TinkerX

Years and years ago, I read the excellent “Chaos: making a new science,” by James Gleick. I recommend it; very interesting stuff. But the point I remember most vividly is that there is a big difference between stuff that’s random — completely without order — and the functional, scientific definition of chaos.

It’s a great book. Brings together stuff from many fields; meteorology, biology, traffic, math… fun stuff. But, again, my main take away is that there are systems that exhibit meaningful behavior, chaotic systems, that aren’t particularly Euclidian in their proceedings.

That is what popped into my head after having viewed “No Country for Old Men” (on DVD) and “The Strangers” (at our local dollar-flick). “No “Country…” is about the utter impersonal nature of fate, about the uncaring of large systems, about how we change in our relationship to those systems as we age, about the penalty for underestimating the power of huge fates to grind us down. It’s got a lot going on. And it’s very well done. It is a great film, and a great poem. Death, in the movie, is an agent of chaos. I won’t go into the plot at all, because it would require me describing the entire movie to make all my points, and I’m tired and I don’t like to spoil really good movies. Trust me, though — the chaos inherent in death. Big theme.

Now… let’s compare and contrast to “The Strangers.” A horror flick based, supposedly, on real events. I don’t mind giving away the plot elements, because if you’ve seen the trailers or read the intro, you know what will happen. In fact, if you’ve ever seen another “weird people in clown masks are hunting/terrorizing a nice, pretty couple” movie… you know what will happen.

Nice couple in cabin. Minor background story. People in clown masks terrorize them. Running, screaming, stabbing, bleeding. Blah, blah, blah. But, at one point, the guy asks them, “Why are you doing this to us?” And the reply from Scary Girl Clown #2 is, “Because you were home.”

Not withstanding the fact that this was actually a punch line in “Stir Crazy,” it’s just not good, scary storytelling. And it’s because of the difference between “chaos” and “randomness,” or “random-mess,” in the case of “The Strangers.”

Chaos is a dance whose steps you don’t quite understand. Randomness is a spasm; a fit. Chaos is the wind blowing leaves in one direction one minute, and another the next. Randomness is a drunk 16-year-old with a leaf blower. There is some beauty, some meaning in chaos. Randomness is just, well… pointless.

Maybe the sheer randomness of some kinds of horror and death can be scary. But it makes for a much less interesting movie.

“No Country for Old Men:” A-

“The Strangers:” C-

I was on vacation last week. The beach in SC. Lovely, thank you, but very windy the last couple days. Good for surfers, bad for families with kids.

I try to read one non-fiction book while on vacation (along with several pieces of brain candy). This year, it was “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky. I don’t always agree with Clay, but even when I think he’s wrong, he’s wrong with intelligence and style.

In the case of this book, he ain’t wrong. It’s his best work yet, I think, and a must read for anybody who’s serious about thinking seriously about the ways in which the Internet (and associated technologies) are intersecting with society. I may do a longer review post at some point, but for the time being, just go read it. Lots of good, telling examples. Lots of well thought out questions, without necessarily giving any answers. Which is a good thing. Asking the questions well is important. Pretending you know the answers is less so.

Clay talks a bit about the “publish then edit” mode that the Internet enables. In traditional media, you “edit then publish.” That is, producers and directors and publishers sift through (edit) a mountain of content, and then present what they think is best. On the Web, everybody publishes everything, and then we, the public, use a number of functions — links from friends, search engines, blog posts, etc. — to edit down the already published stuff.

In another part of the book, Clay talks about how folks all over the world are using this functionality to impact political situations. He gives examples of how smart mobs, email campaigns and even Twitter are used to turn the usual “Big Brother” thing on its ear. This started me thinking… Publish, edit, politics, government. Role reversals.

And then I started reading William Gibson’s new novel, “Spook Country”. Not done with it yet, but 1/3 of the way in… it’s great. There’s a scene where one character is talking to another who may be doing some sneaky “anti-terrorist” stuff. He says (I’m approximating, as the book’s downstairs and I don’t feel like getting it), “A nation is defined by its laws more than it’s circumstances at any particular time. A person whose morals change with circumstance is not moral. And a nation whose laws change based on circumstance is not true to those ideals that brought it into being.”

