More Things From Around the Web

Several things:

• I like this guy's perspective on the global warming concerts yesterday (even though I'm not sure where he gets his stats): If you ask the 15 million people who are going to die from easily curable infectious diseases next year, the idea that climate change is our top priority seems to be massively overblown. What’s even more important is that you ask: ‘Where can we actually do some good?’ The answer is overwhelmingly: we can do very little good if we focus on climate change policies, whereas we can do immense amounts of good if we focus on some of the many other problems in the world. Climate change is a problem, and it definitely is one that we need to tackle over this century. But to say that this is the first and foremost thing that we need to tackle, as Tim Flannery said in a Financial Times interview a week ago, that this is the one thing we need to focus on in the next 10 years - that is simply ridiculous. We would be doing something that will help people very little - and only in a hundred years from now - at a very high cost. Meanwhile, we would be neglecting the fact that we could do massive amounts of good for less money for a lot of the people living right now - and in the process helping their descendents much more... ...We know how to solve many of these problems, just as we know how to deal with climate change. If you want to stop HIV-AIDS, it’s about information, about providing condoms. If you want to stop global warming, it’s about cutting carbon emissions. My point is that cutting carbon emissions costs a lot and it provides only a small benefit 100 years from now; handing out condoms and information, however, is very cheap and it works for people suffering from HIV-AIDS right now... ...To give one example: Gore points out that with global warming we’re going to see more heat deaths. That is true; we will see 2,000 more heat deaths in Britain by 2080. But at the same time we will also see 20,000 fewer cold deaths from climate change in 2080. It seems to me that only drawing attention to the 2,000 heat deaths and neglecting to tell us about the 20,000 cold deaths is not a good way to inform the democratic debate.
• This sounds like a fun job -- Usability Professional -- NYT article here. Excerpt: SOMETIMES there is a huge disconnect between the people who make a product and the people who use it. The creator of a Web site may assume too much knowledge on the part of users, leading to confusion. Software designers may not anticipate user behavior that can unintentionally destroy an entire database. Manufacturers can make equipment that inadvertently increases the likelihood of repetitive stress injuries. Enter the usability professional, whose work has recently developed into a solid career track, driven mostly by advancements in technology. Jobs in the usability industry are varied, as are the backgrounds of the people who hold them. The work can involve testing products in a laboratory, watching people use products in the field or developing testing methods.
• Michael's Museum, which is housed in the residence of this guy named Michael, features a lot of nifty stuff, more organized than my nifty stuff. One day I'll have it how I want it. (The ♥G♥ pointed out the other day that Thomas Jefferson essentially did the same thing at Monticello.)
• Make sure to check out The Incredible Grafitti-Covered Building (via GoodShit -- NSFW):

From Around the Web

Items:

• Happy 100th birthday, Robert Heinlein. Excerpt: When one looks to the writings of an SF writer like H.G. Wells to see concepts of what constitutes the best society, one reads polemics against authoritarianism and stories championing the working class. One also reads narratives critical of bourgeois morality and against democracy as we understand it. His non-fiction book, a presentation actually, After Democracy being a prime example of this part of his thought. Wells was a complex thinker, of the Left to be sure, who wrote insightful critiques of the future. When one looks to Heinlein however, it is almost a mirror reflection of Wells. Almost. We still find polemics against authoritarianism, the Bugs in Starship Troopers comes directly to mind, but you also often find examples praising of other authoritative regimes, the Earth of Starship Troopers comes to mind. There are other examples, and to be fair the Earth society in Starship Troopers can be interpreted as a democratic society of a kind, but since Starship Troopers is one of Heinlein's most controversial stories it bears mentioning.
• I totally remember the Ready Ranger pack from when I was in about fourth grade. I never had one, but that's OK, because I think you can do it all on the iPhone now.
• Topics from the Unclutterer. Example: Hate matching up sock pairs while folding laundry? One way to save you time is to have all socks of the exact same color and style. Every six months, throw away all of your white sports socks and replace them with six pair of new, identical white sports socks. Be sure to alternate the style slightly between purges so if an old sock accidentally doesn’t get purged, you can identify it when it tries to sneak back in to your drawer. All of your socks will have the same amount of wear, they all will match, and they will save you time during folding. I'll have to think that one through. I have certain sock-matching procedures I go through that seem to work OK, plus I have my socks with Fred Flinstone on them that I save for special occasions.

