Media

Poptimistic

In a recent Boing Boing interview special effects guru John Gaeta dropped a fantastic new word: Poptomistic.

Poptimistic is not his coinage; it seems to be circulating in the design and style world, but I think it perfectly captures the upbeat, day-glo brightness of a technicolor future. It manages to contain many of the optimistic strands of the digiterati, and the pop masses.  It says: technology that works!

The new pace-setting film Speed Racer (which Gaeta worked on) is poptomistic.

It is the opposite of the distopian Blade Runner, even though both are visually outrageous and seminal. The overlook sci-fi cult favorite Fifth Element was slightly poptimistic.

The book of Japanese street fashions called Fruits is poptimistic.

So were many of the early issues of Wired magazine.

And as far as I am concerned the entire instant city of Burning Man is poptimistic.

Poptimistic is super-saturated richness, hyper-realism, brightly lit in even the furthest corners, up tempo, and generally positive.

What else is poptimistic?

Country Code Map

I got a nice note from John Yunker:

While most country codes are fairly obvious, such as DE for Germany and JP for Japan, many others are not so obvious. For example, Serbia is RS and Sri Lanka is LK.

Last year, I designed a map that illustrates the world's 245 ccTLDs in a way that is both useful and informative. Each country code is sized according to the population of the given country/territory. China and India were sized down by 30% to accommodate the layout.

It is available as a 24 x 26 poster ($30).

Single Note Control in Recorded Music

Also called Direct Note Access.

This new technology permits the dream of every recorded musician -- to be able to change one note in a chord or polyphonic recording. Just that one note! Either change its pitch, timing, key, duration. Now you can. This software Pro Tools plugin from Melodyne will unravel polyphonic recordings (not mere MIDI) into its composite notes and then allow you to alter their characteristics via an visual interface.

Even if you are not a musician, you can appreciate the power this new tool offers, as shown in this instructional video.

Wiki Correction-Stream

The other day Wikipedia had an open house for their move to San Francisco. Their new digs are cozy, funky, and just right. They had a number of public screens on display in corners of their offices, but one caught my eye. This screen showed a log of edits to Wikipedia in real time. The edits were happening about one per second, almost faster than you could follow. As you watched the improvements to the ultimate book would scroll up off the screen in a blur. That's the speed of correction. It gave me a sense of the almost animal-like power of the hive mind behind the Wikipedia -- a constant ceaseless buzz of diligence.

Car Tattoos

Since the hot rod days in the 1950s cars have been detailed, pin-striped, and air-brushed with outrageous decorative art. It was expensive and permanent. To do a good job required the finely honed skill of a real artist. Then there are art cars, with a different aestetic. Piles of stuff glued onto the outside. A highly polished finished is not required for an art car.  Boldness, creativity, and an I-don't-care-what-people-think attitude were required. This type of personalization is also not for everyone. But cars need personalization. Almost everything else in our lives can be decorated with high class cheaply -- except cars.

Last night at a party hosted by IDEO at Pier 28 in San Francisco a small start up premiered their solution to personalization of cars. Infectious (their web site is still in obscura mode) will be offering custom created vinyl temporary tattoos for vehicles. The results look like this:

The designs are printed with solvent inks on a clear vinyl backing, then pressed onto the clean surface of the car. Then the sheet is rubbed with a plastic burnisher, then the backing peeled off.  That's it. The tat will last several years including the punishment of car washes.

At first Infectious will operate like Threadless, the custom t-shirt design site. Designers will submit their finished designs to the site and then members of the sign vote on which design they want printed next. This way there is a small market for small runs, offering some efficiencies to a start up, and it also leverages the power of a passionate community of users. Eventually, Infectious says, they will generate vinyls for anyone who uploads a design file.

The costs will be proportional to the amount of vinyl/ink used. Prices will range from $50 for small bits to $200 for large sections.  The images here capture four cars being tattooed during the party. Each section is considered "large."

Man, am I ready to take my beige generic Suburban and give it some character!

Results from an Experiment in Ad-Driven Books

A few months ago I initiated a small experiment in ad-supported media. The goal was to find a way to give free books away which were supported by advertising. In December, 2007 Adobe announced one promising technology for this dream. In partnership with Yahoo ad network, Adobe released their newest version of Acrobat Reader (8) with the capability to display ads alongside a PDF in view mode.

So the way this works is that the user would open up a PDF in Acrobat Reader 8, and at the prompt they would agree to see whatever ads (if any) accompanied that PDF. The ads would be served by Yahoo, and were promised to be contextual to the content of the PDF, just as contextual ads on the web are. Anyone clicking on the ads would trigger a payment to the author of the PDF file, which would have been registered previously to account for this payment.

The PDF I choose to release was a 250 page e-book I wrote. Called True Films, it contains rave reviews of the best 250 documentaries in English. I released the PDF into the wild, allowing anyone who wanted to mirror the downloads. The idea was to let the file superconduct virally, and see if the auxiliary ads might generate some income. As you can see in the image below of pages from True Films, the ads appear discreetly on the side. For further information on how the program works, and a little more on why I tried it, see my original post. One important note is that unless you were using the version 8 of Reader, you can't see the ads, and in fact don't even know the ads were ever there.  Most people are not using version 8.

I had promised to relate the results when they were in and here they are:

In total the True Films PDF was successfully downloaded 13,500 times.
Yahoo tells me that the total "ad unit impressions" (the times a reader choose to look at ads) was 4,613.
The total number of times ads were clicked on:  189.
My total revenue was $47.59.

