She’s everybody’s sister… she’s symbolic of our failure… she’s the one in fifteen million who can help us to be free.
“Watching TV”, from Roger Water’s amazing album “Amused to Death“, contains surely one of the more poignant statements of the value of mass media in evolving peaceful democracy that you’re ever going to hear. Given the events of the day, I suggest giving it a listen. (And if you haven’t already, you might want to buy the album, and listen to it on a good sound system, it really is awesome. )
Roger’s Yellow Rose was a student of philosophy. So was Neda Agha-Soltan. So was I.
While recently the precise definition of “torture” has been a hot button issue in the USA, I have just been reading about another form of cruelty that will hopefully one day be abolished by the Supreme Court, and that is the sentence of “Life without possibility for parole”. Having read the harrowing tale of Kenneth E. Hartman, it seems clear that the death penalty is probably a more humane sentence, which is really saying something. This isn’t a short blast of utter terror like an execution or being waterboarded, but rather an unending daily misery that lasts for decades.
Personally, I’d rather be waterboarded, despite having also recently read the harrowing tales of Mancow Muller and Christopher Hitchens, two pro-Iraq-war commentators who stepped up to the plate and found out for themselves exactly what Waterboarding is like, afterwards reluctantly declared they were in no doubt that it is torture, and although they certainly didn’t say it, effectively concluded that certain members of the Bush administration are liarsandwar criminals.
There are unlikely to be any conservative pundits imprisoned for life without the possibility for parole anytime soon, but I’m sure if there were, and they still had the ability to get published, they would be arguing just as vehemently that this much slower form of torture must also be abhorred and abolished by any decent and humane society.
The only good thing about LWPFP, vs actual executions, is that it leaves a small chance that these individuals may eventually be released and rehabilitated by a more enlightened America after a change in the law, which surely seems a little more likely now Obama is the one nominating replacements for the Supreme Court.
Here’s a screenshot of a link being previewed in the new Interclue 1.5 Beta, which you should install if you haven’t already.
See the hint next to the magnify cursor you get when you mouseover a thumbnail in a the new clueviews? When you mouseover the comics in XKCD you can usually see a little in-joke in the title hint. Sometimes, the titles are pretty long, and Firefox the tooltips don’t wrap. This has been a subject of some complaint, but thankfully, with the landing of the infamous reflow branch (count the dependencies!), this will be resolved in Firefox 3.
Yep, in the 1.5 Clueviews, images of sufficient size are thumbnailed, you can click to see the image full size, and then click again to go back from there. It’s pretty cool, and we think it’s a good compromise to showing no images, or a full size window with all the images, like Cooliris does (frankly, if I wanted to see the whole page, I’d just open a new tab).
I love this cartoon, and I wish he’d put it on a T-shirt, because Turing featured in one of my favorite assignments [1] while I was at UC, where I majored in Philosophy and Computer Science.
I was never a great academic, far too scatterbrained most of the time, and being up till 3am most nights running my BBS, playing Civilization, or online backgammon (FIBS 1700+, back when that was actually pretty good), sure didn’t help, but I do have my name in the credits of one academic paper, “On Alan Turing’s Anticipation of Connectionism”, because our logic lecturer, who later went on to become co-director of the Turing Archive, discovered a mostly ignored paper by Turing from 1948, in which he definitely did anticipate “Neural Nets“, which is pretty amazing given that at the time there was only one non-specialized computing machine on the entire planet, ENIAC. [2]
Unfortunately, Jack couldn’t figure out how to make Turing’s “B Type” networks actually compute something, so in a brilliant combination of laziness, sadism and cunning, he gave his 3rd year students the option of skipping one our 20% take home assignments for the year, and instead figuring out how to make Turing’s type B networks work.
It was fun trying. In the end, I was one of about 3 students who instead succeeded in making a logical proof that these networks couldn’t work, (as specified by Turing, anyway). As I recall, I had to prove it 3 times, the last by structural induction, because Jack couldn’t accept that Turing might have got it wrong. He gave in eventually and I got full marks.
I put this achievement at the top of my list of 10 things I’ve done you probably haven’t, back in Feb 2005. Number 10 on that list was in fact Interclue, which was in the prototype stages even back then. It took a bit longer than expected to actually get it out, to same the least. I blame Hofstadter’s Law. But I’m really happy with the new beta so far, although it’s going to need some testing and tweaking, and we’d love your feedback. So if you’ve got firefox, go for it!
I recently ran across the web based Mindmeister while reading about the proceedings of a recent NZKM conference on the blog of the prolific Michael Sampson. The map seen there that inspired me was drawn by my old friend Julian Carver who I really must get back in touch with. It’s very cool, and it imports Freemind files, which is the free app I used for the map I did for my 2.0 talk. I feel much better having the map in a web-friendly format :-)
It’s pretty impressive how you can drag the nodes around and actually do one or two things you can’t do with Freemind, but there are definitely a few kinks to be worked out, eg I had problems when one node was on top of another, and kept selecting the one underneath. Printing also wasn’t too flash.
It’s way too big to use as an embed really, but I can’t resist playing around, so here it is. You can zoom from the bottom left and click through to the larger version from the bottom right.
[update: removed it - slowing down the page a bit much, I should probably get in touch with them with performance tips for embedded javascript widgets... Here's a link to it tho - and if you haven't seen Mindmeister in action, seriously check it out. Most impressive Ajax I've seen in ages]
Actually I’ve thought of another thing I could say when people ask what Web 3.0 means….Wittgenstein says “Meaning is Use” (roughly speaking) and therefore Web 3.0’s meaning is bound to whatever use people put that phrase to. In general, I think they use it to mean “Some funky web stuff that supposedly wasn’t part of Web 2.0″
Unfortunately the meaning of Web 2.0 is vastly more complicated, because people use the phrase for all sorts of purposes.
Tony Hung argues very cogently that what’s really needed is a comments policy, not a code of conduct, but I think he’s missed the point. If you want to maintain the moral highground when you censor people who have got out of line in your comments section, particularly if you are in an argument with them at the time, or have a “history” with them, then it’s very handy to be able to point to a code that applies not only to them, but to you, and not just when you’re in the comments section. Otherwise you’re clearly at an unfair advantage. If when you point to these “principles” you can also point to the fact that a fair old number of people have subscribed to exactly the same principles, and that they were arrived at by a consensus process, then that defintely increases the height of your moral highground.
Whereas if you have a comments policy that doesn’t apply to you or your blog posts, that somewhat lowers it.
And the ability to censor people who have got out of line is the point. If you have no code of conduct or comments policy, then what are you going to do when someone posts something appalling? You either engage in ad-hoc censorship or you make up a policy in the heat of the moment (looks bad!) or if you’ve totally rejected the idea of censoring comments and it’s gotten out of hand then you might have to shut the whole blog down (as happened with Meankids and unclebobisms, which started this whole mess).
In general I see no reason that there shouldn’t be some shared principles out there that I can point to rather than having to point to my own. If there’s a badge (but the sheriff’s badge is awful, Tim, sorry) that makes it easy for commenters to spot the principles of my blogging and comments section, then all the better – just like the Creative Commons for copyright. I’m not expecting anyone come in and *enforce* anything on me, but then I wouldn’t choose to subscribe to a set of principles that I disagreed with, so if I transgress then I’ll withdraw and apologise. There are people out there who refuse to apologise for anything they’ve said, but I’m not one of them – I think if you can’t admit when you’re wrong, then people aren’t going to trust you when you claim that you’re right. More importantly, how are you going to trust yourself?