Bong. Gong goes off in my head.

Are laws, when taken as content, the result of publishing or editing? I would argue that laws themselves are a kind of editing; they keep us from doing certain things; they proscribe. Is the tendency of the current administration to do whatever the frick it wants, and then justify it later, a kind of “publish then edit” rather than the other way around? We’re supposed to come up with laws based on (among other documents), the Constitution, which (as my Republican friends point out all the time) does more to limit the power of government than describe it.

OK. If government is meant to be limited (edited), and laws are meant to be editorial tools… then doing things first, then coming up with wild-ass justifications for them, is a case of going “public then edit.” Action as public publishing of events; editing as the spin, rewrites, cover ups, justification, etc. after the fact.

I’m still not sure if this makes any sense. But all these thoughts are tangled up in my head in this way, and sometimes they need to live somewhere where I can come back and look at them later.

Publish then edit gives power to the creative masses. Editing, not publishing, is the proper function of government and laws.

Are the current hijinx in the White House a kind of reaction to the new balance of power imposed, to some degree, by the Web and the Flat World? Are politicians “doing more things” outside the lines of editorial (read: Constitutional) correctness because the Great Unwashed now has access to so much more creative power.

I have no idea. But it’s ringing in my head.

[Note note: the draft of this post was written months ago. I’m not sick anymore, thanks for asking.]

Note: I am sick as heck. Bad cold. This is Day 4 of what, at work, is being called affectionately, “The Pox.” I read an interesting post on Lifehacker about “Presenteeism,” the opposite of absenteeism. The idea that going to work, regardless of consequences, is necessary. We’re all the stars in our own life drama. So the idea that I’d put my own work requirements above the health and welfare of my coworkers isn’t completely unreasonable; especially when we take into account the fact that we don’t know what facts to take into account in terms of where/how we get sick. All this being apropos of nothing, except that I did stay home from work Thursday and worked from home on Friday, and now consider those acts to be somewhat selfless and communal. Whereas before, I would have considered myself lazy and weak. New wine, old skins. Yea.

Meanwhile… having been sick, I’ve been waking up early and watching The Daily Show on the DVR. One of the episodes from last week featured an interview with Lee Siegel, author of “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.” I did not read the book, and don’t plan on it. This is a review of a couple things Lee said on the the show.

First, he made the claim that relationships mediated by electronics — the Web, that is — aren’t really as real as those in real life and (?) those conducted over the phone. Hmmm… Odd that he wouldn’t consider the phone part of the machine of the electronic mob. When it debuted, critics believed that the phone would end civilized discourse, as it allowed for communication without physical presence and, therefore, without possible physical repercussions. That is true (I suppose), as you can call somebody a dillweed on the phone and not worry about him/her cracking you on the mellon.

Lee went on to say that because of the lack of real presence on the other end of the digital line, we tend to imbue “the other” with our own characteristics, thus making the relationship both shallow and somewhat fictional. That’s not a bad point. It is easier, certainly, to create a web (ha ha) of assumption when there is more left to the imagination. He then started talking about bad behavior on blogs and bulletin boards, what with the ranting and raving and flaming and invective and… and… and…

And he lost me. Even as an interesting antagonist to my own view… he lost me. Because you can’t have it both ways, Lee. If the machine is bad because it is a concave lens that diminishes our perception of “other,” that’s one thing; if it is a convex lens that exaggerates the bad behavior of others… hold on. Can it be both?

Well, here’s the thing: it can, if you’re being a dillweed.

I tend to expect the best of people, regardless of circumstance. I assume that they, like me, want to get along, be friendly, be smart, do the right thing, etc. That holds true online as well as in RL. I’ve had very cool, long, intelligent disagreements with people in both places. Where it stops (again, regardless of media), is when someone clearly just wants to rant on their own, and has no interest in discourse; no interest in the voice of “the other.”

Does that happen on the Web more than in RL? Perhaps. Comments on blogs are often not set up as discussion points, but more as stand-alone statements. And it is certainly possible to read a such a comment as if it were aimed right at you, thus making it seem like a churlish response, rather than a simple statement.

And so we’re back to the Web, as Lee said, distorting relationships because of our tendency to put ourselves in the center of the whole thing. We either assume closeness that isn’t there (because we want to see it), or assume animosity that isn’t there (because we read everything as personal).

