Notable Blogs/List of Lists

I've been perplexed by the lack of serious reviews of blogs. There is no reliable evaluation of blogs as there is of say, movies, books and music. There is no where to go to hear about the best street fashion blog, say. Sure, people have favorite blogs, but there is no sensible critique or systematic recommendations of them.

For the past several years, Rex Sorgatz at Fimoculous has presented a short list of the best blogs of the year, and his annual list is the closest I've seen to a good blog review. (There are blog sites that list the top blogs, but most of these have little annotation making them weak. ) Unlike most such year-end lists, the Fimoculous Notable Blogs list is extremely well researched, intelligent, and refreshing. First of all, Sorgatz apparently reads all blogs so his perspective of the landscape is stunningly broad. Therefore, he is capable of considering a blog with similar or competitive ones. In his list he'll mention comparable sites, or blogs that "you'll like if you liked this one." He includes the well-known sites if they've had a good year, but often seeks out the marginal blog, or upstart, if they are doing something interesting.

I also like his style and find that we often converge in our approvals of blogs we read, so naturally I think his choices are smart. Every year I pick up more than a few new great reads to add to my fairly selective RSS list.

This year I was blown away to find that the Technium, my book-in-progress blog, was ranked #11.

Fimoculous also produces the world's best meta list every year. Its annual List of Lists lists all the "best of lists" on the web. Categorized by kind. So you can get all the Best Movies lists published in English this year. Or Best Books lists, etc. The genius of this meta-list is the scope. There's more than 650 lists, and they include stuff like the list of Best Comics, Best Games, Best Videos, Best Predictions, etc. Fimoculous has done this for 6 years; it's a staggering amount of work. I am waiting for someone to parse these lists and come up with the Best of the Best Lists, which combines and correlates the winners in each category into one pan-annual list.

Breakup of the USA

In the world of scenario planning, the fact that something is unthinkable should not prevent us from considering it. The breakup of the Soviet Union was unthinkable almost until the day it happened. At the same time, of course, not every impossible thing will happen.

Among the most unthinkable scenarios for most Americans is the unthinkable idea that the United States could become the disunited or turn into divided states. Even though this union accumulated very slowly in the first place, and against all odds -- in other words it was not inevitable -- the fact that the USA will not always be as united, or at least united in the way it is now, is considered, well... unthinkable.

But as Juan Enriquez notes in his amazing PopTech talk, based on his book "The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future", no US president has ever died under the same flag that he was born under. That is, the borders of the United States has constantly shifted even in modern times. The last state was added in 1959 (after I was born!) and more could be added still. Americans are comfortable ADDING states, but it might not take much to subtract one. The outcome of the US Civil War has biased Americans to disbelieving in subtraction, but that might change.

In past decades bold American thinkers have imagined how the US might break up, but these were more thought experiments indicating the cultural differences within this large country. There's no shortage of maps showing the alternative arrangements of North American countries. One of the finest is Joel Garreau' s 1981 scenario of the Nine Nations of North America.

However the current economic instability and the general devolution of nation states around the world has led to several outsiders considering the break up of the US as a serious possibility. Two of these scenarios come from Russians.

In the past year or so, traffic to Dmitry Orlov's online presentation about the 'collapse gap' has soared as word of mouth recommendations about his scenario flourished. Orlov's argument is that the parallels in the state of the USSR twenty years ago and the USA now make an economic collapse likely. Orlov does not specifically talk about breaking up as collapse. He says the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US.

The most recent breakup scenario was noted today in the Wall Street Journal in a piece about Russian professor Igor Panarin, who predicts the breakup of the US in the year 2010. He has been predicting the same for the past decade but is now getting an audience. The logic of his scenario goes like this:

He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.

With his Soviet KGB background it may be no surprise that in Panarin's scenario the breakaway "countries" all succumb to foreign influence and are not really independent. In contrast American scenarios of breakup envision the resultant countries -- like the Pacifica coast -- as vibrant independent influences themselves.

It is certain that in the long run, the borders of the US will change. I think it is far from clear how it will change at the moment. I would be willing to bet the US will add something (Puerto Rico?) before it subtracts, but that is a minor matter. History is betting that at some point the nation as we know it will break up.

So, to my fellow Americans, happy new year!

Wooden Horses

Horses made of driftwood. Not photoshoped but woodshopped. This kind of maniacal love (and why else would you do this?) makes my spirits lift.

Despite its fragile appearance, each horse weighs three quarters of a ton and is free standing.  Artist Heather Jansch has created almost 100 of these wooden horses, along with the occasional deer stag. Each stands at about five and a half feet. From an interview in the Mail Online.

Q    How do you fix the bits of wood together?

