Darwin Among the Machines (1863)
We take it that when the state of things shall have arrived which we have been above attempting to describe, man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man.
Walking barefoot has gone out of fashion, but sensible people are reviving the habit. —Nan Shepherd (1945)
Hypothesis. Question? Test. Science! First ever black hole image released – BBC News
Translation
My daughter told me I should get some face lotion for my dry skin. I thought she would ask why I was crying, but the dry salt of my tears hid among the rough flakes of skin. I can feel them yet there, crusted on my swollen face.
This is how a sixteen year-old says I love you: Use lotion, Dad.
Agnus Dei,
Qui tollis peccata mundi,
Miserere nobis.Agnus Dei,
Qui tollis peccata mundi,
Miserere nobis.Agnus Dei,
Qui tollis peccata mundi,
Dona nobis pacem.
If money were no object, what would you do? If your income were divorced from your work, what would you do? If you earned the same regardless of occupation, what would you do? If dad were rich and you wanted for nothing, what would you do?
LinkedIn has a nifty feature that shows the commuting distance to a given workplace. It also asks, “How do you prefer to commute to work?” Well, since I would prefer to walk, I selected that option, so now I can see that a 43 minute drive would be a 7 hour, 46 minute walk.
BBC Radio Essays
I would lie awake late at night listening to the BBC World Service on my shortwave radio, sometimes guided by a printed program guide, but more often than not taking things as they come, which is one does with broadcast media. One of the more interesting tidbits, to my inquisitive teenage ears, was a regular essay. Turns out The Essay, or its kin, still exists, is broadcast on BBC Radio 3, and can be streamed online.
I listened to the series on paying attention —you may have noticed that attention is a particular bugbear of mine—last year around this time, and spent some time yesterday in forests.
Today, I think I’ll visit ancient Wales.
A comment on attention and time, from the introduction of Eric Sloane’s Seasons of America Past (New York:Funk & Wagnalls, 1958)
Impulses
ACTION REQUIRED, the e-mail demands, NOW. Give money. Sale! One day only! You might like this video. Sign our petition now or terrible things will happen! How was your test? Sign our petition now to stop terrible things from happening! What kind of furry animal are you? Fill out this spreadsheet with data from another database, then copy data from spreadsheet column A to spreadsheet column ZZ. What’s for dinner? ACTION REQUIRED.
But can you act when all of these demands force themselves upon your attention and you’re twitching this way and that attempting to satisfy every competing request?
We’ve been trained to act on our impulses immediately, and to expect instant gratification: Send an instant message to your daughter at school asking about whatever springs to mind or sharing something interesting; pop off an unread e-mail to your Congressperson objecting to the latest idiocy; watch a movie now in the comfort of your car; order pizza delivered.
Whereas earlier we couldn’t, and had to learn patience; now we can, and the discipline of patience is but a fleeting memory. As is our memory: Can you hold a thought in your head longer than it takes to tweet at someone?
Can you respect your time and another’s?
Can you think before you act?
It’s still the Associated Press building to me.
Is anyone surprised at this? The Hottest Chat App for Teens Is Google Docs – The Atlantic
AT&T Fell for Media’s Inflated Sense of Self-Importance
AT&T has entered the “content” business in a big way with the acquisition of DirecTV and TimeWarner. This is not a new plan–they’ve been in love with the glamour of Hollywood for years. But it is a misguided plan.
AT&T hopes to provide value and profit from exclusive content through focused advertising.
This is a fool’s errand.
Folks other than I have talked about the reasons why in greater depth for many years, most notably Andrew Odlyzko, formerly of AT&T Labs, whose “Content is Not King,” First Monday 6(2) (February 2001), persuasively showed that people pay overwhelmingly for connectivity, not content. And not by a small margin either.
The reason is simple: humans are gregarious. We are social animals. We want to reach out and touch someone.
Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail,” Wired (October 2004), proposed that given infinite, instant availability, sales of things, particularly digital things, would tend to accumulate in the long tail of a Pareto distribution. That is, value would accrue to things that had had minimal value before. A follow-up analysis in 2008 at the Harvard Business Review noted that while this was the case, the long tail got longer and thinner so that the popularity of things on the thick end of the tail became more significant. (You can also see this with the current shape of income inequality.) That could provide hope for AT&T’s advertising plans, but it doesn’t because of two factors outside of their control: time and the supply of money.
