Ratchet Up

[The World of Ends]

The World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else is a short, provocative philosophy-in-a-list by Doc Searls and David Weinberger:

3. The Internet is stupid: The telephone system, which is not the Internet (at least not yet), is damn smart. It knows who's calling whom, where they're located, whether it's a voice or data call, how far the call reaches, how much the call costs, etc. And it provides services that only a phone network cares about: call waiting, caller ID, *69 and lots of other stuff that phone companies like to sell.

The Internet, on the other hand, is stupid. On purpose. Its designers made sure the biggest, most inclusive network of them all was dumb as a box of rocks.

The Internet doesn’t know lots of things a smart network like the phone system knows: Identities, permissions, priorities, etc. The Internet only knows one thing: this bunch of bits needs to move from one end of the Net to another.

There are technical reasons why stupidity is a good design...

[Be sure to scroll down to the ten points.]

[The World of Ends]

[I'm Showing A Film At The Getty Next Week]

When asked if his art purchases in the 1960s were for investment or social climbing, collector Robert Scull famously replied: "I'd rather use art to climb than anything else."

I'm showing a film I made in 1973 with then-partner Jeff Vaughn at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Next Tuesday evening. After the screening I'll have a dialogue with Serge Guilbaut, a leading scholar of the period and author of Reconstructing Modernism and How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art.

On 18 October 1973, Robert Scull, a private New York art collector who, in the 1960s, built one of the major contemporary art collections in the United States, auctioned fifty works at Sotheby Parke Bernet for $2,242,900. The unprecedented prices these art works brought—amounts usually reserved for old masters—raised questions about art, business, and the market. America's Pop Collector is the title of a non-fiction film that chronicled this watershed event.

It was an attempt to write history with a camera...and now that it's history, people are getting interested. You'll need to reserve tickets, I just heard it's nearly sold out.

[Above: Ethel Scull by Andy Warhol]

[Grey Tuesday]

DJ Danger Mouse

"Tuesday, February 24 will be a day of coordinated civil disobedience: websites will post Danger Mouse's Grey Album on their site for 24 hours in protest of EMI's attempts to censor this work.

DJ Danger Mouse created a remix of Jay-Z's the Black Album and the Beatles White Album, and called it the Grey Album. Jay-Z's record label, Roc-A-Fella, released an a capella version of his Black Album specifically to encourage remixes like this one. But despite praise from music fans and major media outlets like Rolling Stone ("an ingenious hip-hop record that sounds oddly ahead of its time") and the Boston Globe (which called it the "most creatively captivating" album of the year), EMI has sent cease and desist letters demanding that stores destroy their copies of the album and websites remove them from their site. EMI claims copyright control of the Beatles 1968 White Album.

Danger Mouse’s album is one of the most "respectful" and undeniably positive examples of sampling; it honors both the Beatles and Jay-Z. Yet the lawyers and bureaucrats at EMI have shown zero flexibility and not a glimmer of interest in the artistic significance of this work." [More]

[Downhill Battle]

[Illegal Art]

[FightBox: Online Fighting > Live Audience > TV Broadcast]

Here's a new crossover form. Get ready for more.

BBC TV3's FightBox allows viewers to download a FightKit from the show's website with which they can fashion and train their own fighting Warrior avatars. Virtual Warriors then battle online, and the best progress to duke it out in the FightBox Area in front of a live studio audience. Which then becomes a TV show, replete with chirpy hosts. FightBox runs Sunday mornings: a clever counter-programming strategy to lasso the eyeballs of the Godless. They have a great slogan: "It's not the winning...it's the taking apart!"

The actual online tournament is now over, but you can check out the site. The FightKits still work, so you can make your own Warrior and skulk on the digital commons until the next tournament happens. [If there is one. I don't know how successful this actually was with viewers.]

This probably means we're destined for a Virtual Talent Search in which viewers create their own idealized characters, create a soundtrack, then voice-synth their way to looonged-for celebrity?

[Radio Blogistan]

If you're interested in blogging and politics, here are a couple of radio programs that mostly focus on the Dean campaign. Unfortunately, since voters didn't buy Dean a second round, these shows seem to have lost some of their fizz. But that's not their fault.

Christopher Lydon's The Blogging of the President call-in provides an interesting overview of the Dean campaign and its use of the internet. Naturally, the show itself has its own blog. Here's the great thing: you can get a big file with all of Lydon's interviews for the show--uncut--in one massive download. [Big file for big appetites.] BTW, if you like Lydon try his Whole Wide World series on globalism; find it on the nav-bar on the left. Excellent.

WNYC's always-good "Radio Lab" has a new show entitled "Will Meetup Rebuild America?" Intro: "There is a national crisis happening right now in America. It’s not the economy, or the war, or mad cow disease. It’s picnics. According to Harvard professor Robert Putnam, America is facing a national picnic crisis. Putnam says that in 1975 the average American went on five picnics. Today, the average American only goes on two. He also says that social isolation may be as big of a risk fac tor for death as smoking—it may even be bigger. Can websites like Meetup.com help solve this problem? Can they get Howard Dean elected president?"

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While we're talking radio, here's a link to a London program, Traffic Island Discs, in which the producer wonders around a particular section of the city asking people what they're listening to on their iPod. He does a brief interview, taps in, and the program's playlist comes from these chance encounters. Great idea. But the musical taste of swinging London these days is just so-so.