That's pretty dismal for a business. It doesn't pay for bandwidth if you are being charged for it. But, but.... it also says that fully one third of the readers went to the significant trouble of getting the latest version of Reader AND then agreed to opt in to see the ads. The piddly 189 clicks is actually not bad given the number of views. It works out to be 4%, which in the world of advertising is pretty good.  The payout rate per click is 25 cents which is also not horrible for the web. The gating factor is simply the small numbers of folks who actually see ads (or downloaded the free book). All these numbers -- books downloaded, ads seen, and pay out rate -- would have to increase substantially before there was any hope of free viral books supported by ads.

That said, I'll try it again sometime soon with another book. And in the meantime, you can still download this great illustrated guide to the best documentaries for free right here. Check out the ads if you have Acrobat Reader 8.

Testing the Veracity of the Internet

This is no scientific test, but it is amusing. What if you were a famous celebrity? How accurate is the Internet's information about you? What if you could sit said celebrity down in front of a laptop and go through Wikipedia, Internet Movies Database, fanboy sites, anit-fan sites, fan-fic boards, YouTube, celebrity sightings, the whole nine-yards, and get confirmation or not for the facts? Can you believe anything the Internet says?

AJ Jacobs (one of my favorite magazine authors) performs just this test with "sexiest man alive" George Clooney in the current issue of Esquire. It's a very funny exchange.

"In a bold and unprecedented move for a celebrity, George Clooney openly admitted to having cosmetic surgery."

"I love this one," he says. "This was everywhere. Oprah did a show where Julia Roberts and I interviewed each other. And Julia said, 'Would you ever consider plastic surgery?' And I said, 'I got my eyes done, what do you think?' "

Clooney opens his eyes wide, like Betty Boop.

"I was in Italy when it aired, and all of a sudden it was all over the Italian papers. Once it switches languages and loses all sense of irony, and it's bouncing back and forth.... They used to say you can't make a joke in print, but you can get away with it on film. But now you can't get away with it there."

He pauses.

"I did get my balls done, though. I got them unwrinkled. It's the new thing in Hollywood -- ball ironing."

Jacobs didn't supply a final score for the internets, but I would estimate it is a C minus. Clooney is not gay, not running for Vice President, not planning to wed in a few months, as the Internet Tubes say. But a great deal posted about his life is accurate, probably more than I expected.

I wrote to Jacobs and asked him for the grade he didn't give in the article. What score would he assign to the hive mind for Clooney's entry? His reply:

I would say that the Internet was about as accurate as I expected. I was surprised -- and I guess I shouldn't be, having spent 15 years in journalism -- by how inaccurate the articles from the mainstream newspapers and magazines were.  Not much more accurate than the wikipedia-type sites.

Also, I've come to rely on the wikipedia a huge amount in my every day life. I generally figure that about 80 percent of each entry is accurate. Clooney's wikipedia entry seemed about 70 or 75 percent accurate. So maybe just a tad below my assumption.

I found a fascinating type of vandalism I hadn't heard of before. There's a line in Clooney's wikiepdia entry that says 'He secretly financed a thriller called Endgame Study." Clooney had no idea what that was. I did some research and found it was an obscure low-budget thriller. Apparently, the producers wanted some exposure and a link to a Hollywood star, so they (or someone on the film) just inserted the movie into Clooney's entry. And they used the word 'secretly,' which was brilliant.

Material Fingerprints

Laser Surface Authentication (LSA) is an authentication process to spot manufactured counterfeits. As authentic items come off the assembly line a laser scans their surface and measures the scattered beams. Every batch of material will have its own signature. The material signature can be applied to ID cards. The technology is being developed by Ingenia, based in the UK.

A scanner with a low power focused laser beam scans across the surface of the item to be identified. The document or card is placed flat on the top of the scanner and pushed by hand until two of its edges press against guide rails. This ensures that the same part of the document is scanned each time. During the scan, the scanner records a large number of details of the way the laser light is reflected off the surface of the paper or plastic.




Microscopic irregularities on the surface due to the structure of the paper fibres or the setting of the plastic result in complex scattering of the laser beam, through the optical phenomenon of 'speckle'. This forms the basis of a signature which is unique to any given sheet of paper or plastic. The scanner is sufficiently sensitive to detect surface irregularities of less than a few hundred nanometers in size.

Genuine documents, cards and packaging would have their fingerprint read on the way out of the issuing agency or factory. The fingerprint is then stored either in a central database or is written onto the item using an encrypted barcode. In order to check the validity of the item later in the field, the fingerprint would be re-read and compared against the database or against the barcode.

A Web Page For Every Species

Here's a story about something big. Big as the planet. Not well known, but important. I go into great detail because I was present for part of its rise. It's also the story of how big things get done. With set-backs, failures, many people, unexpected turns. This is not the whole story; it is just beginning.  There may be lessons for others hoping to launch a big hairy audacious idea.

It all started at a dinner at the February 2000 TED hosted by Nathan Myrvold. At the height of the dotcom boom one of the dinner guests (not Nathan) was lamenting the difficulty of giving away a billion dollars. He was serious. To do it right -- to spend it smartly, effectively -- meant building some kind of large apparatus, usually a foundation, which burned a lot of the money. The more ambitious your goals, the more the organization would self-consume the billion dollars. But if you didn't have a guiding principle for something grand, you'd fritter away the billion dollar opportunity to make a mark. What would be a bold, high-leverage thing to do with a billion dollars he asked?

I had never thought about it before (a billion dollars was not my problem), but sometime later that evening I had a flash.  "I know what to do with a billion dollars, " I said. "Use it to pay local people around the world to catalog the planet's biodiversity in their neighborhood. This is a grand project that would yield vital, essential, and enabling knowledge, help the planet, and it would put the billion dollars into the hands of people who could really use it, not for charity, but for work they did."

Nobody paid any attention to my suggestion, and I forgot all about the idea myself. But a few days later, Stewart Brand, who as at the dinner, said, "You really should do that billion dollar project." I replied, "What billion dollar project?"  He said, the species catalog. It really needs to be done.

