. He called it the ‘Precautionary Principle’ – we are forcing pharma to make drugs that kill no one. But, how many thousand will die without the drug? He called on folks to weigh the needs of the very many versus the needs of the very few.

Kevin Kelly, a Long Now founder, suggested Enriquez call his view the ‘Pro-actionary Principle’.

Link: Long Views » Blog Archive » Juan Enriquez ‘€œMapping Life’€:

"All life is imperfectly transmitted code," Enriquez began, "and it is promiscuous."€ Thus discoveries like the one last month of an entire bacterial genome inside the DNA of a fruitfly is exploding the old tree-of-life models of evolution. The emerging map replaces gene lineages with gene webs.

Uncategorized

links for 2008-02-19

Posted on by charlie
Strategy/The Narrative

How to teach a service the connections I have in my mind

Posted on by charlie

I’ve been a big proponent of teaching machines by doing. I don’t mean that the machine is ‘watching’ my move and guessing what is going on, but that in the process of using the machine, explicit links are create, much like a path is warn across a park by the folks who use it.

Link: BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » The internet is the social network:

Yes, but the problem is that this relies on explicit, semantic links we just don’t use. It wants us to include rel= links when we link to someone defining the relationship. I just don’t see that happening. Sometime ago, the semantic folks wanted us to put vote links in (marking them as positive or negative); it never took off.

Here’s Brad Fitzpatrick of Google explaining the API:

I believe the killer social graph app will be the one that sniffs and understands our relationships without our having to take explicit action or by exploiting the actions we take for different reasons.

Uncategorized

links for 2008-02-18

Posted on by charlie
Long Now/Philosophy/Religion/The Narrative

Are Kosovars Albanians or Serbians?

Posted on by charlie

I grew up thinking that nations should be the scale at which people are governed. I could not understand why Israel didn’t just make all the Palestinians Israeli, why the Irish and British couldn’t just let Northern Ireland be part of the Republic of Ireland. And, as the Balkans, well, balkanized, and the Soviet Union collapsed, why was everyone moving towards smaller units of government centered around cultural lines?

Well, I’m past that. I am beginning to see that the end of the last 10 years has been more about the end of nations, much like the end of the 19th century was the end of empires.

Taking this logic to a further level, I really think current national governments will lose their power as cities and regions (city-states, anyone?) rise in political and economic strength.

For example, many states in the US are clashing with the federal government, making stricter environmental laws. Cities like London and New York are no longer really part of their nation, becoming true city-states, their mayors meeting heads of state for political and economic reasons.

And, empires fell apart as a sort of national identity arose. But, now, there are regional identities that are stronger still, and cut along cultural lines.

So, are the Kosovars Albanian or Serbian? Neither. They are Kosovar, much like the Austrians are not German, but Austrian, or the French Swiss are Swiss, not French.

It’ll be interesting to watch Kosovo form a real government and economy now that the question of their identity is resolved (at least for them). There’s a lot a work ahead for them and the global economy was not set up for tiny states to prosper in.

Link: Frenzy greets the new Kosovo – The Boston Globe:

In a move that inflamed tensions in this volatile region, the ethnic Albanian government of Kosovo yesterday proclaimed the province independent from Serbia, forming a new and very troubled country in Europe.