“The investigation, reported in the journal Nature, warns that large areas of currently productive land could become engulfed by shifting sands.”
So many areas of the planet have become deserts. The middle east was forested. The Gobi desert is spreading. The Saharah has grown in recorded history. Deforestation, and now global warming, is a widespread foundation. The dust bowl in the midwest is another example, but let us not forget that the oceans are becoming wastelands as well, with the death of entire underwater regions.
Potable water is set to be a much fought over resourse. I recall that this was one conclusion of some strategic planning out of the Pentagon not too long ago. Further, water rights are a big part of the battles in Oregon and between the Israelis and Palestinians.
Some time ago, I printed out an article that pointed out something that I recalled seeing before. Many of the civilizations that have failed through history, have failed because of environmental collapse.
“There’s a war on terrorism going on in this world, and we are a part of it, and I agree that we need to fight them over there before they get here. The problem is, the place that we need to fight those people are in Afghanistan, hiding over the border in Pakistan. The Iranians, who sponsor state terrorism, these are our enemies. And these are folks that are not being paid the kind of attention to that need to be paid attention to while 138,000 brave American men and women are pinned down in Iraq because of a gross error in judgment by this administration.”
So this boggles me. Now, Dean is saying that the administration isn’t going far enough on the plan that the PNAC outlined? So, the administration isn’t going far enough on the crazy plan they outlined and wish they could trigger, according to Dean.
The thing is that the military-industrial-oil complex wins either way. Whether it’s direct militarization or the militarization build-up around security, or the way that the future is inevitably going to include violence in response to the complex system of pain and anguish that the US has helped along with a great big push – there’s job security for the capitalists.
And now, Dean appears to be pushing for exactly one of the goals of the PNAC, a multi-front war in the middle east. Driven by the need to molify the mythic and coersive archetypal patriot, it’s a cycle of violence and empire that no one seems to be able to change. Actions merely seem to perpetuate the problem, not address the system that enacts the problem itself.
“Looking for ways to finance highway projects without hitting the public trough, the U.S. Congress appears set to pass a proposal to encourage private ownership of new toll roads.”
At Scripting News: 6/30/2005, Dave mentions that paying should preclude commercials as part of a general discussion about why movies are in the decline.
It’s not just that. I refuse digital cable because of the ads that are included in the interface itself. There are ads that appear not only in the program guide, but in the channel bar when one chances channels, etc … I refuse to have my UI become a space for ads, especially if I’m paying for the cable service.
The abuse our minds are subjected to is a perfect example of a tragedy of the commons, where every advertiser is trying to maximize their opportunity for eyeballs, as if they were the only one attempting to use the resource. Well, they aren’t. An I am not willing to take that. I’ve significantly toned down my acceptance of advertizing.
I use my Tivo, sure, to skip ads. However, I do watch ads that I enjoy watching. I have even been known to pause the playback in order to show some particular ad to someone.
But I also have almost stopped watching TV at all, supplementing that with Netflix. I prefer to watch a series on DVD than on TV. Which, as an aside, is a conspiracy to destroy independent TV stations that rely on syndicated version of TV shows, all of which are now available on DVD with no commercials.
Dave points out that there’s not way to get a subscription list out of iTunes. Well, there’s no real way to get a subscription list out of Safari RSS either. Sure, one can save their bookmarks, but they’re all mixed in with everything else. It’s not the mixing that I think is a problem, but the inability to usefully get them out again.
Isn’t this a job for Applescript? I mean, yeah, there’s no reason not to have this built in, but … frankly, I want a unified store for these things. I don’t want to have to get my subscriptions and import and export them to every freakin’ application. That’s the pain of bookmarks all over again. This is another topic, but Netinfo was a great way to store things like these in a uniform and independent way for users. Something like that would be an idea way to store everything, from addressbooks, bookmarks, RSS subscripts, etc … Of course, some kind of network capable store that included not just links to the data, but the data itself would be even better. This leads to a framework that bootstraps applications like DevonThink across any application. There’s a clear opportunity here, and I realize that the ODB in Frontier had that potential, if it hadn’t been ignored, for whatever reason.
Then again, Apple seems to have been trying to leave Netinfo behind. That’s not such a bad idea, since it seems like it wasn’t very scalable for large data sets. I have to say, however, that I really felt that Netinfo, as I experienced in a NeXT-based network was quite intuitive, impressive and I longed for it on my Linux boxen. Unfortunately the Linux version was in proprietary production by a company in Australia. As far as I know, it was never released for Linux, and now days I think anyone that cares has OpenLDAP on the brain anyway. If I understand correctly, Netinfo is still used on local machines, and I suspect that it’s still used on the server in Mac OS X networks to handle much.
I’ve lost my train, or rather I’ve derailed my train.
This blog was linked on “BoingBoing”. Not this article, but another one. Anyhow, I noticed this posting about Amma.
I met Amma once. It was an interesting experience. There was, perhaps still is, a group that did weekly chant session in Olympia. I knew someone that knew someone that invited the someone I knew to go see Amma. So the someone I knew that was invited invited me too.