I was certain the idea was so obvious that surely biologists were already in the middle of doing it. After a few days of researching it was clear that there was no up-and-running program to catalog all species on earth. There were several programs to unify the unorganized knowledge of known species into one master list. The most outspoken proponent of this idea was legendary ant specialist and writer E. O. Wilson. In 2000 he was calling for a "global biodiversity map" to cure for our deep ignorance of life on Earth.

In the realm of physical measurement, evolutionary biology is far behind the rest of the natural sciences. Certain numbers are crucial to our ordinary understanding of the universe. What is the mean diameter of the earth? It is 12,742 kilometers (7,913 miles). How many stars are there in the Milky Way, an ordinary spiral galaxy? Approximately 1011, 100 billion. How many genes are there in a small virus? There are 10 (in øX174 phage). What is the mass of an electron? It is 9.1 x 10^-28 grams. And how many species of organisms are there on Earth? We don't know, not even to the nearest order of magnitude.

Ed Wilson with one of his ant collections, personally mounted and tagged.

One thing led to another, so Stewart, Ryan Phelan (DNA Direct) and I decided to host a meeting of taxonomists (the catalogers and conservers of species) to see if a dedicated campaign to catalog all the species on earth in 25 years was a possibility. Ed Wilson joined our board, along with a few other notable conservation biologists and taxonomists. The upshot of the meeting was that it turned out we knew less than I thought we knew. Estimates of the percentage of unknown species varied from 70% to 99%. It was clear we did not even know how many species we already "knew" with any precision. We roughly had identified 1 million plus organisms out a possible 7 to 200 million species on earth. We ended the meeting with the idea that all this  "unclaimed" dotcom money might be a great opportunity to finish the task the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus began 300 years earlier.

I wrote out a manifesto for this endeavor called the All Species Inventory and published it in the Fall 2000 issue of Whole Earth Review. It recounts the reasons why I believe the world needs an inventory of life on earth. You can read it, but it begins:

If we discovered life on another planet, the first thing we would do is conduct a systematic inventory of that planet's life. This is something we have never done on our home planet. The aim of the All Species Inventory is simple: within the span of our own generation, record and genetically sample every living species of life on Earth.

My main contribution was upping the ante. No one in the biological community had dared suggest we should aim for ALL species (they knew too much). And imagining we could do ALL in one generation seemed insane. It had taken hundreds of years to complete only one million.

While outlining the reasons to why doing ALL was important I realized I was an "all-ist." A person who believes there is a transformation phase transition when you go from many, most, to all.  From the manifesto:

"All" is the crucial term. The difference between "many" and "all" is the difference between, say, a local public library and the universal library of all documents and texts. Knowledge crosses a threshold when it goes from "most" to "all." Geography crossed the threshold when it went from knowing a lot of the world to creating a globe with all continents in rough form; anatomy crossed the threshold once it produced a diagram of all the bones, all tissues, and all organs in a human body.

"Imagine doing chemistry knowing only one third of the periodic table," says biologist Terry Gosliner. Sure, it can be done, but with an immense handicap. We are trying to do biology knowing perhaps only a tenth, or one hundredth, of our species. It is an immense handicap that does not need to exist.

One of the biologists attending the first meeting had come into some family stock which was flying high at the peak of the dotcom craziness and he wanted to cash it out to fund this risky biological adventure. So Ev Schlinger, a world expert on fly and fly parasites, funded the All Species Foundation with a million dollars. Our aim was to use new technology to accelerate the rate of species discovery from thousands of new species per year to millions per year.

While identifying all undiscovered species is the grand scheme, E.O. Wilson has always personally championed a smaller -- but still huge -- first step: to collect all the discovered species into a universally accessible format. I suggested that what we really wanted was a web page for every species. We could even generate a blank page for each named species and let any enthusiast fill them up. This notion was pretty radical in 2000, since there was no Wikipedia to prove the idea, and taxonomy is much harder than editing an article. Even worse, unauthorized information is a no-no in taxonomy.

On one flight across the US I sat next to Ed Wilson. Ed writes about a book per year. In long hand. On yellow lined paper pads. His trusty assistant does his email for him. Here is a snapshot of his latest book -- a novel! -- as he works on it.

Ed thinks in terms of books. He wrote up a new manifesto: a call for an Encyclopedia of Life.

Imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth, available everywhere by single access on command. The page contains the scientific name of the species, a pictorial or genomic presentation of the primary type specimen on which its name is based, and a summary of its diagnostic traits.

At All Species we eventually made a universal search engine which scoured all known species lists and returned a "page" for every species, but we soon ran out of money. The dot-bust was now in progress and after a few more interesting but minor projects, but no additional funding, the foundation ceased.

However the taxonomists on our boards did not give up. In 2004, they gathered with others in Telluride, CO and hammered out a procedure to make an Encyclopedia of Life. They continued to develop an open-source protocol for electronically communicating species information (GBIF). They developed incredibly cool ways to digitally construct a photograph of a biological specimen so that the composited photo had more information in it than the specimen under a microscope.

Take a look at this image of a ant, which is an aggregated mosaic of dozens of digital photos taken in focus at different layers to give one full-dept in-focus image -- a picture which a microscope or your eye won't give up. This new tool enables inspection taxonomists to inspect key specimens remotely instead of having to ship fragile specimens around the world, and this tool lets more than one researcher at a time inspect this key specimen. The taxonomists developed methods of mass-processing specimens from tropical areas, greatly speeding up discovery. And genetics came in force. Maverick upstart Craig Venter proved that you could genetically sample air, soil and water and identify new genes of news species at the rate of thousands per day. It was a whole new world.

