John Griogair Bell - Arlecchino Malbenvolio

smash it smash it
kill the christmas tree
stomp it stomp it
and give the remains to me
I’ll tie it tie it
tie it in a knot
in the basement basement
it will surely rot

(This is actually something I wrote a very long time ago …)

I finally sat down and started to read the Jeavons book, How to Grow More Vegetables …, which I got back in December. The discussion of the focus on growing soil reminded me very much of something I learned while in Ireland. On the Dingle peninsula, the soil was created by gathering and laying seaweed on the coastal rocks for many generations. The commitment to the future that would take to overweigh present hardship is almost unbelievable. When compared to the voluntary hardship of the monastics in Ireland, especially in places like Skellig Michael, the soil project still seems vast to me, but not out of character.

“Gardening is an education in observation, harmony, honesty, and humility – in knowing and understanding our place in the world.”

Reading this text, I find myself once again fantasizing about a plot in the Organic Farm at Evergreen. For two years, my partner, Erica, has been commited to our plot in the garden, but I have failed to take it on. I think I want to be that person, but when it comes to being that person I fail to do what it takes. I don’t feel as good doing gardening as I want to feel, and that is disappointing to me.

I remember at a family reunion, for my mother’s family, the question was raised: ‘Who here does any farming?” The answer was, I recall, only one or two people. For at least the period of time we were in Kansas and thereabouts, we used to be farmers, but are no longer.

There seems to be a very clear connection between philosophy in the combination of companion crops and grow biointensive beds and the philosophy within the deep design principles of multi-use in arcologies, Soleri’s Acrosanti project. I know there is within the plan of Arcosanti a phase of development where the base of the plateau is curtained in greenhouse environments. After visiting Arcosanti, I was struck by the feeling of the place to me, as a visitor. I find myself thinking every once in a while about what it would be like to be a resident in Arcosanti.

In the Irish city of Derry, the hostel we stayed in felt impossibly tall, a building crammed next to other similar buildings along the block. The view from a window in the back revealed that an entire block was just a circle of buildings around a central, rough, dilapidated park-like space. I assume that an area like that was devoted to horses and carts owned by those in the surrounding buildings, but now seems like ideal community garden land.

The notion of design in multi-use and in grow biointensive philosophies, theories and techniques links in my mind with envisioning possible post-oil futures. One element in such a future would be transportation. In Ireland, I saw an actual Irish Gypsy cart, which is a mobile living tool designed over the centuries for contingency living. What would a modern, perhaps post-oil, wagon / cart look like? Seems like an interesting design re-visioning that could become a project like Ideo’s re-visioning of the shopping cart.

I find myself thinking about an Ursula K LeGuin book, for which I’ve forgotten the title. It was a novel about a future society that came with a cassette tape of music from that culture. There’s a complex feeling that comes with this association for me, a synethesia. There is a warmth, a glowing orange sunset colour that is enveloping.

Watching The Weather Underground, a documentary from 2002 about the 1960’s radical group, there was a comment about a technique of group cohesion called the “gut check” where members would challenge each other to go past wider social boundaries.

Also, the commentary about the need to know rule echos the rule about not talking about fight club. In voice over, Brian Flanagan makes the comment that, “if you didn’t need to know it, you didn’t know it.” I can’t help but wonder how much influence there might have been in the story of Fight Club.

From the fifth communique, the Weather Underground hoped to build “a culture and society that can resist genocide. It is a culture of total resistance to mind controlling maniacs.” There seems to be a lot of honest and rational philosophy behind what seems to be be intensely irrational conclusions. I see echos of this philosophy in many of the apparently more rational current responses to pervasive persuasion, such as the work of dadaists like the Subgenius and the Cacaphony Society as well as more organized direct responses from groups like adBusters.

I also see a philosophical connection between an attempt to resist social engineering and the resistance to persuasion. The susceptibility to persuasion and social engineering is the key vulnerability in any attempt to break security systems. Th

But, the documentary begs the viewer to ask about the nature and ethic of a sense of moral righteousness. What is the place of radical action as an element in social change? As Mark Rudd, in interview states, “I think that part of the Weathermen phenomenon that was right, was our understanding what the position of the United States is in the world. It was this knowledge that we couldn’t handle. It was too big. We didn’t know what to do. In a way, I still don’t know what to do with this knowledge. I don’t know what needs to be done now. And, it’s still eating away at me, just as it did thirty years ago.”

