Google’s Quote of the Day today:
There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
A lesson we largely seem to have forgotten.
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Doug
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Doug
I was all prepared to write a screed about the stupidity and absurdity of Pat Robertson, but I don’t have to because Jeffrey Radcliffe exactly captured what I was going to say. I did say it, in fact, nearly verbatim in a conversation at work today. Now I don’t have to write it.
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Doug
Google turns their desktop search client into a Remembrance Agent. This sounds very cool, and I’m tempted to install it on my Windows system at work just to play with. I have hopes of Spotlight gaining similar capabilities in future versions.
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Doug
All the ‘net’s abuzz over Google’s latest offering, Google Talk. No doubt every available pundit has an opinion on whether this is a good or bad thing, whether this makes Google Evil ™, or if you should even use it.
As far as I’m concerned, I’m migrating as much of my IM activity over to Google’s IM network as fast as I can. It uses SSL to encrypt connections, and it’s a Jabber network, which I prefer over the closed and proprietary AIM network.
So, if you’re heading over to Google Talk, you can find me at my Gmail address.
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Doug
Via Ars Technica, an article indicating that RSS is still far from mainstream:
bq. Although RSS feeds were pioneered by the blogs, online news presences such as CNN and others soon joined the fun, and it’s common to see a small orange “XML” icon on many pages these days. But are people using them? Not according to recent surveys:
bq. Nielsen/NetRatings polled 1,000 members of its research panel who read blogs. It found that nearly two-thirds of the respondents either never heard of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or did not know what the technology is used for. The study found only 11% of Web log readers use RSS to monitor blogs…
bq. …According to a Pew Research survey released in January, less than 6% of U.S. Internet users take advantage of RSS.
My own informal surveys of friends and relatives results in similar findings - outside the weblog writing crowd I don’t know of anyone that uses RSS to track web content. At this stage of the game that may not be terribly surprising among casual web users or the less techno-centric, but as far as I can tell out of the entire department of Tier III/IV IT engineers I work with, I appear to be the only one making use of RSS.
As Brent Simmons regularly reminds people, we’re in the early days of this. The technology hasn’t been widely adopted and there’ll be a lot of changes before it is. When personal web publishing and easy content syndication (and remixing) do become mainstream (and they definitely will), there are some really attractive possibilities for increasing personal liberty associated with these technologies.
It’s important to remember that we aren’t there yet though, and therefore to be suspicious of the hyperbole of those who have a financial interest in pushing these technologies. Despite the cheerleading, it isn’t yet possible to live as if there were broad adoption of these technologies. We can’t act as if everyone around us knows about and uses this stuff, and we can’t just dismiss those who don’t as “clueless.” Moreover, as more and more people do adopt these technologies, it becomes more and more important to acknowledge that there may be some legitimate concerns about their use that go hand-in-hand with the positives - and if we don’t start considering those now rather than just beating our breasts about how clever they (and we) are, it might just be too late to do much about it when the time comes.
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Doug
The Kansas school board’s hearings on evolution weren’t limited to how the theory should be taught in public schools. The board is considering redefining science itself. Advocates of “intelligent design” are pushing the board to reject a definition limiting science to natural explanations for what’s observed in the world.
Instead, they want to define it as “a systematic method of continuing investigation,” without specifying what kind of answer is being sought. The definition would appear in the introduction to the state’s science standards.
That’s great! Kansas is making Indiana look progressive!
I would suggest that anyone living in Kansas who is reading this strongly consider moving to a part of the country where your children’s education isn’t going to be so blatantly damaged by the religious whacko political agenda - but I have to seriously wonder if anyone left in Kansas can use a computer or is literate.
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Doug
I completely missed this very good article about the success of Finland’s social welfare state. The author quite rightly points out that the Finns can be an inspiration to Americans while their system probably can’t be taken as a model:
bq. But the United States could not simply turn itself into another Finland. Too much of Finnish reality depends on uniquely Finnish circumstances. Finland is as big as two Missouris, but with just 5.2 million residents — fewer than metropolitan Washington. It is ethnically and religiously homogeneous. A strong Lutheran work ethic, combined with a powerful sense of probity, dominates the society. Homogeneity has led to consensus: Every significant Finnish political party supports the welfare state and, broadly speaking, the high taxation that makes it possible. And Finns have extraordinary confidence in their political class and public officials. Corruption is extremely rare…
bq. …I found Finnish society beguiling on many levels, but in the end concluded that it could not serve as a blueprint for the United States. National differences matter. The Finns are special and so are we. Ours is a society driven by money, blessed by huge private philanthropy, cursed by endemic corruption and saddled with deep mistrust of government and other public institutions. Finns have none of those attributes.
bq. Nor do they tune in to American individualism. Groupthink seems to be fine with most Finns; conformity is the norm, risk-taking is avoided — a problem now, when entrepreneurs are so needed. I was bothered by a sense of entitlement among many Finns, especially younger people.
