Will Robots take all the jobs?

My feeling is that the robots will take the drudge jobs.

We will (somehow) in response create more jobs for artists, teachers, musicians, semi-pro athletes and other creative, artistic and helpful people. 

http://boingboing.net/2013/05/17/will-robots-take-all-the-jobs.html

Say Hello to the 100 Trillion Bacteria That Make Up Your Microbiome - NYTimes.com

Michael Pollan is one of my favorite writers on food, diet and the creation of food.

Here he talks about you (plural) are what you (plural) eat.

With you (plural) being the mass of bacteria you cohabit your body with.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/magazine/say-hello-to-the-100-trillion-bacteria-that-make-up-your-microbiome.html?_r=0

Making Your Own Website: Your Career Will Thank You Later

I think you all know this. In any case here are some good tips on how and why to have your own web site.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/making-your-own-website-your-career-will-thank-you-later/

Help with Terence Deacon's Incomplete Nature now on GitHub

My current favorite book is Terence Deacon's Incomplete Nature.

It's about an attempt to resolve René Descarte's mind-body dilemma while obeying the rules of the good contemporary science. Kant, Darwin, Einstein. Final cause, DNA, quantum mechanics. It's got them all and more.

Guess what?

It's a bloody hard book to read.

So I am in the process of coding and creating an online cheat sheet for the work at:

http://absence.github.com/

The GitHub web site is where over three million programmers keep their programs in the cloud.

The nice thing is that you can use GitHub for other uses than for merely keeping software.

My work, which comprises content, appearance and behaviors, is still very much a work in progress.

From time-to-time, I will inform you here of worthy developments.

And, well, just remember what they say: "You can't enjoy the show without a program!"

Yay! I made a drawing. Actually, I copied Jean Cocteau.

The Future of the Book ~ an Update

I met a nice person at a party the other day and we talked of the future of the book. So I updated some of the work I had started in 2008, sent it him and include it here.

Anybody else interested in the future of the book?

Festivus Day ~ a holiday I can celebrate

Today I learned about Festivus day through the kind auspices of Matt Cutts.

https://plus.google.com/+MattCutts/posts/1p3CBpHvNJw

In acknowledgement I have added a reference to the Festivus pole to the Wikipedia page for Google hoaxes and Easter eggs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google%27s_hoaxes_and_easter_eggs#Search

And also to the Wikipedia entry for Festivus:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festivus#In_popular_culture

At last I have a festive season holiday that I can celebrate. Yay!

PhiSci Icon

If I am to write about Incomplete Nature (see previous post) then I need a category or label for the topic. My current name seems to be PhiSci for philosophy and science - and it's a play on Si Fi as well.

Well, what would an icon for this topic look like? How about electrons swirling around a brain?

Back into Incomplete Nature

I am reading again Terrence Deacon's Incomplete Nature. This time I am starting with the epilogue and am reading a chapter at a time in reverse order. I'm now at Chapter 15.

It's a hard book to read. It's a fun book to read. The process is like trying to solve a puzzle - where the obstacle you are trying to overcome is the slowness of your own brain.

It's also a scary process.

I think the reason I am reading this book is because I feel that it may be a shortcut. Instead of spending thousands of hours trying to formulate an education based on Kant, Kierkegaard, Kuhn et al, one could jump onto a more modern, scientifically verifiable foundation and use this new, unified structure as the basis for building a personal cosmology faster miles an hour.

Well, we all know about the "10,000 Hour Rule" - that it takes 10,000 hours of work or effort to master a particular skill or discipline. So, shortcut or no shortcut, if I get into this science/philosophy thing then it will take years to get out to the other side.

And even if I did - then what? Scary thing #2 then pops up.

You run into the conundrum posed by that very smart lad, Paul Graham, in his essay "How to Do Philosophy"

Here are some quotes from Paul's essay:

The proof of how useless some of their answers turned out to be is how little effect they have. No one after reading Aristotle's Metaphysics does anything differently as a result.
...
If I say this, some will say it's a ridiculously overbroad and uncharitable generalization, and others will say it's old news, but here goes: judging from their works, most philosophers up to the present have been wasting their time.