I got two necklaces to be blessed, and got into line with everyone. We were all kneeling in line, moving slowly forward. As I finally reached the end of the line, I handed my necklaces to be passed to Amma through an intermediary, and leaned in to get my hug. Somehow, I got planted pretty much with my face in her breasts … oops. Amma definitely had a distinctive smell. I took this to be the smell of rose and milk in which she is said to bathe. Her breasts were copious and soft, as far as I could tell.
I found myself crying a bit. There’s a kind of archetypal feeling of being mothered which I chose to think of Amma fulfilling, a representation of a universal mother. I found myself with definite emotional response. Well, it was an experience, to be sure. I was tempted to attempt attending more of the chanting session, but didn’t. I was not tempted to stay connected with Amma.
One of the problems I have with traditional media on the web is that they are informationally dead-ends. Many articles from traditional media, especially newspapers, that are transitioned to the web do not have links to anything else. That makes them a dead-end. The meaning of this metaphor is that the article claims to be the last bit of information I need, but very seldom is that the case. An article is about something, and I would like to be able to get to that something from the article, but cannot directly.
This dove-tails into a conversation I’ve been having with myself, especially after re-acquainting myself with Clay Shirky’s Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags. I ran into Shirky’s essay again because I’ve been thinking about the list extensions to RSS and OPML.
RSS and OPML both enforce a hierarchical relationship between elements, To some extent, I feel this is also a problem with XML also. The structure implies a relationship that is bounded by a single-meaning link. By single-meaning, I mean to describe that the only context for the relationship is “this thing follows this other thing” in the chain of information. Certainly, these relationships can result in recursive links if the next page, or somewhere else along the chain, links back to a previous node. However, there’s no other kind of link.
Some pages, especially blogs, have attempted to qualify links by having sections that collect links backward and referrers, but these have to be explained in the context of the content, not by the link themselves. So, one has to very inefficiently, and lossily, determine the relationship from context.
The extension to Shirky’s observation about ontologies might be that what would be useful, as a next step, would be a thesaurus to describe links. By this I mean that a link could express specific information about the relationship, such as the page is “more specific” than the link, or “more general” than, etc …
“The relationships specified by the standard, and their abbreviations are presented below:
SN Scope note; a note attached to a term to indicate its meaning within an indexing language
USE The term that follows the symbol is the preffered term when a choice between synonyms or quasi-synonyms exists
UF Use for; the term that follows the symbol is a non-preffered synonym or quasi-synonym
TT Top term; the term that follows the symbol is the name of the broadest class to which the specific concept belongs; sometimes used in the alphabetical section of a thesaurus
BT Broader term; the term that follows the symbol represents a concept having a wider meaning
NT Narrower term; the term that follows the symbol refers to a concept with a more specific meaning
RT Related term; the term that follows the symbol is accociated, but is not a synonym, a quasi-synonym, a broader term or a narrower term”
When I was thinking about developing relationship terms to provide a thesaurus for links between community asset records, I thought of similar options but included the notion of creating human understandable, free-text descriptions to co-exist with the specific terms. For example, one might represent a second record having a relationship to the first as “more general” but also provide a free-form description as article two “offers more information about the topic in” article one. Certainly, this would all be optionally added to the link.
There is in fact a way to already express link relationships in the HTML specification, as described in LINK- Document Relationship, but this is not granular to anchor tags and only provides information on the entire HTML document.
And, now I feel pretty silly, because there is the option to place the same information in the actual anchor tag, as described in A – Anchor. However, the options for link types does not include useful entries to describe the relationship between documents outside of a local set. The link types include things such as index, toc, next and previous. This is not useful to describe thesaurus relationships between different sets of documents. The htmlhelp.com document does point out that authors may use other link types.
Bringing the elocution safari back home, a de facto ontology based on simple links is not nearly as interesting as one that actually expresses the nature of the relationship. However, a de facto ontology of simple, undifferentiated links has the advantage of not forcing a linear heirachy, inherent in RSS lists or OPML.
One of the productivity tips on concept mapping I have heard is to provide text on the link which makes a sentence. For example, if I have two nodes, I might write something along the linking line which creates a useful sentence: [OPML] — is a file format for –> [OUTLINERS]. Being able to provide this kind of description might allow for more robust visualization, such as the way that Omnigroup’s OmniGraffle 4 can now automatically display outlines as graphical maps.
The notion of describing the nature of relationship implied by a link, especially to external documents, seems to be a useful next step in allowing strong user-created ontologies to be constructed. Even if the description is free form, there would be advantages.
Tools like technocrati, flickr, etc … use tags to describe content, but there’s just no robust way to describe the relationships. I feel attracted to the notion of having a controlled thesaurus to describe these, but perhaps the lesson from livejournal and technocrati is that the thesaurus develops on its own as people self-select terms used by others when they wish to do so. However, either way, there should be such a thing.