At least we do when we’re being dillweeds. I’ve done it, for sure. A disagreeable statement that, in RL, might have been mitigated with a shrug and eyebrow-raise, comes across as totally hot-headed and unreasonable. And I’ve flamed back, too. But… but but but (this is the big but, and I like big buts, and I can not lie)… because of this tendency, signs and appeals to reason come across even more strongly, too. I’ve made some very good friends over the Web — some of whom I’ve never met in person. And in almost every case, it is because their online voice is one that I want to hear more of.

Which is the same as in RL. We seek out those people whose presence is pleasant. And that’s the case online, too.

Yes, there are more cranky, shallow statements on the Web. But there are also more chances for rare and beautiful flowers to spring up, in stark contrast with the dillweeds.

Fascinating post titled, “Is the Tipping Point Toast?” at Fast Company. In it, author Clive Thompson focuses on work done by Duncan Watts (a Columbia U. network-theory scientist on sabbatical to do work for Yahoo!) that shows how trends move through society. Contrary to the work of Malcom Gladwell, who wrote “The Tipping Point,” and who posits the importance of “Influentials” in establishing trends, Thompson’s research suggests that anybody can be the “spark” that ignites a conflagration of popularity. In fact, one of his research projects points to the almost random nature of hits:

Watts wanted to find out whether the success of a hot trend was reproducible. For example, we know that Madonna became a breakout star in 1983. But if you rewound the world back to 1982, would Madonna break out again? To find out, Watts built a world populated with real live music fans picking real music, then hit rewind, over and over again. Working with two colleagues, Watts designed an online music-downloading service. They filled it with 48 songs by new, unknown, and unsigned bands. Then they recruited roughly 14,000 people to log in. Some were asked to rank the songs based on their own personal preference, without regard to what other people thought. They were picking songs purely on each song’s merit. But the other participants were put into eight groups that had “social influence”: Each could see how other members of the group were ranking the songs.

Watts predicted that word of mouth would take over. And sure enough, that’s what happened. In the merit group, the songs were ranked mostly equitably, with a small handful of songs drifting slightly lower or higher in popularity. But in the social worlds, as participants reacted to one another’s opinions, huge waves took shape. A small, elite bunch of songs became enormously popular, rising above the pack, while another cluster fell into relative obscurity.

But here’s the thing: In each of the eight social worlds, the top songs–and the bottom ones–were completely different. For example, the song “Lockdown,” by 52metro, was the No. 1 song in one world, yet finished 40 out of 48 in another. Nor did there seem to be any compelling correlation between merit and success. In fact, Watts explains, only about half of a song’s success seemed to be due to merit. “In general, the ‘best’ songs never do very badly, and the ‘worst’ songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible,” he says. Why? Because the first band to snag a few thumbs-ups in the social world tended overwhelmingly to get many more. Yet who received those crucial first votes seemed to be mostly a matter of luck.

Yikes. The reaction of older music industry executives, in Watt’s words, was, “They were all like, ‘I think it’s bullshit. I’m still going to go with my gut,’” he recalls. “And I’m like, Okay, good luck to you. You’re going to need it.”

This reminds me, a bit, of the reaction of old-school baseball scouts in Michael Lewis’, “Moneyball: the art of winning an unfair game.” From the New Yorker editorial review:

The Oakland Athletics have reached the post-season playoffs three years in a row, even though they spend just one dollar for every three that the New York Yankees spend. Their secret, as Lewis’s lively account demonstrates, is not on the field but in the front office, in the shape of the general manager, Billy Beane. Unable to afford the star hires of his big-spending rivals, Beane disdains the received wisdom about what makes a player valuable, and has a passion for neglected statistics that reveal how runs are really scored.

Lewis wrote about how old-school scouts woud go out and pick players based on some basic, observed phenomenon — batting skills, running ability, etc. — and then go with, essentially, a hunch based on which ones looked “the best.” This is, to my mind, akin to looking for these Influencers that Gladwell and others insist are important to the hit making (ha ha) process. What Billy Beane found, though, was that all kinds of other stats were a better indicator of how well a player would perform as part of a team and contribute to scoring and, thus, wins.