Fortunately Paul leaves a bit of wiggle room. There may be, after all, some utility to philosophy:

These seem to me what philosophy should look like: quite general observations that would cause someone who understood them to do something differently.

And this is what I hope for. It would be a fun and fine thing to be able to apply what I learn from Deacon and others to the other topics I am interested in - including follow-ups to Christopher' Alexanders A Pattern Language and my own investigations into the visual display of huge amounts of data.

I have started the process by beginning to write a summary or synopsis of each chapter - which I plan to publish here and elsewhere as soon as some of it begins to look as if it might look like something. And given my extremely low standards of quality, I will probably publish way too early. If it's worth doing then it's worth doing badly. Right?

A Boat ~ Drawing in the Modern Way

It is a nice to draw something on a digital device and then have the drawing 'appear' on the web 'just like that'.

The 'A Boat' drawing is an approximation of such a process.

The boat was dawn on a Nexus 7 using Skitch.

Skitch is a very nice drawing tool produced and maintained by the Evernote team.

The underlying data is saved by Evernote.

From Evernote you can obtain a URL to a Skitch drawing.

Add that URL as the source to an HTML IFRAME tag which in turn is embedded into a Blogger post while editing in HTML mode and - presto - the drawing is publicly available.

Here's the code for the boat drawing.

<iframe height="100%" src="http://www.evernote.com/shard/s1/sh/94c80bfc-ffad-4e55-b4dd-20683860d484/8e68333b1d0f82fea10d41ef3e0701e2" style="border: medium solid #000;" width="100%">
<p>
Your browser does not support iframes.</p>
</iframe>

There is a significant side effect: any edit to the original Skitch drawing automatically updates Blogger and appears in the post with the next refresh. Whether this is a good thing or bad thing could be debated. The modern tradition is that once a blog post is posted it should not require further editing. Perhaps this is the precursor to post-modern blogging.

Evernote iFrame Test

Kindle Fire versus Nook Color ~ Day #2

I have had another day with my Kindle Fire and I am perhaps a bit less gloomy than yesterday.

Don't get me wrong, the Kindle Fire is an awesome device. It was just four years ago in November that Amazon released the Kindle First Generation for $399. This device is half the price and is a gazillion times sexier. [The same month saw the introduction of the OLPC and the first Asus netbook. Each of these was also $399. I still have my first Asus netbook and it is a total piece of junk.]

But now that we are in the land of milk and honey – device-wise anyway – we can be ever so picky.

On Facebook: Incomplete Nature - a book by Terrence Deacon

Incomplete Nature - a book by Terrence Deacon that came out this week is a work that I have been studying for several months – having been the recipient of some of Deacon's early drafts.

Although I prepared a number of comments on the text for Deacon, the book is so dense that I cannot say that I fully understand it as of yet.

What I do recognize is that Incomplete Nature is an important book and perhaps one of the most important books to be written on what it is to be conscious and what it means to think about things. It is far too early, however, for me to even begin to think of how I would structure a review of the book.

Part of the process of learning to deal with such a complex work is to approach the work from a number of different points of view. One approach I am taking is perhaps a bit wacky and that is to build and manage the Facebook page for the book.

Which brings me to this: I need help!

In order to register a username on Facebook and thus be able to obtain the elegant facebook.com/incompletenature URL one needs to have twenty five people "Like" the page. As of tonight there are just three Likes.

So please, please - if you are on Facebook - click on the link below and when you get to the Facebook page then click on the Like button. Thank you!

You do not need to read the book. Just wait a while and I will tell you all about it...

Link:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Incomplete-Nature-How-Mind-Emerged-from-Matter/187470574672645

On Facebook: Art Technology & Culture (ATC) at UC Berkeley

One of my very favorite activities is attending the lectures at the Art Technology and Culture (ATC) Colloquium at University of California Berkeley. This is a project run by the Berkeley Center for New Media.

Over the past 15 years, Professor Ken Goldberg and his colleagues have invited some of the most interesting, unique and innovative individuals on the planet to come and talk to students of new media.

The lectures are open to the public and I have become a regular member of the audience. So much so that I've been asked to help out on the ATC's Facebook page.