The dream of identifying all the species on earth in 25 years no longer seemed insane.

Completing a circle, at the 2007 TED, seven years after that dinner, Ed Wilson won the TED Wish. His wish was to have the TED attendees and the public at large help him produce the first real Encyclopedia of Life. He wrote a letter to the MacArthur Foundation, who responding with the first funding for this project. Recently, the taxonomists who never gave up on the idea of All Species, like Terry Erwin, Christian Samper, Peter Raven, to name a few close to us, created a broad consortium of university and natural history museums to fund and curate the Encyclopedia of Life, with a web page for every species.

Last month, at February 2008 TED, eight years later, the consortium launched the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL). Ed's wish (and mine) fulfilled so to speak. The first 30,000 species got their active web pages. Another 1 million species got blank pages, with only their names filled in. In other words, the EOL is still mostly blank -- but real.

The EOL is handsome, intelligently designed, and ambitious. When you query it, you get a photo (if available) of the organism, its species classification chart, a basic legal description, some ecological information - where found, etc. This information is primarily pulled from existing taxonomic databases such as FishBase, AmphibiaWeb, and AntWeb, and translated into a common interface. Some of the info comes from Wikipedia.

Turns out that while we were waiting, Wikipedia has been serving as the EOL. If you want to know about a species, just type the latin or popular name into Wikipedia (not Wikispecies). Even though field biologists insist strongly, repeatedly, in no uncertain terms, that random authors can't supply reliable scientific information, they can. Because they aren't random authors. In any case the scientists at EOL have seen the light. They will be accepting taxonomically non-critical submissions from enthusiasts later this year; that is photos, sightings, observational notes, and so on. And they are working directly with Wikipedia to coordinate their efforts in tapping the commonwealth of eager contributors.

But as good as EOL will be, it is still only a small part of the original All Species vision. I believe, more than ever, that it is possible and essential to inventory all the living things on earth, in one generation. The reasons to do it before are still valid:

* Every species on earth is hacking the rules of life and has discovered unique methods, materials, processes, and genes for living that are, or could be, valuable to us. If we knew about them.

* We can't do holistic biology, systematic ecology, or intelligent conservation knowing only a few percent of the ingredients. We have to start with all species.

* A global inventory can employ highly skilled naturalists in remote and familiar regions, bridging two worlds of knowledge, and distributing wealth to where it can do some good.

* We are morally obligated to know our fellow passengers, and understand their roles and positions while on this small planet together. The more we know the better we can love.

But how do we do it? In broad strokes the procedure for identifying new organisms today is roughly identical to the way it was done during Darwin's day. It is hugely labor intensive, and bottle-necked by the few key experts in each taxonomic domain. Only those very few will know if it is a new species or not. The traditional method simply does not scale.

The solution is new technology. The most potent force in taxonomy is genetic sequencing, since every species has a unique gene pattern. What we all want is a nifty handheld tricorder that reads the genes and can tell you what species you are holding. For 99% of the specimens you will pick up, the tricorder's EOL database will know what it is. In that step alone, 99% of the hard work in discovering new species is eliminated. Because most of the precious inspection time of the world's expert in some taxon or another is spent is looking through huge piles of candidates that science already knows about. What we need is a system where smart devices linked to the EOL database go through all the known specimens and present to the world's expert only the unknown and mystery specimens. Attaining that requisite level of knowledge in humans represents 10 years of deliberate practice, and is in short supply, but it can and will be done via computational genetics. At first the assay will be done in a lab, and then soon enough, it will happen in the trusty tricorder in the field.

When anyone can buy a hand held species identifier, and amazing transformation will take place: everyone will become a taxonomist. At first this sounds absolutely counter-intuitive, because one would think that if you have to rely on a machine to identify species, you will become less of a taxonomist than you would if you steeped yourself in natural history and spent years studying organisms close up. This is the same incorrect logic that many teachers used against bringing calculators into the classroom. The argument was: calculators would lessen mathematic ability. But in fact calculators can increase both higher math skills, and interest in math. Turns out that doing arithmetic in your head was the least important thing in mathematics. By offloading that easily tripped-up skill onto a machine, the higher skills were enabled.

We see a similar phenomenon happening in cartography and typography. Both of these were formerly esoteric practices. The number of folks who knew about fonts and kerning, or rubbersheeting and lat-long, numbered in the tens of thousands. But now that fonts are loaded into every PC, and kerning a matter of dragging your mouse, when Google maps are a click away, the rote work of type design and map making are done by machines empowering hundreds of millions of new enthusiasts in these fields.

The Species ID'er will do the same. It will accelerate a learning feedback loop in taxonomy that is now broken. If on one of your walks you find a new-to-you species, it is extremely difficult to get a trustworthy identification. It can take years just to learn how to use book-based keys, and very few amateurs will learn to use keys in more than one field. And many taxon groups still require an expert to sort out. So getting a confirmation of your own identification will either take hours, days, or months, if it happens at all.

DAISY is software that can identify species of insects.

But when you have a handy Species ID'er, you try your best to identify something new to you. You'll get instant feedback. Either, yes, you are correct! Good job! Or, nope, it is this species and here's why. Or, very rarely, nope, we have no idea what it is. You may have discovered a brand new species! (At that point you bother the world's expert who will be overjoyed to see you.)

I know from my own experience that anyone who can tell the difference between two types of lettuce can learn the differences in species -- if you have a learning feedback. The instant feedback of a Species ID'er will educate millions of backyard taxonomists in record time. With the device in their backpack they will fan out from their own neighborhoods into the rest of the world, joining up with local naturalists to fill in the gaps in the EOL.  With the enabling power of a taxonomic calculator, taxonomy will become a mainstream pursuit.

