April, 2008
27
Apr 08
sometimes a number hits you like a baseball bat to the head
Televisions from days gone by by Neil Anderson. License: 
Clay Shirky on how small wikipedia is, relative to the way we’ve spent our culture’s free time for the past fifty years:
So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.
The whole thing is worth reading, but that particular bit just jumped out at me like a lightning bolt.
On that note, back to my cave to work on passing Corporations and E-Commerce exams.
23
Apr 08
RHEL-izing Wikipedia
I’ve been waiting for this. (It isn’t the first time; see wikitravel, but it appears to be a higher-profile publisher.) It is obvious that to some people and institutions, stable and vetted is good. It is true in software, and in specific areas (textbooks, guidebooks, possibly encyclopedias) it is probably true in written books as well, so it is only a matter of time before this model (take unpolished, cutting edge community version and turn it into something ‘enterprise-y’) becomes relevant in publishing too.
Now, hopefully wikitravel has an Istanbul book before the summer…
16
Apr 08
new headshot
I got interviewed last week for a linux.com piece. I also got LASIK over spring break, after 22 years of glasses. (It’s been a month without them and I’m still pretty psyched.) The result of the above two facts is a new headshot, in best chinposin style:
Next necessary step: new hackergotchi, possibly from this picture (almost certainly not from the chinposin one.)
(And yes, I’ll get one that is slightly less swarmy/businessy at some point. If that’s what you need, you probably still want this one. :)
11
Apr 08
second worst dialog I saw during a recent Ubuntu upgrade
This dialog gets points for being graphical, and loses many, many, many points for presenting no information that any reasonable user could possibly get any use from unless they already previously understand (1) what FUSE is (2) how to get FUSE plugins (3) who the ‘first user’ is (4) what the ‘fuse group’ is and (5) how to add users to the ‘fuse group.’ And if you know all those things, you didn’t need the dialog, so kudos for being both useless and intimidating.
The worst dialog was actually a terminal wrapped in the upgrader GUI which stalled my entire upgrade in order to ask me what my terminal encoding was, helpfully presenting a list of 28 possible encodings, of which UTF-8 was 27th and the default was some obscure encoding I’d never previously heard of. (The other times the upgrader stalled the upgrade to ask for input it told me I’d modified config files I’d never previously heard of, much less modified, but at least those had basically the same useful-ish debian config file dialog I’ve been used to for ages.)
Linux has come a long way (the upgrader helpfully offered to do a partial upgrade instead of complaining and dying like previous debian/ubuntu upgrades), but still has a long way to go too.
(These weren’t the only problems I saw; Gerv has a good list of some of the other ones, though I didn’t see all of the ones he did.)
9
Apr 08
I love the smell of a fascist state in the morning
Suspending the protection of the laws in favor of executive power: it makes the trains run on time gets fences built on time.
Brought to you by the people who decided we didn’t need that pesky fourth amendment anyway.
(Why yes, this did provoke me to finally renew my ACLU membership. Read more about what they are doing to make us safe and free here.)
7
Apr 08
good news/bad news, journal edition
Good news: I’ve been selected as Editor in Chief of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, 2008-2009 edition. I’m excited to be able to work with a great team to release a solid issue of the journal, and also to spend some time thinking about where journals might go next.
Bad news: Lots of work to be done, and big questions like these to be dealt with. I can already feel my hair getting greyer. ;)
Overall: very excited, I just hope I get to sleep some next year. :)
[This happened a couple weeks ago; I keep forgetting to blog it for the record, but with journal recruiting starting in earnest this week, it was hard to forget.]
7
Apr 08
couple quick quotes
- “I think [defining BSD as 'free because it has no restrictions' and GPL as 'not free because it has restrictions'] confuses freedom with anarchy.” –James Vasile. As concise and correct a refutation of this position as I’ve seen.
- Obama on patriotism:
I love this country not because it’s perfect, but because we’ve always been able to move it closer to perfection. Because through revolution and slavery; war and depression; great battles for civil rights and women’s rights and worker’s rights, generations of Americans have shown their love of country by struggling and sacrificing and risking their lives to bring us that much closer to our founding promise. And as long as I live, I will never forget that I am only standing here because they did… It’s a country where the improbable love of my parents was actually possible; where my mother could raise me without much money but still send me to the best schools in the nation; a country where I’ve seen hope triumph in neighborhoods that were devastated by joblessness and poverty; where I’ve seen ordinary Americans find justice in a courtroom; where I’ve seen progress made for working families who need leaders who are willing to stand up and fight for them. That is the country I love. That is the promise of America.
6
Apr 08
spring ’08 new york diary
For a whole variety of reasons (birthdays, my brother’s extended visit, decision to leave NY post-graduation) Krissa and I have been making a serious effort to enjoy New York over the past few months. I’ll take the liberty of treating the blog as a personal diary (sorry casual readers), and put here a list of some things we’ve done since December ’07:
- theater: we saw a puppet show about a Norwegian Jew who died in the holocaust. I’ve been curious about professional, ‘adult’ puppetry since the use of puppets in Being John Malkovich, and when I saw this show reviewed, I knew I needed to see it. Well worth it- really interesting use of the form. We also saw Patrick Stewart as Macbeth; really incredible despite our not-so-great seats.
- flamenco (x2!): for my birthday, I was given tickets to two different shows in the New York Flamenco Festival. Really incredible shows both- Eva Yerbabuena had tremendous technique and presence; and Son de La Frontera was uniquely interesting.
- jazz: I was unfortunately sick, so I couldn’t enjoy it fully, but we took in a very good show by Marcus Roberts at the utterly incredible Allen Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Also went to Smoke a couple times- lots of fun to have a good jazz club less than a ten minute walk away.
- museums: we finally went to the interesting Transit Museum. It needs an investment to make the signage and layout more modern, but still, really interesting stuff in understanding the growth of the city. Nice to take in while attempting to tackle The Power Broker. Also went back to the MAD for their ‘Extreme Embroidery‘ exhibit- I think MAD may be my favorite, quirkiest New York Museum.
- Brooklyn: after not going to Brooklyn pretty much since moving here, I’ve gone three times, once for a party and twice for cultural events.
- food: we’ve eaten well. More visits to Pukk and Caracas Arepa Bar- our favorite cheap-ish places in New York. On the non-cheap side, the highlight was a meal at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, lovingly detailed by Krissa. It was her 30th birthday, and truly a joyful, wonderful meal.
And now, a picture of that last dinner, in pre-processed form:
2
Apr 08
post-April Fool’s note
For future reference: if you’re in an organization with a lawyer, this is how you do April Fool’s.