It’s possible that the Finnish social democratic state contains the seeds of its own downfall through the sense of entitlement it may or may not be breeding among today’s youth. Having said that, there seems to be a pretty decent sense of entitlement among many U.S. youth, too, who don’t have the excuse of the social welfare benefits Finnish youth have.
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Doug
Left leaning individuals of a technophilic bent may be interested in a new mailing list, the Technoliberation List. From the list home page:
Using technology to deepen democracy, using democracy to ensure technology benefits us all.
The technoliberation list is a welcoming space for conversation, collaboration, organization, and debate among liberal, social, and radical democrats from around the world all of whom share the sense that emerging, converging, disruptive global technological developments threaten unprecedented harm while they promise unprecedented emancipation for humanity. We want to think about the ways in which technology provokes us to rethink and reimagine the left wing of the possible.
I spent some time looking over the recent posts (there aren’t that may yet). From what I read was instantly intrigued, as much by the contrast between the strident Darwinian-Randian market libertarianism that is the usual voice of the tech community and the posts on this list as anything else. While I feel far from qualified to do much posting among the imposing voices who clearly have thought about the subjects of the list far more deeply than I have, I immediately recognized a crystallization of issues and concepts in their thinking that I’ve been worrying at for some months now. I’m looking forward to reading, and learning from the members of this list.
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Doug
Via BoingBoing - NYC2123 - Davender, a graphic novel released under a Creative Commons license and formatted for reading on the Sony PSP. Normally I’m not a huge fan of graphic novels, but I grabbed the first installment of this to give it a try. Any PSP content that extends my use of this expensive gaming platform without asking me to shell out even more cash to Sony is worth a look.
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Doug
This blog post by Giles Turnbull and this post at 43 Folders today have generated a fair amount of discussion today among the productivity-geek crowd. I suppose it can’t hurt to throw in my two cents.
As I mentioned the other day, I’m spending more and more of my time in terminal shells, both locally on my own system and logged into other various *nix systems at work. I’ve re-developed my affinity for the CLI, and for the simplicity of things like text files. At the same time, I’ve become increasingly dependent on Quicksilver and Spotlight for rapidly navigating my file system, launching applications, and (in the case of Quicksilver) rapidly appending text to files.
I also mentioned how switching jobs seriously jolted my organizational system, something I’ve yet to fully recover from. After almost two months though, things are starting to normalize a bit. I’m developing a system around the following:
- Tinderbox: As always, my primary writing and general note taking environment. I’m using it quite heavily for meeting note taking, particularly where I think I may have to share the notes in some format later. I’m keeping one Tinderbox document per large projects; smaller projects and one-off meetings are being captured in a general “Wishard” document.
- Text files: I’ve started using plain text files for keeping GTD-esque to-do and reminder lists. There are several advantages to doing things this way - first, I can quickly and easily append an item to a given list via Quicksilver without having to actually open an editor and text file. Second, these lists are easily transferrable to various handheld devices, where they can also be edited and transferred back to my Mac. Probably most importantly though, these lists work with one of my new favorite tools…
- Remind: Remind is an incredibly powerful *nix CLI calendar and reminder program. I am still using a combination of iCal and Lotus Notes to track my actual schedule, but Remind provides the fastest, simplest, and least intrusive means of staying on top of my to-do’s and reminders that I’ve yet found. Because it’s a *nix CLI program and I’m already in a shell, simply typing ‘rem’ pops up a list of all of my current to-do items. As I alluded to above, I actually keep several different context lists of to-do’s in different text files, but these are easily displayed as a single list by telling Remind to include these lists in it’s .reminders file.
So, between Quicksilver for rapid, unobtrusive entry of action items into my lists and Remind for rapid, unobtrusive display of these action items throughout the day, I’ve found a stunningly easy system for staying on top of what I need to do. Tinderbox does the heavy lifting for serious note taking, while TextWrangler makes for a good editor for those times when I need to do any serious editing on my text files, or I need to move items from my context lists to my “Completed Tasks” list. Finally, just about everything can easily be transferred to another device if and when I need to.
This system is a fairly significant evolution in a different direction than the systems I used over the past couple years to keep myself organized as a Realtor. The nature of the tasks I’m engaged in has changed so much that while the underlying organizational principles were still sound, the implementation of those principles through various systems had to change too. By far, this is probably the simplest system I’ve adopted so far, and for that reason, I hope the most adaptable and long lasting.