A  By whatever method works.  I love solving problems and experimenting.  Each sculpture is different.  One needs to give a lot of thought to it and have an understanding of the stresses and strains created by different poses and some idea of the weights involved. The structure must not only be self supporting, it must also be stable enough to cope with high winds without falling over.  Further, it must be strong enough to withstand being lifted by a crane to be positioned for exhibition.  The larger sculptures require a steel frame.  This is first painted with a rust inhibitor and then coated with fibreglass to give a roughened surface which both makes it easier to hide and stops the wood from slipping on bare metal. The wood is held in position for me to see and then tied with wire until I am sure it is right.  Finally it is screwed together and the screw heads covered with filler and stain. Inevitably we miss one or two as people take great delight in proving.

Whole Earth Video

When it finally occurred to NASA (with persistent nudging by Stewart Brand) to turn their satellite cameras back on Earth, from whence they came, our planet took its first self portrait. That picture of the whole Earth became a catalyst for human environmental consciousness. It is now the emblem of our home.

Although there have been a few crude animations of a video version of this self-portrait since then, the following Whole Earth Video -- with Moon transit -- is quite handsome.

 

The still-unlaunched L1 point satellite DSCOVR would display a continuous year-round real-time image of the earth in full sunlight. It would be a mirror in space. Watching in multi-spectrums, this full-time eye would make video of earth a never ending webstream. Bush-politics have shelved plans to launch the $100 million completed bird now sitting in a warehouse. Maybe Obama can get it up where it belongs. Or at least release the FOIA-denied documents on why it was killed.

If Your Website Were a Person

Maybe this is a trend, maybe this is a cool tool, maybe this is silly. It is Typealyzer, a website that can analyze the text of another website (which you identify) and gives you the personality of the target site in Myers-Briggs notation (MBTI).  You know, the four letter extensions of inner directed/outer directed psychological traits popular with personality tests.

For instance, I went to the Typealyzer and entered the url for the blog of my book-in-progress, The Technium. It's where I post long bookish philosophical musings on the meaning of technology. The Typealyzer came back with this:

The personality of Cool Tools is noticeably different:

What I had not realized is that there are groups, forums and websites dedicated to each of the 16 Myers-Briggs personality categories. A master list is here. For instance readers of the Technium (and probably its author!) should be reading INTP.org.

Earning Money From the Free

Earlier this year I wrote a piece about creating works in an environment where everything is copied freely and when copy protection does not work -- in other words today's digital world.

How do you make money with the free?

My answer is you offer something better than free. I gave eight examples of what I call Generatives that improve upon the free.

That post, entitled Better Than Free, got a lot of attention, garnered many comments, got Digged and Reddited, and was translated into several languages by fans.

Now it is available as a free (of course!) downloadable PDF manifesto. Published by ChangeThis, a bunch of savvy media folks who produce very short, incredibly well-designed, free PDF Manifestos pushing the skills of change. Past authors include Seth Godin, Tom Peters, Guy Kawasaki, Hugh MacLeod. I really like the smooth navigation and user interface of these PDFs. They have a few ideas worth stealing in the format alone.

My piece begins:

The Internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, and every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times.

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.

When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

Well, what can't be copied?"

The whole thing can be downloaded as a small 11-page PDF from here.  You are encouraged to share it, spread it, email it to friends, and make as many copies as you want. A landing page is here. The copies are free, and free to disseminate. I'll make my money (if any) through one of the generatives.

The Next 1000 Years of Christianity

I am a follower of Christ. I find it useful in my own life to frame my spiritual experience in the language of a 2,000 year old religion.  I think this old perspective still has a lot of bite in it, even intellectual bite. There's a tendency to want to write Christianity off as ancient history and impotent ignorance, but again and again smart, sane, civil people have their lives remade by it, and the belief sticks around. I think that at its core Christianity will continue to poke and sharpen and transform people in the future. But, of course, it will have to be interpreted yet again by another era. Let's just say that its current vocabulary is not entirely up to date.

Despite the fact that Christianity is two millennia old, and often takes a longer view, it has been myopic when it comes to the future. For the past 2,000 years it has offered only one scenario for the future: the world will end tomorrow. You'd think that after getting it wrong every day for 2,000 years it would come up with at least one alternative scenario.

In my casual search for published alternative scenarios for the future of Christianity, I did not find much, even in very progressive liberal branches of the faith. Speculators are hindered by fear of sounding heretical, by the difficulty in predicting anything that far ahead, by doubt that speculations are worthwhile, and by the completely false notion that Christianity is unchanging.

I am foolish enough to dive in where saints fear to tread. I've been hanging out with the emerging generation of American Christian leaders. They are making a new vocabulary for the traditional faith. They are re-ordering some traditional priorities. They have questions. Lot's of them. Gabe Lyons, an emerging church guy, started a conference called Q (for questions). It's sort of like a Christian TED. 