We can then move from doing a global inventory of all living species to global and local censuses of life. Mapping out where each species lives, in what numbers, in which associations, etc. Honest ecological work, that because of the lack of easy species ID today, must be done by overeducated grad students. Empowered by cheap devices, anyone passionate about nature can be a ecologist.

I don't know when we'll be able to buy one of this on Amazon, but genetic sequencing is improving at Moore's rate or faster. It will be built upon a fully inhabited Encyclopedia of Life. An EOL that is populated with all the key information about each species. Over time the EOL will provide enhanced photos of each species, in each of its life stages, with virtual 3D dissections. It will contain a digital 3D model of the "archetype" specimen, and a scan of the original description. And detailed maps of its home territories, charts of it closest relations, and a graph of its ecological network.

Out of this will come a predictive ecology, sound conservation choices, and a new citizen-based engagement with taxonomic knowledge. Without a doubt these will increase our respect for the life on this planet.

The non-profit Ryan, Stewart and I founded to substantiate this big idea is gone, but it accomplished something important. It introduce to the public an idea that won't go away: the immediate need and possibility for a global-scale inventory of life on earth. The launch of EOL means this secret dream of taxonomists and field biologists is now a shared common dream. It's a destination that has been put on the map, and can no longer be ignored. I'm am happy to see the dream begin with a web page for every species.

HyperReal Homer

There is something so disturbing about this hyper-real rendition of Homer that I am mesmerized by my own revulsion.  Larger image here.

Consensus on Colors

Is there any consensus between names and colors -- at least in one language?

A little bit. 

The folks at Dolores Blog "showed thousands of random colors to people on Mechanical Turk and asked what they would call them. Here’s what they said:" 

In short the experiment goes like this. They generated random color samples and then paid the anonymous workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk to give a name to these random colors. Dolores then mapped that name in the appropriate color place on the standard color wheel. The result is this color wheel of names. But the really cool part is that you can search for color names via this Color Label Wheel. Type in a name and see all the colors that random folks think belong to that color name. Here is the wide variation of hues which people identify as Pink:

Short Is In

Four word film reviews. A whole site dedicated to four word reviews of movies. Offers hundreds of different 4-word reviews for one film, although most are lame. Samples:

Magical book, muggle movie. [For first Harry Potter movie]
Giant robots need glasses. [Transformers]
Post-nuclear Nativity story. [The Terminator]

More Five Word Movie Reviews. Not as many, but better.

Five Word Reviews of London Musicals and Plays. Sample:

Amusing tale for sci-fi geeks. [They Came from Working]

Five Word Reviews of video games beginning with Z.

Six word reviews of 763 songs recorded by mostly indie bands appearing at SXSW 2008. Written by Paul Ford, these reviews are witty, pretty good, and convey probably all you need to know.

Rhyming’s a tool, not a weapon.
Theme for a grunge-era sitcom.
Thin white men, tight black pants?
Remarkably many boring influences at once.
Crisp little synths; New Order chords.
That’s how to rob Pink Floyd.

Six-word memoirs can be found in "Not Quite What I Was Planning", a book of, well, six-word memoirs. Samples:

Nobody cared, then they did. Why? -- journalist Chuck Klosterman
We still don't hear a single. -- pop singer-songwriter Adam Schlesinger
I was a Michael Jackson impersonator. -- comic strip artist Keith Knight
Cursed with cancer. Blessed by friends. -- 9 year old Hannah Davies
I still make coffee for two. -- Zak Nelson
Most successful accomplishments based on spite. -- Scott Birch

Seven words of wisdom collected by Tara Parker-Pope on the New York Times Health blog. She was inspired by Michael Pollan's haiku-like message in his book "In Defense of Food." His seven-word nutrition and diet advice is in brief: "East food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Retaining the 2-3-2 word sequence, the Times accumulated 1,000 seven word edicts. Samples:

Get exercise. Frequent and regular. With sweat.
Accept him. Or dump him. Relationship fixed.
Call Mom. Let her talk. Don’t argue.

How about seven-word wine reviews! From Andrew Barrow at Spittoon.

Earthy, melon, medium-bodied; needs sharp cheese
Musky flowers perfume this bright, cherry wine

Ten Word Reviews. Includes movies, TV shows,  muisc, websites. Crowdsourced, quality variable. Sample:

Rotoscoping gives Keanu a soul. Shame he opens his mouth. [A Scanner Darkly]
Big monster, super shaky camera and idiots dying. Pretty good. [Cloverfield movie]

20-word (or less) music reviews can be found at AddReview, which has been compiling these for  4 or 5 years.  Also 20-word movie reviews at AddMovie.  Samples:

Songs about NASA, robots, and girls that transcend their subjects. Rock for nerds that's not nerdy. My favorite new band. [Built By Snow, Noise]

They dial back the pop but remain typically upbeat and jangly on this album inspired by their nighttime dreams. [The Kennedys, Better Dreams]

One sentence true stories. Nicely presented at One Sentence.

I stared into the eyes of a psychopath moments before he killed a girl, shot a dozen people, then took his own life.

My mother didn't realize that teaching me to fight, shoot, and play pool made it hard to find a boyfriend without tattoos.

The flashing red and blue lights told me definitively I was no longer a college student.

One line reviews of great computer games. Samples:

Drop numbered tiles to form chains. [Chain Factor]
Strangely compelling cat-tossing game. [Cat on a Dolphin]
Clever puzzle of stairs and recordings of past moves. [Cursor*10]

Fifty word mini-sagas. Written by Narcotic Anonymous members. Sample:

He was a very bad man. He said that he’d killed over thirty men in cold blood. “Pinning Juan to the door.” was how he put it. When he got clean, he had a lot for which to atone, so he helped addicts escape Hell. I’ll never forget the bastard.