I think society as whole has this dilemma. What do we do with this knowledge? As a poster early in the movie declares: “Everyone participates whether they know it or not.”

This is the history of an important period of resistance that reflects on current events, especially in the voice commentary by Ayers and Dohrn, which I highly recommend. Among other thing, the commentary points out that the hippy culture was an edgy and humorous rejection the “three pillars of empire: militarization, materialism, and racism.” Without the war in Vietnam, the structure of resistance faded and the culture was co-opted or made absurd, or both.

From the audio commentary, self-righteousness is dangerous, but state-righteousness is more dangerous. As Ayers says, “It’s a power not to be trusted.”

Ayers: “It’s so hard for the film to end, because it’s not over.”

Here’s where the nature of economies, suggested in part by Jane Jacobs work of that name, can be recognized. The origin of the study of eco-nomies, deriving from eco-logy, surfaces a disconnect in the way that the term competition is used.

When advocates of the market talk about the natural competition that would take place within the ecology of a “free” market, they are not being precise.

Natural systems tend toward a stable state. While there may be competition for resources, generally speaking, what conflict there is in a natural system is between hierarchically differentiated participants. This is because a natural system tend to have niche players in each rung of a food chain.

When advocates of the “free” market talk about competition, what they are speaking of is the kind of sorting out that happens before niche players in the ecosystem have become entrenched. What is not talked about is what happens when the niche players have holds on levels of system hierarchy. Ultimately, advocacy of a market without conditioning will result in a hierarchical food chain, where there may be competition of scraps, but generally the order in which members of groups eat and the order in which the groups eat is pretty well settled.

Therefore, advocacy of a market without regulation and oversight is advocacy for a system that tends to preserve privilege and power for those that hold it against those lower in the hierarchy. Competition in a stable ecosystem is typically horizontal and down the hierarchy and almost never up to hierarchy, except for sneaky behaviour that doesn’t challenge the hierarchy.

Time to track the ownership of sprynet again? Last time I looked it was back in ‘99. I sent out an e-mail:

So, it’s been fun watching where Sprynet had ended up over the
last couple years. Okay, so let me see if I can get this right:

Sprynet was purchased by Compuserve
Compuserve was purchased by AOL
AOL sold Sprynet to Mindspring
Sprint purchased Earthlink
Mindspring was purchased by Earthlink
Sprint is purchased by MCI-Worldcom

So, the current score card says that Sprynet is owned by
MCI-Worldcom, in case you were trying to keep track … it’s kinda
like playing Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon. How many mergers does it
take before Sprynet has been owned by everyone in the industry?

So, the last time I tuned in, it was at the time when MCI-Worldcom and Sprint announced a merger in 1999. I think I took too long to pay attention. With the Sprint Nextel merger, and MCI merging with Verizon I think it’s finally too much time past to trace Spry any longer. Even the domain spry.net appear to have been re-registered by some other entity (a Texas law firm) since 1999. I seem to recall that spry also used sprynet.net and that’s registered by someone apparently in Korea since 2000.

I suppose a copyright and trademark search might show something of who could be called the holder of spry now.

On the topic of crazy mergers, here’s news that AT&T and BellSouth are looking to combine. If the only thing to stop it is if the feds step in, then clearly the trend is that the less regulation the more consolidation there is. That means that monopolies, or cartels in an economic homeostasis, are the end result of this economic system without regulation. Free markets do not result in pervasive competition, but rather a process of consolidation and concentration towards economic homeostasis. This balancing loop then tends to resist change and to destroy overt competition whenever possible in order to maintain the status quo.

I don’t know who asked, “If you had everything, where would you put it?” However, my answer has always been, “Everywhere, of course.”

So, almost under the radar, I find that iPhoto version 5 imports movies. I assume version 6 does also. Also, iTunes holds movies. And, there’s a movies folder which is where neither iTunes nor iPhoto stores the movies that it holds. iMovies uses the movies folder. Also, iTunes may import music when downloaded via a browser, but movie downloads are placed in the folder for downloads in preferences, which defaults, I think, to the desktop. (I’ve set mine to my documents folder.)

This is some very confusing design which suggests that the strategy for movies is either not very well thought out or the various teams at Apple are in competition over how to handle movies. It also means that users are given confused messages about organization.

One of the things that I don’t like about iPhoto is that there’s no clear distinction between pictures that one has taken and pictures that one has collected. There’s context menu option to put images from the browser into iPhoto, but that confuses what purpose people should use iPhoto for. Is iPhoto for storing all picture assets? Maybe, but it’s not well defined.

