Why sampling is important, by PWEI.

Touched By The Hand Of Cicciolina

• BBC Football coverage. Cicciolina herself
• Repeating metallic percussion shaker from ‘Tales From Topographic Oceans’ by Yes.

Yoz has more.

This has been an entry in the style of Ben Hammersley – and while we’re talking about the big fop, look what he’s gone and made: Linkr.

Growing up in the UK in the 70s and 80s, one sometimes heard mention of Cronkite.

A word synonymous with the news, rather than a person who read it. It sounded like a fantastic material – an element, unbendable and unbreakable that history was made of; over there in the wonderland of Shuttles and Star Wars.

Via the excellent Hypergene Mediablog, come some choice chunks of pure Cronkite, shaped into commentary about erstwhile colleague and essayist Eric Sevareid and news media past:

Rules of an essayist
Sevareid speaking in his farewell essay, shared his self-imposed rules of journalism that guided his essays:

1. Not to underestimate the intelligence of the audience, and not to over estimate it’s information.
2. To elucidate when one can, more than to advocate.
3. To retain the courage of one’s doubts, as well as one’s convictions, in this world of dangerously passionate certainties.
4. To comfort oneself in times of error, with the knowledge that the saving grace of the press, print or broadcast is it’s self-correcting nature.

and

“…when society values the impulsive spoken outburst, over the reasoned elegance of the written word, the implications for an informed citizenry are dire.”

Via Adam and Abe comes this literally chilling Fortune article about catastrophic, abrupt climate change caused by the failure/change in established global climate mechanisms like the North Atlantic Conveyor [diagram, wikipedia entry]:

“Global warming may be bad news for future generations, but let’s face it, most of us spend as little time worrying about it as we did about al Qaeda before 9/11. Like the terrorists, though, the seemingly remote climate risk may hit home sooner and harder than we ever imagined. In fact, the prospect has become so real that the Pentagon’s strategic planners are grappling with it.

The threat that has riveted their attention is this: Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world’s climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decade—like a canoe that’s gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don’t know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societies—thereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power.

… The changes relentlessly hammer the world’s “carrying capacity”—the natural resources, social organizations, and economic networks that support the population. Technological progress and market forces, which have long helped boost Earth’s carrying capacity, can do little to offset the crisis—it is too widespread and unfolds too fast.

As the planet’s carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern reemerges: the eruption of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies. As Harvard archeologist Steven LeBlanc has noted, wars over resources were the norm until about three centuries ago. When such conflicts broke out, 25% of a population’s adult males usually died. As abrupt climate change hits home, warfare may again come to define human life.”

Sitting in Helsinki airport about to fly to San Diego for Etech, this feels close to home:

“Europe, hardest hit by its temperature drop, struggles to deal with immigrants from Scandinavia seeking warmer climes to the south.”

Yup.

» Fortune: The Pentagon’s Weather Nightmare

MonkeyMagic:

“One little thought:

If complex systems self-organise, where do leaders fit in? Put another way, if Big Tony is Prime Minister because of British self-organisation, is there anything that’s his fault?”

» MonkeyMagic: Churchill, Lincoln, Caesar RIP

Via BoingBoing, a remark of a Judge on the Grokster p2p vs Hollywood case to one of the content-industry lawyers:

“Let me say what I think your problem is. You can use these harsh terms [“piracy,” “theft”], but you are dealing with something new, and the question is, does the statutory monopoly that Congress has given you reach out to that something new. And that’s a very debatable question. You don’t solve it by calling it ‘theft.’ You have to show why this court should extend a statutory monopoly to cover the new thing. That’s your problem. Address that if you would. And curtail the use of abusive language.”

“To many in both politics and business, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power has finally moved to the people. Certainly the people may feel they are in charge, but are they really? The Century of the Self tells the untold and sometimes controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society in Britain and the United States. How was the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interests?

Sigmund Freud’s work into the bubbling and murky world of the subconscious changed the world. By introducing a technique to probe the unconscious mind, Freud provided useful tools for understanding the secret desires of the masses. Unwittingly, his work served as the precursor to a world full of political spin doctors, marketing moguls, and society’s belief that the pursuit of satisfaction and happiness is man’s ultimate goal.”

A fantastic series, and unfortunately not available on bittorrent… First watched this in parallel to reading The Filth, which was a helluva combo.

» BBC Four: The century of the self

Good overview of “absent presence” and other afflictions of modern technology, found via LMG:

For years, researchers have discussed how cell phones have trampled over the once communal public space of sidewalks and restaurants. The idea is that we may be physically on a street corner, but our distracted minds are not. We do little bits of everything and none well.

A convergence of technologies is making the distractions still worse. A new kind of personal computer called the Media Center allows users to easily watch TV on the same screen where they swap instant messages and burn music DVDs. And Asian cell-phone companies have begun building television tuners into their most advanced models.

How we manage these relationships between technology and people is a growing source of anxiety. It’s depressing, but somehow fitting, that convergence now allows us to be distracted from our distractions.

The article goes onto cover methods of rationing information, such as “email-free days” in organisations. In fact most of the suggestions mentioned for managing the relationships between technology and people are seen as ‘on or off’ decisions… or at their most sophisticated: ‘throttling’ the amount.

There’s no mention of changing the information into meaning through good design (see the Bruce Sterling quote I posted earlier about “what to pay attention to”) – information can be made sense of, and the burden on our attention made less by great information design, information architecture, interaction design, user-interface design.

I think it’s fantastic that journalists, bloggers, technologists and hackers are starting to pay more attention to sociologists, ethnographers and other theorists on the human condition and technology’s effects. However, research and analysis takes you only so far – synthesis means design. It would be a shame if designers couldn’t benefit from this recent, reinvigorated dialogue, as I think the other parties would definitely benefit by including them.

Great design internalises the observed human needs, and instinctively creates useful, beautiful things.

Great design creates meaning from information.

I guess however Foucault’s Pendulum demonstrates we could always end up with “meaning overload”…

» TwinCities.com: Pioneer Press: “Attention Please!”

A snatch of Vonnegut found in the comments at Many2Many:

“Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen,” she said in a grackle squawk, “has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous.”

A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen-upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.

The rest of Harrison’s appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.

Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.

And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.

“If you see this boy,” said the ballerina, “do not – I repeat, do not – try to reason with him.”

» HARRISON BERGERON by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

You should have pitched it as invading the Moon and Mars, and you would have not been so nickel-and-dimed. Dan DigitalDust has this:

“So Bush is commiting a few billion to the Mars race, these are not numbers he fears. He’s a big spender, he’s had well over US$100bn for his wars, he got US$50bn for Afghanistan and US$68bn for Iraq as well as his beefed up defense budget and all the money he’s spending on ‘homeland security’.”

Ok – last space post for a while I think. Just putting off a post about ethnography and innovation that I’m fretting over.