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So I say our decisions about culture at large, about the question of how to spend our 100 million hours, I say these are rooted in personal ability to wield the tools of production. And as we said, 100 hours practice would get you a really long way.

Here’s my challenge. Right now, put aside 100 hours over this summer. Do it right now, in your head. Put that time aside. 100 hours. 8 hours a week for the next 12 weeks. One hour a day, or one working day a week. It’s one summer out of your entire life, it’s nothing. Okay, you’ve got that 100 hours?

Now for the next two days, go to talks and start conversations with people you don’t know, and choose what to spend your 100 hours on.

I guarantee that everyone in this room can produce something or has some special skill, and maybe they’re not even aware of it.

Ask them what theirs is, find out, because you’ll get ideas about what to learn yourself, and decide what to spend your 100 hours on. Do that for me.

Because when you contribute, when you participate in culture, when you’re no longer solving problems, but inventing culture itself, that is when life starts getting interesting.

Google is developing an operating system (OS) for personal computers, in a direct challenge to market leader Microsoft and its Windows system.

Google Chrome OS will be aimed initially at netbooks, the low-cost portable computers that have turned the PC world upside down.

Google said netbooks with Chrome OS could be on sale by the middle of 2010.

I wonder what it'll cost.

I have the utmost respect for an author -- or any artist -- who is willing to throw away the easy conventions of success, and embrace new, untested models.  Think of the mass of musicians who keep coming out with what's effectively the same songs, over and over, or the directors who "specialize" in repeating car stunts in one action movie after another.  There's lots of money in sticking to form and producing version x in a predictable, safe, never-ending series.

Mieville is different. 

While he's been categorized into a literary movement called The New Weird, his latest book proves that he doesn’t want to be labeled.  He has the guts and the creativity to invent something different, and for that, he deserves our support.  We should want to take risks with artists who are wildly inventive, dedicated, and unique. 

I gave up on "The City & The City."  But please buy it anyway.

So. They have this huge map of the Web and are aware of how people move around in the virtual space it represents. They have the perfect place to store this map (one of the world's largest computers that's all but incapable of crashing). And they are clever at reading this map. Google knows what people write about, what they search for, what they shop for, they know who wants to advertise and how effective those advertisements are, and they're about to know how we communicate with friends and loved ones. What can they do with all that? Just about anything that collection of Ph.Ds can dream up.

Tim O'Reilly has talked about various bits from the Web morphing into "the emergent Internet operating system"; the small pieces loosely joining, if you will. Google seems to be heading there already, all by themselves. By building and then joining a bunch of the small pieces by themselves, Google can take full advantage of the economies of scale and avoid the difficulties of interop.

Kottke on Google, in 2004.

(via Waxy.org)

Bit by bit, we'll watch the transformation of the Web services wilderness. The first stage, the pioneer stage, is marked by screen scraping and "unauthorized" special purpose interfaces to database-backed Web sites. In the second stage, the Web sites themselves will offer more efficient, XML-based APIs. (This is starting to happen now.) In the third stage, the hodgepodge of individual services will be integrated into a true operating system layer, in which a single vendor (or a few competing vendors) will provide a comprehensive set of APIs that turns the Internet into a huge collection of program-callable components, and integrates those components into applications that are used every day by non-technical people.

Looking to the future (from 2002).

A news report from Xinjiang. I'm pretty sure that Dan Chung recorded the video with the Canon EOS5D mkii.

“This planet has a physical geography with which we have already familiarised ourselves. But since the dawn of the first stories, there is a fictional geography, where the gods and demons live. We have created this big imaginary planet that is a counterpart to our own; and in some cases these places are more familiar to us than the real ones.”

Moore is intrigued by the notion that stories, and past events, can leave a physical trace. His insanely ambitious 1996 novel, Voice of the Fire, was contained geographically within a ten-mile radius of Northampton, with each chapter set in a different century, from Stone Age to present, and each written in a style suited to the time. It so happened that the final chapter featured a dog trotting about with a decapitated head in its jaws; eerily, soon after he wrote that passage, this actually occurred near by. At the time he wondered whether he had intuited the future event, or somehow willed it into existence (coincidence does not seem an option). What does he believe now? “Probably both. Ultimately I couldn’t say. I don’t think time is as we see it, and that means cause and effect are different from the way we see it.”