One might hope that spotlight is a snapshot of a future where the filesystem and metadata fully unified, and there’s a universal interface to all the kinds of files. When all these applications are developing different file management systems, in addition to the filesystem management in the Finder, things are bound to be implemented in different ways by different teams.

In the future, using metadata tags, each application might merely show the spotlight results for files that the application can handle. Where ever a file shows up on the filesystem, or when, an application would have files it can manipulate show up. Perhaps there would be an unsorted folder for files that had no application specific metadata added. When a file is moved to some collection, this would be reflected in metadata, which could then be used by other applications to re-create the same collections.

In this vision, creating a collection of movies in iPhoto of, say, my trip to Ireland would add metadata to the movies that could be used by iMovie, iTunes, Quicktime, etc … to show those files in a folder.

Smart folder are then just saved searches, which can be used by any application to show smart collections that include files that application understands. Smart folders / saved searches should also be available across application.

Another thing I’ve noticed which is annoying is that normally burn folders contain aliases to the originals, but if one drags a file from iPhoto or iTunes to a burn folder the entire file is copied. There’s no good reason for that since the files are still located in the filesystem in locations to which an alias could point.

And, all of these applications would have immediate access to files across additional drives, including external or archived sources. One could put collections on a removable device and have items reflected in their applications when those devices where available. This has been an annoyance for me with both iTunes and iPhoto. Why can’t I have multiple locations so that I can have my portable collection on my laptop but store the bulk of my files externally?

On a lark, I had my Tivo record an episode of The Emperor’s New School. The episode I watched was actually pretty interesting. Eartha Kitt and Patrick Warburton play the bad guys, and were quite fun to watch. Eartha Kitt, of course, was the Cat Woman, among other things. Patrick Warburton was The Tick.

If you can stand the commercial for ridiculous crap they try to sell to kids these days … and is there really still a Power Rangers tv show on air? That will not die which can eternal lie … and so on.

The script has some good self-referential jokes and anachronisms. There’s a recurring element where the character Kuzco freezes the action and comments on events, which is an interesting ex machina technique to get through exposition and keep the action moving.

The action has various stock characters with improbable changes and events, and there’s a core structure that the character Kuzco must learn lessons that help him become emperor which drives the stories forward.

Hey, they even have a bit of action during the credits so the whole “now we return to the show!” isn’t a lie where they just run credits.

Anyhow, it’s not as great as something like Tiny Toons, but it was good enough that I say check it out.

Via Technology – Industry News, Policy, and Reviews, “Jeeves, You’re Fired“:

“NEW YORK I grieve for Jeeves. The butler mascot of the Ask Jeeves search service got the boot yesterday but will always remind me of the pre-Google era when searching online still intimidated most people. Back then, the cartoonish Jeeves helped humanize the impersonal search box by encouraging…”

It wasn’t the mascot, actually. It was the option to do natural language searching, which in the days when Altavista was search king, was a big deal. That was a time when search engines had very different views of the Internet, often having completely different result sets, Altavista at the time being, in my opinion, the best. It was a long time until I switched to using Google primarily.

Via Northwest Progressive Institute, “The economic model is broken“:

“It’s the worst of all economic models, a monopoly run by millionaires where cities are manipulated into a financing contest with each other. ‘The team can’t win unless we’ve got the money.’ Phooey. Let them play the game on the court, not in our wallets.”

Indeed. I’ve often wondered, to myself and aloud to others, how anyone can get excited about a “home” team that contains no local players, and really has nothing to do with the local area. I say, let’s trash the professional teams. Spend the money on building amazing fields and facilities for local leagues and amateur teams and parks and trails for local people.

Did you know that hurling, an Irish sport with great following, is only amateur? At least, that’s what I understand.

Just skip the circuses, that’s what I think about silly professional teams that suck up local money when they have huge flows of money of their own. The economic model is broken if professional teams cannot pay their own way and require states and municipalities to subsidize huge amounts of income for a small group.

I always resented having to build stadiums in SimCity, too. The public already pays for tickets, and that’s not the only income source for professional sports.

If the sports teams can’t pay for themselves, then maybe it’s a business that shouldn’t exist? Certainly, I doubt it should be protected from failure by subsidy when there are so many funding options available to the business. Perhaps there needs to be a National League of Cities response to sports team, if there isn’t one already. Cities need to get together on this the way that did, or better, when dealing with cable contracts.

