Brandymore Castle

I was thinking recently about the emergence of visualization as an important trend. Visualization is gaining mindshare rapidly among academics and information technology people. The overwhelming volume of data on the network is prompting this interest in visualization as way coping with this emergent, crushing tidal wave of data. There are billions of digital photographs online. I remember when I could see nearly every historic photograph with online access in week. There are trillions of texts and billions of images. The only way to make sense of this data, the only way to organize and explore this data, may very well be through visualization. Visualization is not photographs or illustrations. It is making data visible. Numbers, statistics, metadata, information about texts or images, the activity of users, authors, creators, contributors, visitors, etc. It is using visual means to make this kind of statistical data and the architecture of information visible and comprehensible. I lik...

We are raised in a culture that teaches us to always look for answers or winners. We are taught to expect the purpose of a question is to find the answer. We expect the goal of a game is to win. In Zen practice, students are given questions to ponder in the form of stories, called koans. I was taken aback when I realized the purpose of the koan was not to find an answer to the question, but to measure the progress the student has made in understanding zen. It was a shock, for this rational and scientific minded person, to consider there might be some other purpose to a question than to find the correct answer. Although one can find cheat sheets with common answers to zen koans, there may be no correct answer to a koan. The answer, although interesting, is not the important point of practicing with a koan. A koan is a measure, just as for those who believe in 'fortuna' culture (a common belief among Virginia cavaliers was that each person was born with a certain amount of forunt...

In a 'manuscript' culture, the distinction between written and verbal text is not as sharp as it happens in a culture dependent on printing. It appears we are heading into a new era of manuscript culture as social networked content emerges and comes to dominate, as documents become conversations and conversations become documents. In a manuscript culture, such as the period in the West before the invention of movable type, or in China before printing became universal, manuscripts offered a 'more fluid transfer of information' where the copyist (think of 'retweeting' or sharing information socially), could make changes to the text, purposeful or inadvertent, could leave sections out or add new ones, combine with illustrations (as in illuminated manuscripts, perhaps similar to Storybird). (References http://goodlifezen.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/the-road-to-nowhere.pdf)

The idea of cutting off blood flow to tumors and using 'diplomacy' to convince cancer cells to listen to the better angels of their nature are like the 'soft security' and 'human engineering' schemes used to protect wikis from vandalism. The run counter to the scorched earth policy of killing all cancer cells. But medicine is now looking to solutions in epigenetic therapy and other methods, which attempt to negotiate with disease instead of destroy it. We're so used to locks and gates, slings and arrows, we forget other ways.

I am trying to use Facebook more. I do not have a lot of use for the "poke" tool, which seems a bit childish. I wonder if it would be good to use the Poke method for content? What if you sent someone a book you thought they should read or you wanted to discuss. Sent a link to an ebook? Then they didn't reply. You might poke them about that post of content, not just generally?

My hands are small, I know But they're not yours, they are my own But they're not yours, they are my own And I am never broken --Jewel, Hands , Spirit

According to CNN , the twitter outage left users feeling as if they had lost a limb or left home without their cell phone. It is suggested Twitter needs competition to provide alternatives when an outage occurs, as they inevitably will. There were (or are?) a couple of alternative social microblog services available (is jaiku still running?). Of course, this won't help if multiple sites get attacked at once. What would help is Google Wave. This outage is an incredible opportunity to demonstrate the potential for resiliency a "federated" or distributed social media system has. Content in the Google Wave universe is independent. Every user can have a copy of a bundle of posts, comments, content on their own device. Multiple copies can exist on different servers. It could be possible for a group to continue working, or at least work offline with their content, during an outage and then when connection is reestablished, the changes can be merged back into the conversation. Th...