Technology

Fellow Cooperative Bloggians. It appears that our blog has become a bit stagnant. That doesn’t mean that we’ve left the wide world of the web. We’ve just found and embraced another means of sharing information . . . or at least of sharing news and blog articles.

Enter Google Reader.

Google Reader has been around for some time, and a subset of our fellow cobloggers have been consuming digital news via this RSS feed reader. It is great for many reasons. I’ll only highlight two reasons here:

It is quick. Once you’ve subscribed to the feeds that interest you, you’ll be able to peruse the news pretty fast . . . especially if you use keyboard shortcuts. It generally takes me about 5 minutes to make it through hundreds of headlines. I open the articles that I am interesting in in new tabs for further reading.

You can share. If you find something especially interesting, well-written, or relevant, you can share it so your friends can be enriched too. In general, we all have topics that we are more interested in than others. Sharing lets us cherry pick the best of our respective interests. For example, Himay shares music articles; Dillon shares design post; I share architecture pictures. Of course we all share more than just that, but you get the point.

If you are not using Google Reader, I encourage you to do so. And make sure you share with your fellow cobloggers.

Well, I guess it’s about time I stopped lurking and started contributing.

So without further ado, here I am.  Blogging.  Fucking crazy.  How do I change my pw on this thing?  Surely I don’t have to remember the made up one they emailed to me.  If I do, you can consider this both my first and last contribution to the cooperative blog.

Now, this might come as a surprise, but I love street performers.  While in NYC recently I didn’t see any of the human statues who don’t move until you give them money, but we did see lots of musicians.  My friend Jessica explained none of them even came close to this guy.  This guy has serious skills.

But this was my question:  do you think his parents are extremely proud of what he’s done after thousands of dollars and hours spent on flute lessons or completely mortified?

Here it is….

The beatboxing flutist

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXmeayaHh4U

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crfrKqFp0Zg

Has anyone worked with open office?  Someone told me that it was the way to go and I’d like it more, but I wanted to see if there was a general consensus out there?

The Genetic Protection in Insurance Coverage Act of 2007 basically says that insurance companies can not discriminate based on genetic information.

I find this concept amazing.

For a second think about insurance companies.

one mississippi.

Insurance companies are a simple exercise. They take individual risk, weigh it against the pool of insured or likely insured and make a decision on how much a person is worth. They figure when a person is most likely to die and how much they need to charge that person in order for them to profi over the life of the policy.

If I were to apply for a new insurance policy they would weigh (no pun intended) all of the negative factors and balance against their pool and give me a monthly payment. This is why actuaries exist, think ‘About Schmidt.’

So, insurance companies have a good baseline of study. A 29 year-old white male with my height and weight with my socio-economic-status should live to be about 70 (give or take 50 years based on modern medicine).

What amazes me is that we have decided the point at which insurance companies can stop gathering information and must start making guesses. Basically, Math (actuarial science) is ok, genetics is not.

How can we possibly make some sort of arbitrary decision on how much knowledge is ok? Why not assail the actual algorithms altogether (that sentence took some work, but it is fun). How can we allow for insurance companies to compile one list of happenings and base a payment but not another?

How can we possibly not agree that more information is better?

It’s a tricky-deal. Should we punish those, by having higher premiums, who are weak? Now I am entering Darwinian zone here, but why shouldn’t the most healthy of our species be rewarded for their superior genes? We’ve been playing that game for, well, a long time. Then, there is that whole euthanasia thing.

Now, what if I were to argue that we don’t really make any decisions? My ability to be fat is a direct result of how I was raised within my genetic disposition. Nature and nurture. If it is a choice, then it is ok for insurance companies to gouge me–ask smokers (and actuaries usually live within these lifestyle factors). But what if I can’t control my weight? By that I mean any disposition or symptom that we show may not be a choice, but in fact may programmed. What if that is really true? (This goes for any kind of disorder in which people make ‘choice’. I am simply picking on myself for expediency.)

I don’t know, it really fascinated me tonight. There was a dude on Colbert who was talking about this. 2 things struck me.

1) He decided he didn’t want to know if he was disposed toward Alzheimer’s.
2) He had a gene that would say he would be bald by an 80% certainty. He has a beautiful healthy swatch of hair.

Anyway, I was amazed that this guy wouldn’t want to know, and, in the context of his argument, it seemed amazingly disarming. He too was drawing a line of should-be-known-knowledge.

This is what I am saying. Either you want to know or you don’t.

The march of rationalism has and will continue to run against an ethics that was born in a previous era (thank you David Harvey). Every time we run from that we rob ourselves of understanding. How can ever knowing more be a bad thing? It might mess up how we look at the world, but there is no value in pretending that known knowledge doesn’t exist.