I’ve been working with several Mac OS X apps, including NetNewWire, MarsEdit and even iTunes, that all seem to assume that if there’s a network it must be on the Internet, which just is not a good assumption to make.

For example, I find that iTunes takes forever to start.

NetNewsWire has a problem where is cannot update the article view to a different article while there’s a hanging process trying to load images referenced in the previous article. So, I can scroll around all I want, clicking on different articles, but I will only see text from the last article until all the images timeout. So, if I want to read articles without bizarre timeouts, then I have to turn off any networking. That means NetNewsWire breaks AirTunes for networks that aren’t always on the Internet while browsing subscriptions.

Mail under OS X also seems to assume there’s a constant connection to the SMTP server. There does not appear to be a way to send an e-mail later unless one either has a server to spool on the LAN or save each message as a draft.

MarsEdit appears not to understand edits to existing posts while offline. If you’ve posted it before, you have to be online to edit that post. Otherwise, you have to save the edit as a draft which then ends up being a new post, instead of an edit to an old one.

Another annoyance to MarsEdit, for me, is that while there’s dates on the drafts, posting a draft uses the time and date of the posting action, instead of the time that the draft was created.

Additionally, moving a post from one blog to another resets the timestamp as well. Instead of preserving the original timestamp, which is what I would expect. Actually, I’d also like to be able to post the same message to multiple blogs, without having to duplicate the message in the UI, but that’s feature request not a “feature” I have observed in the app.

It’s an interesting shift. Back in the day, it would have been, and should still be, wrong to assume that a network has an upstream connection. Everything should behave well on networks that are only LANs, without a WAN link.

Oh, and NetNewsWire doesn’t seem to cache images when they are loaded in the Article view, so that each time an article is viewed, it must re-load from the Internet any images. That means that it is not possible to cache the images of a photoblog and view them at a later date, offline. So it does a brute force style of display, every view it loads images fresh even if one just clicks to another post and back.

It’s just bad design to make a network application that assumes the Internet will be there, or that every network is connected to the Internet or that a connection to the Internet is always on.

Or, at the least, give a guy the option to stop the damned application from doing something stupid like trying to get to the Internet over the LAN when it isn’t there.

Then again, just to contradict myself, I’ve absolutely hated the design of USENET, which pushes all of the content of ever post to every corner of the network. I’ve also complained about the way that I have a complete copy of my music library on each machine, instead of a convenient consolidated library. So, there’s something to be said for not duplicating, but that shouldn’t mean that applications aren’t smart about the network in what they assume to be there on one layer when any other layers might be present.

Via Crooks and Liars, “Bush on Katrina“:

“Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.”

Pretty well insulated from reality, just as a true royal should be, a courtier had to make a DVD of the news so that the chief executive could get a clue about what was going on in the real world. Wow. Let them eat cake, indeed.

Via Catallarchy, “Fighting the AOL/Yahoo email “tax”“:

“I should point out that Hotmail has done exactly what AOL and Yahoo are proposing from the very beginning, in the form of their ‘WebCourier’ program, and in fact WebCourier was always a major part of Hotmail’s business plan.”

Interesting reminder that tiers for e-mail delivery isn’t new.

Apparently, the post office is an important example for people arguing against the government:

The difference is that I’m force to be a customer of the USPS, but I have a choice about whether to do business with Yahoo and AOL. Cory, help me get the post office shut down!

Positive liberty brought up the post office in a response to a posting of mine, and I did not realize that was a code word. Apparently there’s a whole raft of argument and meaning behind a mention of the post office as a government monopoly.

There’s even another posting about the e=mail service notion here here

Via Cascadia Scorecard Weblog, “Eat More Veggies“:

“Lots more. According to a new biochemical analysis, the nutritional value of US vegetables has declined over the last 50 years. That’s because new varieties of fast-growing crops designed to maximize output cannot take up or synthesize nutrients as quickly as more slow-growing plants. The result:

…of 13 major nutrients in fruits and vegetables tracked by the Agriculture Department from 1950 to 1999, six showed noticeable declines — protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin and vitamin C. The declines ranged from 6 percent for protein, 15 percent for iron, 20 percent for vitamin C, and 38 percent for riboflavin.

Yikes. Just when the slow food movement is taking off, it turns out we need a slow-growing food movement too.”