In these times when money is ever so precious, it is really nice for an organization that needs help to ask for help rather than money. In my case, I happened to do a little bit of both but my real pleasure is in the helping part.

Link:
https://www.facebook.com/CalATC

Kindle Fire: First Day

Video
Instant Video via Amazon Prime is awesome. Free movie streaming.

Apps
Accepts Gmail but no support for Google Docs, Maps, Calendar etc.

I use Google Apps frequently every day - so this is a deal-breaker for me.

My rooted Nook Color hands all of these well - plus the full Kindle Reader app

NY Times
I am already a subscriber to the New York Times digital edition.

But it looks like I would have to subscribe again in order to read it using the Kindle version.

First Impressions

It's beautiful hardware. Bright and very responsive screen.

But for the moment I am dismayed by the software and content issues.

;-(

Moved This Blog from WordPress to Blogger

If you are a heavy-duty blogger, WordPress is definitely the way to go. WordPress has a lot of great tools for writers built into the software. The software is open source and can be run on any server or  hosted by WordPress.com for free. The founder, Matt Mullenweg, is a San Francisco Bay Area hero and still very much involved with the company. I could and probably should write a number of posts just about the good things of WordPress.

Nevertheless I have moved to Blogger – a free service offered by Google – for a number of reasons. The first is cost. I run a number of websites for a variety of people for which I receive no money. With Blogger I have more freedom - at no charge - to control the appearance of the site than I do with WordPress. With WordPress I would have to pay $30 per year per site.

With WordPress if I want a domain name to point to set hosting service offered by WordPress.com I have to pay $12 per year. With Blogger I can do this at no charge. When added all up, we are talking only about a few hundred dollars a year. So the cost is not really that important.

On the other hand I do help a lot of people with their websites for whom such an expense would be too much. So I feel that my expertise with Blogger may be more helpful to people than xpertise with WordPress – for people for whom such a charge would not be feasible.

The ultimate back story, however, is what happens sometime in the future. At some time somebody will stop paying for the domain name registrations and for the styling charges or whatever. I feel that Blogger office of greatest chance so that some years from now – even with pay no money – the websites I work on will still be around and look much the way they do the last time I happen to touch them.

So what I'm saying is that the historians of the distant future will have an easier task parsing through Blogger sites than the WordPress sites. And this is very important. Since nobody today reads the stuff I write, my only hope is you guys way out there sometime in the future.

New on MangoJango: Clever Robot - Created by 3D Printer

A quick post on a cleverly made 'bot.

Link:
http://www.mangojango.com/2011/11/clever-robot-created-by-3d-printer.html

Umbrella

It's raining here today...

So Many Jobs Available in Technology - Even More Jobs for Females

There is an upbeat story in Techcrunch today by David Kirkpatrick about the current state of technology in the world today.

The fastest-growing resource in the world is computing power and storage.
How To Be An Optimist In A Pessimistic Time

And yet in most every country in the world today, too many people are looking for work. The only significant exception is the technology sector. Every major and minor player in the San Francisco Bay Area is looking for talent.

Cup of Coffee

Ever since I can remember, I have always wanted to be somebody who draws things. For good portions of my life I have been able to fulfill this ambition.

New on MangoJango: The Power of Free Electricity

Re-igniting the Mangojango web site. It will cover architecture, 3D printing, robotics, transport and design. You'll see - they all do really combine well - when you have a utopian vision of things.

Link:
The Power of Free Electricity

New on BC News: The Decrease in Crime: The Nice Thing Nobody Tells You

There was an angry and strong response to my post on the decrease in crime is San Francisco here.

Link:
The Decrease in Crime: The Nice Thing Nobody Tells You

 

New White Paper: "Learning to Program"

I have written a number of white papers. As the Wikipedia link explains, a white paper  is "an authoritative report or guide that helps solve a problem". The ones I have written are usually prepared for people I am working with to build some kind of product or service. They are often written quickly casually being under some kind of deadline. Nevertheless they have tended to have some content interesting to me and, I hope, to others. Therefore I've decided to start cleaning some of the papers up and make them readily available on the web.

The first white paper I offer is called "Learning to Program". This paper shows you how to use the Internet to learn about the Internet and then using this knowledge explains how you can be  not only be a passenger on the Internet and but also one of the drivers.