Movie-A-Minute collects 4- or 5-line synopsis of movies in script form. Samples:

The Sixth Sense

Haley Joel Osment : I see dead people.
Bruce Willis: Try talking to them.
Haley Joel Osment : It worked.

Pretty Woman

Julia Roberts: I'm a hooker, but I don't kiss on the lips.
Richard Gere: I have a lot of money.
Julia Roberts: (smooch)

And companion site Book-A-Minute.

Six sentences blog posts, from Six Sentences. Sample:

My grandfather wasn't afraid to dirty his hands in the dirtiest ways. His fingers always gripped some weapon: rifles and machetes during his WWII tour, knives and cleavers at his store, and a stick at home. Even his hand was a weapon. His voice chopped, mashed, and dissected the people he loved. If he delivered praise, one loving word would slice through the scars of preceding ones. My mother endured past pain but clings to current acclaim as an addict clutches a crack pipe.

Napkin fiction. Esquire mailed out napkins to 250 notable authors asking them to scribble a story on it. Turns out that you can get a lot of words on a napkin if you use both sides.

I am sure there are many other examples of the short form. Send them and I'll add here.
UPDATE: I've added entries and will add more in rough size sequence as they come in.

Tools for Big Love

Big love is a renewable building material, says Clay Shirky. Like the Ise Shrine in Japan which is rebuilt -- out of love -- every 20 years. Turns out the longest lasting things don't have an enduring edifice, but an enduring process.

Clay says the best predictor of longevity for a system is not to inspect the business model but to answer this question: Do the people who like the place/building/system/product take care of each other? Not just take care of the object of veneration but take mutual care of the fans?

In other words, do they run on love?

About five years ago I wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal declaring that the "internet runs on love, not greed." You can read it here.  Clay has expanded, deepened, and brilliantly enhanced the argument. He ends a recent talk with these memorable lines.

We have always loved one another. We’re human, its something we’re good at. But up until recently, the radius and half-life of that affection has always been quite limited. With love alone, you can get together a birthday party. Add coordinating tools, and you can write an operating system. In the past, we would do little things for love, but big things, big things required money. Now we can do big things for love.   

Here's the video of his talk: 

 

The Wikipedia Deletion Wars

There's a fabulous insider's account of how topics make it or don't make it into Wikipedia. Why does one person, company, or place get their page while another doesn't?The process is full of flawed humanity, and not at all as objective as a newbie might think. Written by Nicholson Baker, this detailed report is tucked into a book review of "Wikipedia: The Missing Manual".


This first-person account, disguised as a long book review in the New York Review of Books, delves deep into the core negotiations that every line in Wikipedia is subject to. But the piece really shines in describing a current fad on Wikipedia -- deleting less popular subjects entirely. Here's a bit: 

In the fall of 2006, groups of editors went around getting rid of articles on webcomic artists—some of the most original and articulate people on the Net. They would tag an article as nonnotable and then crowd in to vote it down. One openly called it the "web-comic articles purge of 2006." A victim, Trev-Mun, author of a comic called Ragnarok Wisdom, wrote: "I got the impression that they enjoyed this kind of thing as a kid enjoys kicking down others' sand castles." Another artist, Howard Tayler, said: "'Notability purges' are being executed throughout Wikipedia by empire-building, wannabe tin-pot dictators masquerading as humble editors." Rob Balder, author of a webcomic called PartiallyClips, likened the organized deleters to book burners, and he said: "Your words are polite, yeah, but your actions are obscene. Every word in every valid article you've destroyed should be converted to profanity and screamed in your face." 

As the deletions and ill-will spread in 2007—deletions not just of webcomics but of companies, urban places, Web sites, lists, people, categories, and ideas—all deemed to be trivial, "NN" (nonnotable), "stubby," undersourced, or otherwise unencyclopedic—Andrew Lih, one of the most thoughtful observers of Wikipedia's history, told a Canadian reporter: "The preference now is for excising, deleting, restricting information rather than letting it sit there and grow."

Image from The Great Wikipedia Webcomic Purge of 2007

Baker's ode to the complexities of Wikipedia's genesis is crammed with wonderful details. He describes the little-known fact that many articles about historical subjects begin from older encyclopedias in the public domain.

But [Wikipedia] also became great because it had a head start: from the beginning the project absorbed articles from the celebrated 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is in the public domain. And not only the 1911 Britannica. Also absorbed were Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, Nuttall's 1906 Encyclopedia, Chamber's Cyclopedia, Aiken's General Biography, Rose's Biographical Dictionary, Easton's Bible Dictionary, and many others. In August 2001, a group of articles from W.W. Rouse Ball's Short Account of the History of Mathematics—posted on the Net by a professor from Trinity College, Dublin—was noticed by an early Wikipedian, who wrote to his co-volunteers: "Are they fair game to grab as source material for our wikipedia? I know we are scarfing stuff from the 1911 encyclopedia, this is from 1908, so it should be under the same lack of restrictions...." It was. Rouse Ball wrote that Pierre Varignon

    "was an intimate friend of Newton, Leibnitz and the Bernoullis, and, after l'Hospital, was the earliest and most powerful advocate in France of the use of differential calculus."

In January 2006, Wikipedia imported this 1908 article, with an insertion and a few modernizing rewordings, and it now reads:

    "Varignon was a friend of Newton, Leibnitz, and the Bernoulli family. Varignon's principal contributions were to graphic statics and mechanics. Except for l'Hôpital, Varignon was the earliest and strongest French advocate of differential calculus."

But the article is now three times longer, barnacled with interesting additions, and includes a link to another article discussing Varignon's mechanical theory of gravitation.