I’m in a funny place, here. Because, on the one hand, I believe in the power of powerful ideas, influences and influencers. We’ve seen how trends can catch on based on support from a powerful patron like Oprah. But…

I’m also an old-school ad man. When I read about WoMM and how important it is to generate buzz… I can agree that, yes… it *seems* sensible. Let’s try to get people who have influence to be excited about your product. But I also know, from having managed hundreds of marketing campaigns, that when you do the same, smart, old, right stuff… it just works. All other things being equal, for example, I’ve found that frequency beats size in print advertising. If you have the choice of placing 20 half-page ads vs. 10 full-page ads… take the 20 smaller ones. Why? The stopping power of an ad isn’t important if nobody sees it, and people have to see your ad multiple times in order to even register the dang thing. Breakthrough creative is great… but you can’t budget for it. Make your ad solid, get the basics right, and flog it like mad.

There’s another post in here somewhere too… something about how the Wisdom of Crowds is more like the Random Influence of Crowds.

My title for this post reflects the possibility that while the Long Tail is great for finding interesting, niche stuff… the head of that curve is governed less by quality and influence than by… chance. If that’s the case, then chance favors the prepared, I believe. And being prepared seems to have more to do, if Watt’s is right, with playing to the bleachers as opposed to the box seats.

God, I love mixing metaphors.

Books and articles by Duncan Watts:

Watts, Duncan J. “A Twenty-First Century Science.” Nature. 445. 7127 (2007): 489.

Watts, Duncan J. Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness. Princeton studies in complexity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Adamic, L. “Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, Duncan J Watts.” NATURE -LONDON-. 6929 (2003): 265.

Watts, Duncan J. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. New York: Norton, 2003.

Watts, Duncan J. “Networks, Dynamics, and the Small-World Phenomenon.” The American Journal of Sociology. 105. 2 (1999): 493.

Kossinets, Gueorgi, and Duncan J Watts. “Empirical Analysis of an Evolving Social Network.” Science. 311. 5757 (2006): 88.

Citation HTML generated by WorldCat Lists. 

This is good:

And this is good, and makes the other one better:

If you’ve never seen the blog Indexed, you need to. Funny, smart stuff. I need some help with a Venn Diagram relating to the following:

1. People on whom this video would have a positive voting effect
2. People who watch YouTube
3. People who vote

I’m pretty sure that #1 and #2 don’t touch at all. I can’t imagine anyone with even the marginal hipness and tech savvy required to find YouTube thinking anything other than “Lame-o!” about this piece. It’s a video made for the over 50 crowd who think that Kenny G. is actually jazz, and that Celine Dione has a message.

Sorry. I’ve got a bad cold. Makes me snarky.

If I sell 18 more of these

(I just sold two to a lovely lady in England)

I can get one of these. And I really, really, really want (note: in no way need) one of these.

Because I want to be able to do this…

[Edit 2/1/08: This has been taken down. Link below now leads to somebody else’s posting of the pic. Too bad.]

Just awesome. See the whole Flickr set. I could lay down some pseudo-intellectual crap about mash-ups and the convergence of technology, culture and past culture. Something about zeitgeist and… nah. Just enjoy ‘em ’cause they funny.

I’m watching the 2nd season of “24″ on DVD. I watched the first season recently, my wife having given me the two boxed sets for Christmas. For any of you who don’t know, it’s basically TV-crack.  If you watch the first two episodes of either season and think, “Enh. This isn’t for me.” You’ll be fine. If you watch through three or more… it becomes very difficult to stop. It’s not that they’re fantastically great TV — they’re good, yes… quite good at times — but that the show does a genius job at pacing, keeping the action going in nice rolling waves that almost peak at the end of each episode.

In an episode in the 2nd season (I won’t spoil, don’t worry), a character blames herself for things another character did, saying to Jack Bower [paraphrase], “It’s all my fault. I should have seen that something was wrong. I should have stopped it.”

Jack’s response is beautiful and true. He says [exact quote], “There are things in this world that are just out of our control. Sometimes we like to blame ourselves for them so that we can try to make sense out of it.”