Time and money are finite. Time cannot exceed 24 hours in a day. Money is artificially constrained by governments and their agents. But content is essentially infinite: All humans create things. All humans want to share what they create. Alas, there’s nowhere near enough time to consume infinity, and one’s personal supply of money restricts what little can be consumed even further. I have to choose between writing this, correcting a crontab entry, listening to a podcast, making dinner, lifting weights, watching the Champions League, voiding my bladder, and so forth. No matter how much I want to find out right now what happens when the Ice Dragon breaches the wall, for me to actually do so depends on those two things: time and money. I’ll wait, and get the DVD from the library.
Money, or the lack thereof, is what drives cord-cutting. Even were there infinite money, time trumps everything.
Or, you cannot squeeze blood from a stone.
Oddly enough, AT&T’s earlier foray into advertising, the Yellow Pages, was similarly profitable for the same reason telephony is: connectivity. Rather than shouting at customers “Buy Me!” the directory simply sat there, waiting, until a customer needed something. It, and the classified advertisements which provided much of newspapers’ revenues, have been gradually replaced not by pay-per-click advertising on the Internet, but by services built on the World Wide Web–basically Google and Craigslist–accelerated by the general decline in local economies. Everyone’s price sensitive these days.
But I can understand why they’ve made the choices they did. There’s only a certain amount of time in a day, and only a certain amount of time to spend reading or listening or watching or working or playing. It’s highly likely that the idea connectivity is more valuable than content never crossed their minds.
Better to invest in what enables connections and carries all of that content. And ignore the shiny distractions.
So what next? What could AT&T do with what they have?
What do people actually need? It’s not more advertising and it’s not more content; there’s plenty of that.
I was taking this survey about the “Parent Dashboard” for the New York State Every Student Succeeds Act Plan until I got to these questions. I have, as they say, issues.
Shards
If you must
sit inside on a bright and lovely day,
focused--for definitions that mean unfocused--
on the screen of a computer,
not the world around,
then the shards of life caught in its web
offer beautiful solace.
Yesterday, while cleaning the screen, I found brief mention of Neja Tomšič’s Tea for five: Opium Clippers. It’s a transitory artwork, a happening, so I can’t experience it, but I’m struck by what tiny glimpse the Internet has given me of her work.
The Lost Words is a simply gorgeous book, and one for which the audiobook is required—so you can hear the birds sing.
Mine. Go away.
Oops
The details of the scandal the Justice Department uncovered are notable not because rich people try to buy their way into higher education, but because these particular rich people went about it all wrong.
Libby Nelson, Vox
Or, as The New York Times wrote in their editorial on the subject:
But this case is not a defense of meritocracy in college admissions. What the government actually is defending is private property — the right of the colleges to make their own decisions about admissions, and collect the payments.
…
The key distinction here is not just the amount of money, but the recipient. A donation is made to a college, while a bribe is paid to an employee who, in effect, is stealing an admissions slot, hawking it and pocketing the proceeds. (To comply with tax laws, donors also cannot engage in an explicit quid pro quo with a college. The well-rehearsed pas de deux of donations and admissions must be made to appear as a voluntary exchange of gifts, not a binding deal.)
And Frank Bruni is as shocked as everyone else is to find gambling going on in Casablanca.
But let’s pretend for a moment that nobility, aristocracy, and meritocracy are not synonyms for plutocracy, and study for next month’s SAT.
I suddenly felt as though I’d failed a test I didn’t know I was taking.
Rainesford Stauffer
Exit Numbers
I recall being supremely irritated when Pennsylvania changed the exit numbers on I-81 from sequential to numbers based on the mileage. My complaint was that I no longer knew how far I had yet to go before getting out of Pennsylvania: the consecutive numbers were a countdown to my destination: 10, 9, 8, 7 ….
For some reason this was more important to me than the actual mileage.
DirecTV Plus option will no longer include regional sports networks.
—Business Insider
Um, guys, I don’t think you understand what keeps television on life-support. Or maybe you do.
Learning anything new today, kids? I did.
the meteor that created the Chesapeake Bay