Link:
http://goo.gl/aDNFJ

You Are What You Write

The title of this topic, at least my first contact with these words, comes from an on-line manual titled Producing Open Source Software by Karl Fogel. The author introduces the topic thusly:

Consider this: the only thing anyone knows about you on the Internet comes from what you write, or what others write about you. You may be brilliant, perceptive, and charismatic in person—but if your emails are rambling and unstructured, people will assume that's the real you. Or perhaps you really are rambling and unstructured in person, but no one need ever know it, if your posts are lucid and informative.

http://www.producingoss.com/en/producingoss.pdf ~ page 77

In my opinion the truthiness of this topic goes far deeper than Fogel's pleasant comparisons. "You are what you write" is really quite primal - more like Descartes's "I think therefore I am". I think life becomes "I write therefore I am". For example, I exist only because you are reading these words.

Daughter #2 Was Published: Carpooling ~ What the Census Doesn't Show

My daughter, Cynthia Armour, recently had a very informative article on carpooling published in a major online source for news on transportation. Driving in the fast lane - as carpoolers often get the right to do - is something we should all do more often...

Link
http://www.planetizen.com/node/51565

New on AOTN: Internet Art of a Beastly Kind

Is Internet-enabled art really Internet art? Not so says this site's benevolent dictator for life.

Link
http://aotn.us/post/11637680968/internet-art-of-a-beastly-kind 

Pretty Shiny, New Things

Very pretty shiny, new things – delivered by a wizened old pro - Iain Sinclair.

http://www.iainsinclair.com/index.php

I still have the black version of his calculator from the 1970s
Very pretty shiny, new things – delivered by a wizened old pro.

History in the Making - One Tweet at a Time

In this post I am not discussing the merits of Occupy Wall Street, I am merely, as a techie, thinking about and commenting on certain elements of the the back-story or subtext associated with the events that relate to people's usage of the Internet.

Reuters.com reports that the Occupy Wall Street movement began with blog post with this Twitter hashtag: #OccupyWallStreet.

The are a number of interesting elements here:

Velocity: From zero to global movement in less than ninety days. Makes you think of synchronicity, multiple discovery, collective unconscious, collective consciousness, vox popoli and  zeitgeist,  and some kind of whole earth resonance. How long does it take to start a world movement? It used to take years, decades. Now it's down to days. Will the length of time it takes to get people off their butts become even shorter?

Singularity: It started with one person. Or perhaps a tiny group. This is so different from voting. In voting you say "Each vote counts!" But ultimately each vote is just a statistic. This is much more like the lottery. Guess a number. Guess a hashtag. The lucky winner gets global recognition. Except with the lottery one person gets everything, while the results of the successful hashtag are shared. And unlike the vote or lottery, there are no losers here. Anyone who wants "in" is a winner.

Anonymity: The person who created the hashtag is not a famous person. The hashtag was not written by a Thomas Jefferson or Rupert Murdoch - a person normally associated with the creation of events or news. The creator was just a normal human being in some random place. The creation of the Tweet may have even been somewhat of a random event in the creator's lives.

Openness: We know the history of the event - right down to the millisecond of inception. All out in the open - readily available to anyone. Nothing occurred in hidden rooms. No back-room deals. It's all visible, transparent.

Documented: We don't need no historians. No historian was needed to research the event. The events are self-documenting. The role historian as a recorder of the events is a sunset industry. The role of the future historian (apart from mundane archiving) is only relevant as that of a pundit or commentator.

Big picture: There will be more events like this. Some you will like and some you will not like. Your choice.

Link via Techmeme:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/18/us-wallstreet-protests-social-idUSTRE79G6E420111018

 

 

New on AOTN: Comments On Kal Spelletich At UC Berkeley ATC

I wrote quite a bit of tongue-in-cheekiness on Kal Spelletich's very engaging presentation on October 10, 2011 at the Art Technology Culture Colloquium at the Berkeley Center for New Media.

Link:
http://aotn.us/post/11364932802/kal-spelletich

New on Jaanga: Sound As An Element in Visualizations

There's a web site for curating sound.

Can you hear me now?

Link:
Sound As An Element in Visualizations