Beautiful, true… and scary. We would rather believe that we have some effect on circumstances — even a negative, harmful effect — than that we are powerless. If we are responsible, there is, at least, some order. I know from having a shrink for a dad that this happens an awful lot.

I am a big fan of creating Meaning out of UnMeaning. Poetry, nonsense, humor… all these things are ways in which art and fun and knowledge can come from the creation of meaning where before there was none. But, in this case, I can’t see a positive result. Yes, we should take responsibility for our actions. But assigning responsibility where there is none is less than helpful.

Making me glad, once again, that my alignment is “chaotic/good.” My guess is that those in the “lawful” column are the ones that want to find connections where none existed in order to prove that justice and consequence flow in sensible streams.

Poetry is chaotic. Mercy and grace are chaotic. Just because you can’t make sense of something doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

So, I sat down to read to my son last night. And in getting comfortable in a low chair, I start to make the old man noises. “Er… Umph… Mggg…” etc. But, for whatever reason, I ended with a hearty, “Choocachoomunga.”

“What’s ‘choocachoomunga’ mean, Dad?” he reasonably asked.

Not wanting to go with the truth (it means nothing, and was a set of meaningless syllables I popped out as part of my descent), I thought for a moment, and went with:

“Choocachoomunga… is the noise people make when they say, ‘Choocachoomunga.’”

He was greatly amused. I admit, I amused myself a bit on that one. He immediately said, “That would work with any word you don’t know. Ask me what something I don’t know means!”

So I asked, “What is ‘Barsoom?”

“Barsoom,” he replied, “is the noise people make when they say, ‘Barsoom.’”

He catches on fast.

Tired of giving gifts where there’s nothing left but the gift after the ripping and tearing and surprise are done? Well, give somebody a gift this year that says, “Hey! You’re a creative person! You finish this up.”

BORED limited edition sketchbooks are the brainchild of the enormously creative and pleasantly bizarre Gabe Schulz, whom I’ve known since we were Sopwith Camel pilots together in the Great War.*

These are very cool sketchbooks and will generate inspiration in the recipient on the order of a 6-week, no-expense-paid trip to Belize. Drawing or writing in them is like being in a jungle of creativity, surrounded by vines of… er… musing goodness and geckos of… well… helpful things.

Apparently someone should give me one this year, as my “odd metaphor gland” seems to be dry.

Go! Now! Buy a whole set! Two!!! One for you, one for the person you know whose great opus has yet to be birthed.

- - - - -

*By “Sopwith Camel pilots,” I mean, of course “lazy, TV-watching, X-Box playing yayhoos,” and by “Great War” I mean, of course, the mid 1990’s.

This makes me glad.

I’ve had a Gmail account for about… two years? Something like that. There have always been things about it I didn’t like as much as MS Outlook, which I’ve been using (at work and home) for going on eight years. One major lack in Gmail is the "Preview" pane. I love that thing.

And I’ll miss it. Because over the past few days, I’ve completely switched to Gmail. I’ve kept my POP email account (the one through Sanestorm, if you’re someone who emails me), but I now access it solely through Gmail. Outgoing mail says it came from my Sanestorm account… incoming mail to that account goes right to Gmail. Since Gmail now supports the IMAP protocol, I was also able to copy/import all my old email messages from Outlook into Gmail folders, or to tag them based on the Outlook folders.

So… I’ve now got 8+ years (1.4 gig… about 12,500 messages) of email moved over to Gmail’s web-based platform. Having only used the service sporadically, I expect it will take me some time to get used to it… but that’s OK. We like learning new things, and there are already some benefits to Gmail (lightning fast search of all mail; tags instead of folders; conversation threads) that are easily apparent.

So why the post title? It refers (I hope you already know) to a Dire Strait’s album. When thinking about switching from MS Outlook, there were only two things that really bugged me: 1) I’ve paid for Outlook, both originally and for updates; 2) Advertising on Gmail. Gold.

The proximate cause for my switch was that Outlook was that it stopped, for no reason, doing the "type-ahead" thing when I addressed emails. You know the feature… you start typing a name in the "To" field of the email, and it gives you a list of choices that closely match it. If you have 1,500 people in your contact database, losing that feature is really, really annoying. What’s even more of a pain is that when type-ahead does work, it picks up email addresses from your previous mail, even if they haven’t been entered into your contact database. So if I’ve been emailing with someone recently, but haven’t added them to contacts, I can still get by with simply starting to type their email address. Until type-ahead breaks for no reason.