Moore can discourse at length on the convergence of modern scientific beliefs and ancient intuitions. In the end, he believes, magic is simply the creation of something out of nothing: be it rabbits from a hat, a plot idea from a blank sheet of paper — or the universe from a quantum vacuum. But it is also about individuality: he has no desire to convert anyone else to so “manifestly preposterous” a practice as worshipping a snake god. As an anarchist, a political persuasion that he stresses is simply about taking personal responsibility, he equates organised religion with fascism — both involve abandoning your personal responsibility to the group.

A good article.

Worlds 1, 2 and 3

Popperian cosmology splits the universe into three interacting sub-universes:

• World 1: the world of physical objects and events, including biological entities
• World 2: the world of mental objects and events
• World 3: the world of the products of the human mind

The main argument for the existence of World 2 and World 3 is the direct or indirect causation on World 1.

[edit] The interaction of World 1 and World 2

The theory of interaction between World 1 and World 2 is an alternative theory to Cartesian dualism. Cartesian dualism is based on the theory that the universe is composed of two essential substances: Res Cogitans and Res Extensa. Popperian cosmology rejects this essentialism, but maintains the common sense view that physical and mental states exist, and they interact.

The interaction of World 1 and World 2 is also an alternative to epiphenomenalism, where World 2 objects and events are real but do not have any causal action on World 1. Popperian cosmology rejects this for the reason that "downward causation" is not impossible.

Jumping all over the place at the moment. Got here from "ideaspace"...

Moore expounds upon his concept of psychogeography (that “the only lines of energy that link disparate sites are lies of information”) and Ideaspace (an idea influenced by Rudy Rucker’s essay “Life as a Fractal in Hilbert Space.”

“Obviously there is more to our experience of a place than the bricks and mortar. Our reaction to various locations seemed to me to depend upon the richness of the web of association that we connected w/ these sites…. If you are a practicing magician or poet [then] you have a web of symbol systems w/ which to decode even chance appearances in this area...

“…this hypothetical “space,” which I have labeled Ideaspace…. Maybe our individual and private consciousness is, in Ideaspace terms, the equivalent of owning an individual private house… the space inside our homes is entirely ours, yet if we step through the front door we find ourselves in a street, in a world, that is mutually accessible to everyone…. This would explain dubious phenomena such as telepathy or knowledge-at-a-distance…. The actual ideas represent the equivalent of solid objects in terms of that space. An idea may be a pebble, a rock, a mountain or a whole continent in terms of its stature…. Distances could only be associational in Ideaspace. Lands End and John O’Groates, while famously far apart in the physical world, are usually mentioned in the same sentence and thus are right next to each other, associatively speaking…. Time, as a phenomenon, doesn’t apply in the same way to the realm of the mind as it does to the time-locked material realm. We can think as easily about events ten or twenty years ago as we can about something that happened this morning, or we can think about something that might happen tomorrow…. If this were so, then this would explain, at a stroke, such phenomena as ghosts, premonitions, apparent memories of previous lives… even… de-ja-vu.

“Ideaspace, where philosophies are land masses and religions are probably whole countries, might contain flora and fauna that are native to it, creatures of this conceptual world that are made from ideas in the same way that we creatures of the material world are made from matter. This could conceivably explain phantoms, angels, demons, gods, djinns, grey aliens, elves, pixies…”

July 7 (Bloomberg) -- Dozens of Ethnic Uighurs marched in Urumqi, capital of China’s westernmost province, to protest against the detention of more than 1,000 people following the country’s deadliest rioting in decades.

So, things are happening. Twitter is down, again. I keep feeling unsettled about things like this. And on Monday I had to make an unexpected trip to the police station. Odd times.