Another disturbingly insightful article by Mark Morford:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2006/03/24/notes032406.DTL&nl=fix
about the passing of time during the years of this US administration.

interesting read over at WorldChanging. RFID Viruses: A WC Perspective

If your refrigerator is on the Internet, somebody’s going to try to write a virus for it.

And I’m in the middle of enjoying Bruce Sterling’s perspective-inducing speech at South by Southwest.

(and last night I read the speech he gave at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies conference)

my head is buzzing… “become the change we want to see”…”make no decision out of fear” “the decline does not hold indefinitely” “a regional novel about the planet earth.”

Ah, I’m so sad to learn that Faz has passed away. What a fantastic man. I’ll always remember his kindness, kind words, enthusiasm and attention. He magically showed up at my bachelor party, hanging out in my backyard for a couple minutes, and giving blessings to my wedding. I am thankful for him, and I will miss him.

I don’t want you to come away from this blog without some entertainment, so here’s a section from Mark Morford’s recent editorial, Tab Energy Drink Kills You Dead:

Caffeine, of course, is key. It is our favorite drug, meth for the masses. A basic can of Coke has about 45 mg of the world’s most beloved drug. A good cup of strong coffee has about 80 milligrams. The average sickly sweet, fizzy energy drink, from Tab Energy to Monster to Liquid Ice to Rockstar, has anywhere from 100 to 200. And they all taste like some nasty Frankenstein inbreed of liquefied Skittles, road chalk and the blood of dead moths.

… the blood of dead moths, folks.

From Information Today, 21 Feb 2006 : http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb060221-2.shtml
Another not-so-subtle manipulation from the G. W. Bush administration.

It’s less than a month since President Bush announced his American Competitive Initiative that consists of doubling “the federal commitment to the most critical basic research programs in the physical sciences,” coupled with a permanent research and development tax credit “to encourage bolder private-sector initiatives in technology.” What he didn’t say was that to fund these research efforts, he would cut $2 million that supports a network of 27 libraries, including an electronic catalog of holdings within that network, which is used by those very scientists and corporations whose work he is encouraging. That amounts to four-fifths of the agency’s total library budget. How will the work of the libraries’ staffs change if these proposed budget cuts are approved?

The problem here is the potential damage to the process-level infrastructure, as well as the social infrastructure that contains the essential tacit knowledge surrounding these information systems within the Environmental Protection Agency. It takes many years to build up a system that can be torn down by a couple months of disuse and lack of funding.

I’ve been itching to create some timeline software. I just happened upon this discussion at W6 about making such a thing. I’m thinking I should get involved in an opensource effort that is trying to deal comprehensively with time-based information.

Please let me know if you are aware of any efforts.

These are stunning color photos from 1939-1943. I had no idea such photos existed. They are amazing.

Now that Yahoo has purchased del.icio.us, I find myself wondering what they will do with it. I keep waiting for Yahoo to show something interesting. The Yahoo 360 thing appears to be a bad implementation of a social network, and if that is what they do with a neat idea – a year or more after the idea is popularized – then… I guess I hope they just leave Flickr and del.icio.us alone so they don’t break them.

I do think My Yahoo is half decent, though this is probably because they have some decent content to add to it, such as local movies, weather and comics – though not many hipster comics…

the Google home page type thing – http://www.google.com/ig – is kinda cool in that it is an rss aggregated, integrated into a launch pad for search and gmail. Even this is starting to clutter up the scene, but at least they are introducing an aggregated at the right place in my web surfing experience.

I have an idea about a system that allows a person to express their values into a model, and then gathers product and availability information to propose optimized shopping excursions. I just wrote the following tiny bit after reading an article in Fast Company about things Wal-Mart could do to change its image (10 Steps to Turn Around Wal-mart). The comments on the article were very interesting as they quickly highlighted the standard dimensions that exist around the issue.

Executive summary of this idea:
“Free markets are responsive to consumer purchase decisions, but there is a ocean of information that needs to be considered every time a consumer heads to the grocery store, and weighing that ocean of information against the consumer’s own values and making optimized purchasing decisions is an insurmountable complexity. This proposal describes a system that takes the chore of collecting the ocean of information, then interpreting it through the lens of the consumer’s values, to support everyday consumer decision making.”

more to come on this topic…

My brother Jon has put a piece of his art up on eBay. I’m curious as to how The Seeds of Flame will fair.

I sold a really unique piece of furniture on eBay once, and it really didn’t generate much bidding, despite it having appeared on Boing Boing!

I wonder if the art world needs to first have generated a buzz about an artist, and once that has emerged then the artist is free to use various channels – including eBay – to surface the material for purchase.

Or, maybe there is a sufficient amount of intuitive folks with money who purchase new artworks on a good hunch. Much stranger things have happened.