Then you have to find an email to/from that person and copy it. Or add them to contacts. Which still doesn’t help much, because type-ahead is busted. Yes, I know where the option to turn this feature on/off is in Outlook. I turned it off and on a half dozen times. Nothing.

So, I decided to try to update Outlook again. Tried to do it using files from Microsoft’s web site. We’ll skip the sturm und drang, and let me simply say that it was painful, unsuccessful and almost resulted in me losing all my email from the last two years (since I last backed it up).

Which initiated a Web search (using Google, of course) for info on how completely one can switch email accounts to Gmail. I knew I could forward my POP account to any other email system… but that’s just not… crunchy enough.

The switch was pretty easy. It involved these steps:

• Exporting contacts from Outlook to a CSV file and importing that into Gmail
• Setting up my Sanestorm email as another another account in Gmail settings
• Making my Sanestorm account the primary one
• Enabling POP in Gmail’s settings
• Enabling IMAP in Gmail’s settings
• Setting up an IMAP link in Outlook (which was the trickiest part, since — I found out — it takes awhile for the IMAP setting in Gmail to crank up)
• Copying email folders/files in Outlook into the IMAP folders

That last step took some time, as pushing 1.4 gigs upstream is… well… time consuming. And Outook occasionally whined that I wasn’t paying it enough attention, requiring a clicking of various buttons to keep the flow flowing.

But now it is done. And I’ve got those 12,000+ messages on a system that isn’t going to get fried if my power goes ker-zooby. And I can check email from any browser, including the one on my Pocket PC/mobile phone. Call me crazy, but I trust Google’s servers more than my little hard-drive. I will look into a method to back up Gmail… but in the meantime, I feel irrationally safer.

And type-ahead works in Gmail. So the ads don’t bug me much.

Love.

PS: Dan and I get into the swing as guest artists at TheSuperest. 

New category: Juxtoobposition. Putting two YouTube videos next to each other in a blog post in order to well… er… I don’t know. But these two start things off.

And…

Make of it what you Wiil. 

Ye faithful readers of this blog (yes, that’s you, Jen) will notice an advertising rectangle to the right, featuring links to MP3s that you can buy from Amazon.com. I have great expectations that the revenue from this feature will help pay something on the order of 1/10th of what my Web hosting services cost me (ie, maybe about a buck a month).

Why, then, do I sully the pristine, amateur clarity of my blog with the pixels of filthy commerce? ‘Cause I really don’t like the way Apple handles the DRM for iTunes, and I like how Amazon is going about their new MP3 product sales.

I generally like Apple. I like the iPod. I like the iPhone. If we could go back in time, and somehow convince Steves B. and J. to license Mac tech the same way that IBM did — giving us competitive, 3rd-party versions of the Mac computers –  I think the world would be a better place, though. And now they’re doing similar crap with DRM.

I don’t like DRM. It makes me feel like the company selling me something doesn’t trust me. That’s all. No rant, no preaching, no marketing strategy. I just don’t like DRM. It’s a pain in the bootox and makes me feel icky. So get yer MP3s from Amazon, or another DRM-free source.

So, for reasons related to astrology, humidity, international politics or global warming, all my blogs (I host some for some friends) have been going down for the last few days, sometimes for as much as 18 hours at a time. They all get a nice, vague "500 Error."

After only one initial, "It’s Wordpress; you figure it out," email exchange, my hosting company acknowledged that the problem is on their end. Which is very nice. When 7 blogs dump all at once… that can’t be me. I can screw up one thing at a time, but don’t have the talent or luck to simultaneously crash 7 SQL databases. I just wouldn’t know where to begin.

The picture at left is my inner Spartan, battling the forces of un-understandable technical glitches. I assume that, like all such battles, it will result in eventual glory, my own physical destruction and several hundred thousand dead Persians. 

Another fine post (a bit aged; my bad) from Purple Motes, this time about the decline in literary reading in the U.S. The news comes from an NEA report, "Reading at Risk."

The short version is summed up by the table below:

Literary Reading by Sex
(% reading in given year)