On the other hand, the station on which this program airs, Resonance, is one of my super-favs.

[Network This]

You may have seen some of these visual representations of networks some of the time, but probably not all of them at the same time. [Networks]

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Dave Hendler [now working at Smart Data Solutions] wrote to point us to "some very cool small group social software" that was presented at the just over O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. The author of the conference presentation, Matt Webb, posted his slides and talk on line, so you can check 'em out. A bit into reading his presentation, I realized it was a now much advanced version of an earlier prototype I posted a few months ago. Boy, has this project evolved. Actually it's more software that has learned from the birds [see below], only here it mimics the "contact calls" birds make to say "I'm over here...where are you?...everything ok?...ready to talk or move when you are."

The author, Matt Webb: "The model for Glancing is people sitting at work, focused on their own stuff. Every so often, somebody looks up to rest their eyes or because they're thinking, maybe actually to look at someone else. Maybe they catch someone's eye and that person nods back. And then they all get on with their work. If there's more of that kind of eye contact going on, the eye is more open (or obvious). If there's less, it's smaller. For work, read any small group situation: a pub or whatever. The software means you don't need to be in the same place."

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Danah Boyd on Social Networking. An outline of her presentation at the O'Reilly Conference. [Revenge of the User]

[The Kid: Wiretap Radio]

"Audible.com recently obtained wiretap tapes involved in an ongoing government surveillance operation in Princeton, New Jersey, led by Vincent Mastrobono, an ambitious Princeton police captain. The tapes contain conversations between a brilliant and reclusive 19-year-old Korean-American male - "The Kid" - and are targeted because of purported calls between The Kid and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. The Kid has lived in the penthouse of the Princeton Hilton since late summer 2001. The Kid's parents, whose work as consultants to multinational military consortiums constantly takes them abroad, installed him in the hotel after a devastating sports-related knee injury led to a painkiller addiction and a nervous collapse."

SPECIAL MESSAGE
"May 2002: At the request of the Office of Homeland Security, Audible ceases distribution of hit series, Wiretap. Listen here for a special message from Audible."

Background on the Series from Audible [3:00]

Episode 1: Army of One [First speaker is presumably Kim Jong Il] [25:35]

Episode 2: Patriotic Duty [30:13]

[Series produced by Brian Fielding & Mark Leyner]

[Audible] [Transom]

[Valentine]

 
 
 

Smoochie Woochies

 
 
 

[Optic Flow: Nikko Grooves]

In the summer, my eclectus parrot Nikko likes to hitch a ride on my shoulder while I ride the bike. I don't mean my racing bike, which can get a little dicey, but on the beater, just around the neighborhood. [To be safe, I ride on the sidewalk and away from downtown traffic.] Nikko has developed his own technique for riding: he clamps onto the collar of my tee-shirt and hangs off the back. That way if we have to brake, he's prepared. It's obvious he's thrilled to ride; he has even house-trained himself not to crap on my shoulder. A little nudge on the ear with his beak tells me it's time to head back if he has to go.

Nikko always shows a particular alertness on the bike, which I've assumed comes from the way his visual perception is stimulated by zooming along in proto-flight.

Finally, here's an article that explains the perceptual process behind "optic flow"--the apparent visual motion you experience as you move through the world. As we zip along, objects near us are perceived as a flowing blur, while those at a distance remain comparatively stable. Even though we cognitively correct this streaming blur, we use optic flow as a cue for proximity, distance and navigation. Birds and insects use it in spades.

And now the military wants to improve aircraft navigation by "learning from nature." I'm interested in optic flow because I want to understand my parrot's natural high. The Pentagon is interested because they want to make their own little birds with big video eyes to suss out the bad guys. Then bomb anybody that craps on their shoulder.

[More]

By the way, that's the real Nikko, not some celebrity stand-in from image search.

[Connecting Ideas With Rubberbands]

Regular Ratchet Reader Barbara Donelan wrote recently to relate how much she revered PlumbDesign's Visual Thesaurus. If you haven't run across this yet, be sure to check it out.

When I first discovered the thing--during a bout of searching for alternative visual interfaces--I tracked down The Brain Corporation, the company that presumably originated [?] the underlying software used by PlumbDesign. In addition to having a great URL, , they have a great slogan, "Collapsing the Time to Knowledge."

Here's the thing. If you're turned on by this visual interface, you can download your own Personal Brain, which is now in its 3.0 beta release. You can get started tieing your ideas together with rubberbands. I haven't tried it, since I'm a Mac guy and the beta is for PC users only. [Which means that the brain you'll get is half proprietary and half pilfered, but that's another story.]

A couple of years ago I called the company to see if they would help me with a project, but they didn't reply. Guess they thought my idea was brain-dead. Anyway, if I were computing on the Dark Side, I'd try this. If you do, let me know how it works.

Not the same, but also interesting is the visual search engine Kart00.

And closer in sensibility to most Ratchetees, the new Musicplasma.

And speaking of GUIs, graduated-last-year-from-Carleton Reed Martin is now in Berkeley with one foot at Apple and the other foot at Pixar. He did a senior thesis on zooming interfaces, and sends along this demo from Jeff Raskin, the creative force behind the original Apple GUI. It looks exactly like what Reed did here as an undergrad.