We have a idealized notion of how Wikipedia is created -- that there is a inert Darwinian struggle between uninformed nonsense and higher quality information as they are selected in the hive mind, and the good stuff wins over time. The truth is that Wikipedia is a hive mind of human ego, hubris, obsession, and passion. Each article suffers through a human drama worthy of a soap opera. Indeed I can safely predict there will be novels and TV shows built around the maelstrom in a single Wikipedia article someday.

To the creators of Web 2.0 and beyond it is vital to remember than this power of the hive mind is intensely messy and full of the wild territory of personality and humanity. The crowd is both wiser and more irrational in aggregate. The tools to make this crowd useful are primarily the tools of dealing with people.

So who won the deletion wars? According to Wikipedia, the deletionists lost. Sure articles are deleted all the time, but there is more agreement now on the kind of articles that truly are worth keeping.

If every Wikipedian had been a staunch inclusionist, we'd have tens of thousands of articles on gay and smelly high school kids, not to mention every pet cat who ever did something adorable. On the other hand, if every Wikipedian had been a staunch deletionist, we'd be a boring clone of Encarta with no ads. Maybe each side did have something to offer after all, even if it was only keeping the other side down. But the time of the deletionists and inclusionists has, now and forever, come to an end...

Non-Commodificable in Newsprint

A followup on my Better Than Free, which concern things which could not be easily copied. Michael Hirschorn, writing in the Atlantic, muses on whether newspapers have to be boring in order to survive. He compares what newspapers think is important -- what they put on the front page -- with what readers think is interesting -- what articles they forward to friends.

I reviewed a week’s worth of front pages of The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times in September and compared them with each day’s most–e-mailed list.  I had expected the most–e-mailed results to track the lineups of the more baldly audience-focused TV newscasts, which have increasingly made a fetish of “news that matters to you,” and hence are packed with tedious features on your health, your real estate, your job, your children, and so forth.

In other words, that's the conventional wisdom about newsy stuff: There's the boring important things on the front page and the frivolous self-help stuff on the rest. What Hirschorn found in his study was different:

Instead, the most–e-mailed lists, despite a smattering of parochial concerns, were a rich stew of global affairs, provocative insight, hot-button issues, pop culture, compelling narrative, and enlightened localism. In short, they were interesting. What they were not, generally, was important, at least not in the grand tectonic geopolitical sense. 

The boring news -- most of it "important" -- is now a commodity, easily found and replicated. Hirschorn continues:

The real value now lies in non-commodificable virtues like deep reporting, strong narrative, distinct point of view, and sharp analysis, which even in the blogger era (or especially in the blogger era) is available only piecemeal. 

He points to several examples of newspapers who are emphasizing the non-commodificable virtues, which are closely aligned with my non-copiable generatives. As one example he suggests the front page of the Wall Street Journal (not freely online, at the moment).

The Journal, as a business paper, has been using its front-page news digest to dispense with commodity news for decades, while employing its valuable real estate to pinpoint trends, elevate key personalities, and, with the lighter middle-column stories, reinforce its brand of wry amusement at the capitalist carnival.

I agree with this. The front page of the WSJ was always my favorite, pursuing novel subjects in depth, yet being relevant in unusual ways. The virtues folks want from newspapers are, he says:

...a high-low mix of agenda-setting reportage and analysis, strong storytelling on topics not being covered everywhere else, and saucy, knowing takeouts on people the readership actually cares about.

BIL, the Unconference

Tomorrow the annual TED conference begins. TED is an intense four or five days of world-class presenters across a wide-range of subjects. While the quality of talks is uneven (for 80 in total this is inevitable), I feel safe in saying that overall TED offers a chance to see the world's best speakers and highly evolved presentations. In the years I've gone, I have not been bored for long. 

But TED is a very scripted, controlled, high-priced conference. A ticket costs is $6,000 -- if you sign up a year in advance. Recently TED has begun to post favorite past talks online for free, which of course (Better than free!) only makes the live experience more coveted. 

In response to the highly edited and out-of-reach price of TED, a shadow conference has emerged. Called BIL (get it? BIL and TED), this is an unconference that will take place in Monterey, CA (where TED operates) beginning Saturday, this weekend, March 1-2. The schedule is not quite parallel to TED, but it does overlap by a day. 

Like most unconferences, BIL is a user-generated meeting. It's free. Anyone can come. Anyone can present. The agenda and schedule are self-organized starting with a wiki, and a white board at the event.

Some of the speakers signed up for BIL, the free shadow TED, have spoken at TED before, some should speak at TED in the future, and some are people you will never hear at TED.  And like all conferences, some who talk should not -- but hey, that happens at TED as well.  Here are some sample talks now on the agenda:

Millicomputing: The Coolest CPUs and the Flashiest Storage - Adrian Cockcroft
How to Be a Successful Heretic - Aubrey de Grey
An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything - A Garrett Lisi
Darknets - fascist gated associations, or intentional community - Baron RK Von Wolfsheild
Always the Next Human - Quinn Norton
Motivation Psychology. Learning Optimism. - Kai Chang
The Rise of the Machines and the End of Transit - Brad Templeton
Stem Cells- Everything You Wanted To Know But Were Afraid to Ask - Daniel Kraft

Sadly I am out of town this week, so while I will be a TED, I will miss BIL. But if you would like an intense, unique learning experience, go to BIL.

Unconferences have a long history. They began as supplimental self-organized birds-of-a-feather  meetings at tech conferences. I believe the first Hackers' Conference we organized in 1984 had BoF meetings. The idea was people with a strong interest would publicly post their passion in meeting other like-minded folks and then the interested parties would self-organize a gathering in the evening hours. Those meetings were often so productive, many folks had a similar idea: forget about speakers at a podium. Just host an entire conference consisting of nothing but self-organized gatherings in small rooms. Tim O'Reilly extended the scale of the gathering to include free camping outside on a lawn in his FooCamp (below).