At the first Q Conference two years ago I gave a talk called The Next 1000 Years of Christianity (video here). It is my attempt to describe a few positive scenarios for the next millennial. I did not bother with negative scenarios (negative for believers), such as Christianity disappears in 100 years, because they were predictable, common, and obvious. (But as one friend noted; to retain symmetry the talk should really be about the next 2,000 years to match the last 2,000. I agree but 1,000 years was already so far off the charts for this crowd that I felt no one would listen about 2,000 years.)

One idea: The circumnavigation of the "center" of Christianity, starting in Jerusalem, heading west to Europe, then to the Americas, then to Asia and finally returning to Africa and Jerusalem.

By the standards of the title, this talk failed. I did not come anywhere near outlining a 1,000-year scenario for Christianity. Rather I introduced the idea of scenarios and offered some forecasts for the near future. My main point was to confirm the continued evolution of Christianity, both in the past and into the future, and to demonstrate the value of having multiple visions of what will happen next.

In that way I think the talk succeeded. Uncountable number of people let me know that they had "never even thought about" the next 1,000 years of their faith. I got the sense they did not know they were allowed to.  Now they do. I wrote my talk up as a monograph, which the Q folks say is one of their most popular essays.

The Q conference features speakers talking both about the Christian church and the culture at large. It represents the arm of change within the American Protestant Evangelical branch of Christianity -- the strand that has been most politically active in the US in recent decades. If you'd like to have direct contact with the emerging church of the next generation, this is a good venue to touch many edges of it at once.

Eye-Cam Wanted

This is Tanya Vlach's new eyeball. She lost her real one in a car accident a few years ago. I met Tanya at a film festival recently. During our conversation she said she was looking for help in turning her artificial eye into a eye-cam.  You know, a mini web cam inside an eyeball. It would capture live video and stream it to a memory somewhere and also perhaps eventually assist her own vision in real time. She confessed that she was not technologically adept enough to hack it on her own.

I suggested that she put her request out into the web to see if anyone there has any ideas. She is serious about the project, which is half art, half medical innovation. She doesn't have any money to fund the contraption because she says, she is still trying "to figure out how to get out of my astronomical debt that I owe for the medical care that saved my life."

Her solicitation for engineering help, and a place to reply is here.

I am attempting to recreate my eye with the help of a miniature camera implant in my prosthetic / artificial eye. The intraocular installation of an eye-cam will substitute for the field of vision of my left eye that I lost in 2005 from a car accident. While my prosthetic is an excellent aesthetic replacement, I am interested in capitalizing on the current advancement of technology to enhance the abilities of my prosthesis for an augmented reality.

Specifications for the eyeball:
    * DVR
    * MPEG-4? Recording
    * Built in SD mini Card Slot
    * 4 GB SD mini Card
    * Mini A/V out
    * Firewire / USB drive
    * Optical 3X
    * Remote trigger
    * Bluetooth wireless method
    * Inductors: (Firewire/USB, power source)

Flag of Earth

This is the first flag I feel I could fly with unalloyed pride.  Now all I need is a lapel pin version.

The flag was designed by James Cadle. Prior to the US landing on the moon, there was hope a flag for humanity, rather than the American flag, would be erected on the moon. Some hoped the UN flag would fly, but that never happened.

Some time later, James Cadle, who lived on a farm in rural Illinois, was inspired by this debate to create the Flag of Earth. It is intended to be used for ANY purpose that is representative of Humankind as a whole, and not connected to any country, organization, or individual. James made it his life's work to promote and distribute this flag everywhere. He and his wife made the flags on their kitchen table, and sold them for what it cost to make and distribute them.

The Flag of Earth is often flown at locations doing SETI work in order to indicate that the search is the "work of humanity and not a specific country or organization." Cadle died in 2004, but he left the design in the public domain, bless him.

At the Flag of Earth website there are templates for printing them out or purchasing ready-to-fly sown ones.

Long Clock, Big Gear

Remember that awesome 10,000-year clock the crazies at Long Now Foundation were constructing? The one that will be erected *inside* a mountain in Nevada? Powered by the changes in daily temperature a the top of the mountain (situated among the oldest living things on earth, Bristlecone pines), the Clock will serve to remind humanity of the long-term.

Well, here is the first completed part for the full-size clock. It's an 8-foot Geneva gear, with custom roller bearings later to be replaced by ones made of ceramic. (Because the wheels of the clock move so slowly metal-to- metal contact will corrode over the hundreds of years the wheel will take to move.)

More, including videos of the mechanism in motion, coming soon on the Long Now blog.