Grow it slow, too! Not really a surprise to find that more than just taste is being produced out of the produce …

Via Boing Boing, “What would an MMORPG about healing be like?“:

“Cory Doctorow:
Master game designer Raph Koster ponders the thinness of the role of the healer in massively multiplayer roleplaying games, and noodles around with ideas for a healer-centric game:

Picture an MMORPG just like the ones today, but everywhere you see combat, replace it with healing. A six-man encounter would be a surgical operation that required teamwork. Soloing would be a brilliant doctor doing drive-by diagnostics. Raids would be massive experimental treatments.

Rather than spawning mobs, spawn ill people. Instead of weapons, have medicines. Instead of managing aggro, manage fever. Instead of armors, we have disinfectants.

Quests would include tasks to find and gather new plants for pharmaceuticals, and bespoke missions to fix the sanitation in a remote village. Puzzles might involve finding the standing water where the mosquitoes are breeding.

It goes on from there, every sentence a perfect mind-bomb of fun speculation. Link (via Negatendo)”

Interesting ideas. Reminds me of the way that Cheq’s Quest changed the whole violent mechanism of Doom, back in the day. I’ve long bemoaned the lack of fun cooperative games that I could play happily with my partner. It can’t be a cooperation to kill something, or she won’t play. It can’t be treadmill, or I’ll be bored.

Via Boing Boing, “Awesome quote from 1847 decrying technology regulation“:

“Cory Doctorow:
Dan Lockton, writing on the Architecture of Control blog, quotes Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who responded to an 1847 proposal to regulate the design of bridges with this quote:

In other words, embarrass and shackle the progress of improvements of tomorrow by recording and registering as law the prejudices and errors of today.

Link”

It’s an interesting dialectic between meeting current needs and balancing the necessary generality in the law with future specificity. That future specificity comes from the process of the law in finding and defining the boundaries, exploring implications.

Via BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition, “Origami gadget to debut at Cebit“:

“Microsoft’s mysterious Origami gadget will be unveiled at the Cebit trade fair in Germany.”

Man, oh, man. All this speculation about Orgami makes me realize how much I miss my Newton. I sure won’t care for any Microsoft device, I’m sure, but I’ll likely feel all kinds of nostalgia for the Newton, the EO, the MagicLink … hey, even the RocketBook … sad to be reminded of all the once great, now so low.

Via BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition, “Coca-Cola threat to quit schools“:

“Coca-Cola said it might withdraw its vending machines network from schools over the fizzy drinks ban.”

Yeah, well, don’t let the door hit you on the ass, on your way out, buddy. I’m sure the schools feel stressed about the money they lose, but that frees them up to re-evaluate whether such agreements are really the way to go, and maybe, in a less than ideal solution, to negotiate a new contract.

Now, if only we could get the commercial references out of the textbooks too … I swear it’s like mold. Once it’s there … it’s damned hard to get rid of.

I talked with my brothers to see if they had references in their textbooks via e-mail a while ago. I should go back and find that conversation.

Via BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition, “Guantanamo man tells of ‘torture’“:

“A Kuwaiti held at Guantanamo since 2002 criticises the US regime at the military camp, in a rare BBC interview.”

Here’s a dose of reality. This person has been in a military prison longer than Erica and I have been together. That deserves a moment of reflection.

Via Ars Technica, “Slingbox getting no love from 3G cellular providers“:

“Sling Media wants you to be able to watch your TV on your mobile phone. Unfortunately, the cellular carriers aren’t biting.”

In an open “free” market, one would expect that this would not be a problem. However, each carrier had a de facto monopoly on access to their customers, and they do anything they can to protect that value.

This was similar to the way that AOL and other closed-network service providers behaved toward the Internet.

I feel for the carriers because I know what it’s like to be a service provider and want to mediate how outside groups market to one’s own users, especially from better funded marketing … it’s a hard dialectic to negotiate between open access and giving away customers.

That’s just another way in which companies create conditions that are as close to monoply power as they are able to create for themselves. There isn’t a bright line between monopolistic behaviour and common sense business choices, it seems.

Via Ars Technica, “China gives itself its own top-level domains (updated)“:

“Is this the beginning of the end of the open Internet? China is going ahead with a plan to add Chinese character domains and use its own DNS, bypassing ICANN altogether.”

I’ve always wondered why companies like microsoft didn’t just start up their own TLD, say equal to their stock ticker symbol, and announce where their root servers could be found.

There’s no technical reason this can’t be done. Attempts at setting up alternate root servers for additional TLD space have been tried. In fact, Alternic was an example of how it might be done. The DNS at Telisphere had the Alternic root servers added to the DNS for all customers, back in the day.