FooCamp really works. Here is a the matrix white board from the first FooCamp where individuals can sign up their intention to speak at a certain time.

The rest of the gathering will either pick someone to listen to, or sign up to speak themselves.  It becomes a free-market of ideas at that point.  Popular ideas get a crowded room, less popular ones don't. One can begin to detect patterns of interest emerging.

FooCamp is invitational, and so it spawned BarCamp, now held all over the world, which are open to anyone. The principles of an unconference (as articulated by Open Space) are:

Whoever comes are the right people.
Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
Whenever it starts is the right time.
Whenever it is over it is over.

Here is how to organize a powerful unconference. This can work inside a company as well as in public.

1) Establish a venue with many smaller rooms, and a time. You may need to provide food.

2) Post the invitation on a wiki.  Let users volunteer to speak, decide the agenda, and get a sense of who is coming using the wiki. There is a BarCamp Wiki template here.

3) At a meeting room during the venue erect a large board with a blank matrix. Attending speakers will sign up for rooms and time slots.

4) Enjoy as people and ideas connect.

OK, it is not really that easy. Someone has to get it going, rent the rooms, cover costs, and make sure folks end on time. For a really great tutorial on how to organize an unconference see Darren Barefoot's write up.

By miles, these kinds of unconferences have yielded more for me than any other type of meeting. An unconference give the highest ratio of new, unexpected, never-thought-of-that ideas than any other venue I am aware of.

Evolution and Ontogeny of Game Characters

Over time, even game characters evolve.

The change in these Nintendo characters since their birth display the universal sequence we see in evolution and biological development. Organisms go from general indistinctness to ever greater and sharper distinctness.

We can read these shifts in Mario, Link and Donkey Kong as if they occurred in real organisms. A similar pattern occurs both in an individual as it grows from embryo to adult, and in life as a whole as species evolve from generalized organism to specialized one. This parallel pattern is sometimes known as recapitulation theory. In short form it says "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." In other words the development of the individual embryo (ontogeny) rehearses the development of the species (phylogeny). For instance, in embryo humans have gill structures which suggests that in embryo humans replay our earlier evolutionary past "fish" form. Scientifically, this is an exaggeration, and very few organisms actually recapitulate their evolution, but in broad soft strokes there is a truth to it.

The general trend in evolution is to move from generalization to specialization. From simple structure to complex. And from indistinct to distinct.  That movement is seen very clearly in this timeline of Nintendo characters. They start out as embryonic balls, with generalized parts. An eye is a single pixel to begin with. Later on it becomes multi-pixeled, and later each pixel is doing something different -- different color and function. Hands move from a few general indistinct pixels to more complex forms with specialized parts -- fingers, wrists, etc.

It is not hard to forecast the next steps in this evo-devo. More specialization, sharper distinctions, additional complexity.

Image found on Kontraband

The Kitchen Computer

Marketers seem not to have picked up on this: 

The most used computer in our house -- and many of our friends -- is the one in the middle of the kitchen.

Not only is it the most used computer in our household, it has become the most used device in our house. More than the kitchen light (which is merely on at night), or the dishwasher, or the TV or radio, or our cars. There is simply no tool we use as much, or with as much satisfaction. Yet, I've never seen an ad for the kitchen computer.

It wasn't always this way. A kitchen computer seemed a complete gilded luxury for a very computer-intensive household. But three years ago we bought an elegant Apple G5 iMac computer and set it down smack in the middle of our kitchen. It is one of the few seemingly non-essential purchases I've made that we have zero regrets about. If any of us are home this thing will be used. We play music on it. Watch DVDs while cooking. During dinner it answers questions. Our son plays online games on it. The teenagers will video conference with friends. We retrieve last minute maps from it. My wife does remote email from work. There are five people in our family and while we each have our own laptops or desktops, we are constantly looking things up on this ever-ready central node.

What has been so fascinating is to see how much public or social use this one machine gets. For instance, this device seems to be the place to do YouTube. The beauty of YouTube is sharing clips, and nothing beats sharing your favorite video clips in the kitchen. We stand around as friends show off their favorites. We tend to forget, or ignore, the social aspects of exploring, learning, and playing -- which is a lot of what online life is. These functions are enhanced when engaging them in the social space of a kitchen.

As many parents has noticed, this family social space serves as a great "screen" for kids online. We can not only keep an eye of what is happening online, we can also occasionally participate. Open-air (so to speak) usage also enhances the social process of asking questions. A kitchen-based node is also perfect for family-based queries as looking for a house to buy, or even shopping for gifts for siblings. Now that our eldest daughter has gone away to college we use the iMac's camera to video conference with her in her dorm in the evenings, or with my parents back on the east coast. That's another wonderful family event headquartered in the kitchen.

You could remove many electronic boxes from our home and we would not miss them. But if you took our kitchen computer away, it would hurt. In fact two weeks ago the Mac had to go in for repairs, and we kept turing to its vacant spot for help, only to groan. It felt a little like some feel without their cell phone.

I am reminded of how 15 years ago I bought a cheap computer projector (then solely used for office presentations) and hooked it up to a DVD player and surround sound to make a low-rent home theater (in our TV-less house). It was better than our local multiplex. I couldn't figure out why everyone didn't do that, or least why no projectors were engineered or sold for that purpose. At the time cheap home projectors for a large screen were a geeky hack. Now, of course, the same manufacturers are marketing inexpensive home theater projectors for just this purpose. 

I believe in a few years electronic manufacturers -- maybe Apple -- will aim devices for the incredibly rich social space of the kitchen. In the meantime, everyone should set one up in the heart of the home.  Online is a family affair.

UPDATE: Steven Leckart brings to my attention that an early commercial computer, The H