Like I said, half-formed.

Two final thoughts.

1) Look at how many tags this topic invokes.
2) I looked up the decay/decadence idea from my last post. It comes from the Latin root–as M-W online states (but won’t let me copy and paste off their website [this is particulary interesing in light on the post, why not let me copy from a definition--how is this sacred knowledge?]) from Late Latin decadere to fall, sink.

I can’t sleep. So this post will probably just make you crinkle your nose, particularly if you’re sober. No worries.

This is a chapter of a book, Sound Unbound, edited by DJ Spooky (who besides being a most interesting musician working with the broadest imaginable range of artists, majored in French lit and philo and is a long-time friend of Shepard Fairey). I recommend that you read the chapter; don’t be a-skeerd of it even though it looks dense. That just means you’ll get through more coolness in less time.

The essay’s like a series of TED talks on speed for people who are in to technology and art and architecture and geography and music and film and the all-consuming fastness of the speed of life in which all of these things articulate … it pulls together a plethora of things, people, and ideas I’m interested in at absolute warp speed.

But that’s the point. He’s sampling history and books and philosophers and programmer-speak and art exhibits. He’s filtering them, finding the patterns, trying to decipher a system that makes sense in his (and, since I know who’s reading this, it’s safe to say our) world. And the common denominator for him is the archive as the dominant form. The web as an archive, his music collection as archive, ftp having the potential to be the ultimate communication tool so far.

He tells a story of how a clock maker invented the modern system of latitute (as in longitude and latitude), and the moral of the story is that time is the archival system for the measurement (and thus understanding) of space, and that time is also the archival system for the measurement (and thus the understanding) of music (rhythm). Presence and absence of material. Well … I take it back. It may not have a moral. That’s okay, though. It gets me worked up, and that’s about all anyone can ask for from ideas.

Pedal energy

We should see about getting one of these. Alupa is concerned about the armogeddeon. So after the bomb, or after our google histories put us all on big brother’s list and we can’t use the banking system anymore, or just generally after we run out of natural resources and the grids collapse, we should move to the country and form a real self-sustaining cooperative, with this jobbie keeping us juiced up. We can take turns : )

Is awesome.

It is referenced in the Vanity Fair article linked below.

“The design of the new Central Chinese Television (CCTV) headquarters defies the popular conception of a skyscraper — and it broke Beijing’s building codes and required approval by a special review panel. The standard systems for engineering gravity and lateral loads in buildings didn’t apply to the CCTV building, which is formed by two leaning towers, each bent 90 degrees at the top and bottom to form a continuous loop.

The engineer’s solution is to create a structural “tube” of diagonal supports. The irregular pattern of this “diagrid” system reflects the distribution of forces across the tube’s surface. Designed by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren and engineered by Ove Arup, the new CCTV tower rethinks what a skyscraper can be.”

This is amazing.  Modern and postmodern, form follows function, but you can literally see the forces on the building.  I am completely enthralled with this thing.  The irregular grid on the building’s facades is an expression of the forces traveling throughout its structure. I like the word expression.

The other cool aspect–as the author in the VF article pointed out, there is a slight nod to communism– is how in this skyscraper the relationship between individuals is completely different.  Unlike a traditional skyscraper, in which you can usually not see any other part of the building, the CCTV tower gives its denizens a sense of their surroundings, of the building itself and of the other people with which they are working.  The architecture creates a relationship among those within, as opposed to a verticle stack of disconnectness.

The architects also mentioned how the building is not overwhelming.  It can be broken down into three distinct building which are easily visually digestable, and b/c it is only 47 stories the viewer does not have to crane to see to the top.

China: Figuring their shit out.  more pics

America’s largest brewery sold to a Belgium company, that is really controlled by Brazillians, the third world.

Gov’t bailing the largest lenders in the nation.

Markets in trouble today after an overnight correction in the Asian Markets.

The dollar the weakest it has ever been agains the Euro

The upcoming Olympics are in Beijing.

Ford and GM cutting more jobs.

And in case you missed it, there was a run on a bank.  An honest-to-god line to get money out of IndyMac.

Strap in, it’s going to get interesting.

To wit: kind of.

Or how i stopped worrying and learned to love greenhouse gas…

http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/02/klimatic-base-1-airwater-machine-pulls-drinking-water-from-the-a/

http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/23/dean-kamen-aims-to-clean-water-generate-electricity-with-slings/

It constantly amazes me how many problems we could solve if we threw some bucks to underfunded technologies instead of bridges to nowhere.

Can Mycologist Paul Stamets save the world with mycelium fungus? He thinks so. Pretty interesting stuff, but you have to make it past the first 9 minutes to get to the goods.