We’re going on a cruise for our friend Dan’s 40th birthday, along with 12 other friends. It’s a Carnival cruise, on the ship “Fascination.” The cruise leaves from Miami tomorrow, and we spend Tuesday in Key West, Wednesday in Calica, Mexico (seeing the Tulum Ruins, on a shore excursion) and then Thursday at Sea before returning to Miami to spend the day.
I’m leaving the computer and iPod behind, and we’ll have the cell phones turned off, too, due to the roaming charges, so no twitters or blogging on the trip, and probably no checking email, either. There will definitely be lots of pictures when we get back, and I hope to get a lot of reading done, too.
We have a friend house sitting for us, and we’re packed. Mostly. We should’ve been in bed long ago, but it’s been a busy day.
Many openly wondered if Wheaton would ever act again. “I don’t know, when people see how geeky this is, they might not believe him in a non-nerd role. That could ruin him,” said Chip Scoop from the Hollywood Reporter.
Pentagon cancels plans to send soldiers religious care packages with Christian bibles and “Left Behind: Eternal Forces” video game. Note – this is the game where you can shoot gay people if they don’t join your religious cult. Yeah, they were sending that
“One in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday.” Wow. This makes me want to buy a gun even more than that think tank that wants Bush to be President for life.
Everything Is MiscellaneousI mentioned the book Everything is Miscellaneous a few posts back on my list of recent reads, but I wanted to pull it out and write more about it, because it was very thought provoking, and a book I intend to buy (I borrowed it from the library) because I want to read it again.
In the book, author David Weinberger is discussing how we think about and organize knowledge, and about how the internet is changing the way we do that. He starts by discussing the hierarchical nature of traditional organizing schemes (what he calls first and second order schemes) like the Dewey Decimal System, and Linnaeus’ taxonomic scheme of organizing the natural world, and then examines some of the flaws with those systems. Among them: Dewey isn’t flexible enough to account for new knowledge or allow changes in categorization (libraries would have to move and relabel all of their books) and doesn’t allow books to be located in more than one spot in the system (the history of military cooking is an example of a problematic book). Linnaeus’s taxonomy forces us to make rigid decisions about what fits where, when there are grey areas in between. Both systems are authoritarian in nature; neither allow for additions or contributions by lay people who might possess knowledge the system authors do not. My paraphrasing of his ideas is pretty simplistic here, and I’m leaving lots out, unfortunately.
Weinberger then examines what he calls the “third order” organizational scheme that the internet has given rise to – hyperlinking and tagging are examples. Hyperlinking, of course, allows anyone creating a page to associate any idea to any other by linking pages together. Tagging allows people to create their own robust systems of metadata about a piece of knowledge by “tagging” it with words they associate with it – excellent examples are sites I use every day to do that very thing – Flickr, where I describe my photos using tags, Del.icio.us, where I bookmark links and tag them with descriptions. Systems like these are democratic in nature (anyone can provide tags that mean something to them), flexible enough to accomodate grey areas and restructuring, and allow a one-to-many association of ideas.
It’s a thought-provoking book for me because I’ve pondered some of the same flaws in hierarchical systems while organizing my graphics, photos, personal design work, blog entries, fonts, library catalog and my library itself, and I want to buy a copy and re-read it thinking about my own systems specifically. I’m hopeful that I can solve many of my long-standing doubts about my approaches to those systems – the biggest being that list of topics over there in the right column of this site.
David Weinberger was also one of the authors of another book I found very thought-provoking years ago: The Cluetrain Manifesto (a book I wish we’d paid more attention to at work, frankly) and his website/blog is also a great regular read.
Weinberger spoke recently to the employees of Nature.com about his book and about the web; here are the notes from a fellow who attended that lecture.
Weinberger has been thrust into the debate with Andrew Keen, a former technophile who recently wrote a book about his change of beliefs, for a variety of complex reasons. Weinberger comments on Keens book and numerous public appearances at Huffington Post, and that was a really interesting read as well.
So…… tomorrow I have to have a Colonoscopy. Woohoo! No, Katie Couric will not be there to film it. And yes, I am old. OLD. Just yesterday I was reminiscing about something that happened in college in 1987 – twenty years ago.
a) I’m reminiscing now? Great. People just love that.
b) I still think I’m a college student. I still have that “final in a class I forgot I signed up for and never attended” dream regularly. That counts, right?
c) TWENTY FRICKIN’ YEARS AGO? OMFG.
This is a follow-up thing from my diverticulitis problem back in May. It’s mainly a precaution to ensure I don’t have colon cancer or polyps. Both are unlikely, given my age, but they want to shine a light up there to be sure.
So today I’m not allowed to eat anything but non-red jello (something about the dye) and clear liquids, and tonight I have to “prep” for the procedure. Not going into details; use your imagination for that. As I was leaving the pharmacy this morning after filling the appropriate prescription, the guy actually said “have a good day!” and then remembered what drugs I had just purchased and giggled. Funny guy.
I was going to add a funny picture to this post, but I made the mistake of searching the word colonoscopy on google images. Don’t do that. Instead, I’ll provide you with the obligatory unicorn chaser:
Mandala Unicorn
2022-03-17 Update:
In 2007 I was 39. Yeah. That was 15 years ago. So I’ve been out of college for 35 years. Yikes.
UPDATE: Quebec police admit the three men in the video were indeed “undercover” officers; although the claim they were not there to instigate any violence. Wonder what that rock was for, then.
Police attend a very large Canadian protest against George Bush dressed as “protesters” to attempt to rile up the crowd so they can make mass arrests – dressed in black, with bandanas over their faces and carrying rocks. The actual protesters are labor union leaders (the guy talking to them is Dave Coles, president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada) who all look like your grandpa though, and they object to these young men attempting to “infiltrate” their line (they stick out like a sore thumb), asking them to take off their masks and put down their rocks. Soon they catch on that the troublemakers are police and confront them, so the police quickly run into the uniformed police line and get “arrested.” But these guys weren’t among the four people arrested at the event, who were accounted for later. Security theater gets weirder all the time.
More about the protest – it’s surrounding the “Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America” a partnership between the United States, Canada and Mexico, and many people in Canada believe that it’s designed to allow big business in America to abuse Canadian and Mexican natural and human resources at the expense of both of those countries.
It directs the White House advance staff to ask local police “to designate a protest area where demonstrators can be placed, preferably not in the view of the event site or motorcade route.”