Can't Wait to Read This Book

I have heard about this book by David Weinberger (his blog here) and I want to check it out -- Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. Interview w/ R.U. Sirius here. Excerpts:

You know, in a library, a physical book has to go on only one shelf under one category. That’s not a natural restriction; a single book is about many different things. But even when you try to make up for that restriction with the catalog card, which is a very reduced form of meta-data for the book, the size of the card is dictated by the inconvenience of atoms. The size of the card means that you can’t put in very many of those references. But on the web, everybody can put in his or her own references. We can have hundreds or millions of references and links and connections of meaning linked to a single resource. There’s no limit. So, in some ways, the web reflects better the complexity of the linked nature of the world...

...Taxonomies are power. With a centralized top-down taxonomy, one problem is that somebody gets to say what you are. And lots of people will inevitably disagree with the categorization. A really bad example of this is what happened to a popular musician living under apartheid in South Africa, By the time he was fifty, he had become a different race five times because the law had changed. And once, he had to leave his wife and family because of it. So taxonomy is power. It’s not always that gross. But let’s say you’re trying to decide where Scientology or Jews For Jesus or Baha’i goes in the category of religions. Are they at the same level as the big ones? Power resides in that decision. Now that we can create local clusters of meaning, local taxonomies, categorizations — a lot of that power dissipates. That’s a good thing.

Artists' Desk; Music Metadata; History of Ideas; 1999/Baba O'Riley Mashup

Items:

• Via Boing Boing, here's a bunch of photographs of artists' workspaces. I've been thinking of putting up some before-and-after pictures of the book room and stuff. Included in this batch of photos is the desk of the woman who makes 30-second remakes of famous movies using bunnies.
• I appreciate Chris Anderson's comments on how different types of metadata are needed for classical music CDs as compared to pop music CDs. Excerpt: But I was interested in Amazon's classical music store for another reason: classical is a genre that the one-size-fits-all music aggregators such as iTunes don't handle particularly well. They're oriented around pop music, with its artist, album, track data format. Meanwhile classical music organizes around composer, conductor, performer, soloist, etc.
• Here's the Dictionary of the History of Ideas.
• I freakin' love this mashup of 1999 and Teenage Wasteland (I know, Baba O'Riley). The link I just posted is the basic version, and the more elaborate version is here.
• Here are a bunch of podcasts of things from last year's Web 2.0 Summit. I listened to a couple the other day; I'll probably listen to some more this weekend.

Office Coming Along; 101MIPWNL Updates; TV Streaming; GooTube; Spike Lee Movie; Dilbert Creator Fixes Own Brain

Hmmm... Haven't posted for a few days. Been busy with some sweet home-office reorganization. The ♥G♥ painted my office a couple weekends ago (she's a better neat painter than I am) and last week we got a couple of new office chairs which I assembled the other day, and today we moved a comfy chair from the living room in here. So, I'm going to finish the Deweyfication process on my books (finally) so that the 900s will still be in the living room and hallway, the fiction and 000s-600s (and either 700s or 800s) will be in the book room (aka her office) and the balance will be in my office. I can't decide whether I want the 700s (art, music, etc.) in here, or the 800s (literature and stuff).

A few things:

• I've been updating my post on the 101MIPWNL with some links and comments. Before I'm done, I also intend (for those listees of mine also listed by Karlan, Lazar, and Salter) to parenthesize their rankings of each overlapped listee. Interesting Google find while doing a little research about this -- It's already been done. The Fictional 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Characters in World Literature and Legend by Lucy Pollard-Gott bcame out back in 1998. Here's the official site. Among her other work: Finding fractal patterns in poetry.
• Get it while it lasts... Episodes of TV shows coming out the yingyang -- Not always everything from a given series, but tons of X-Files, Band of Brothers, Seinfeld, 24, Batman Beyond, and many many more.
• Annalee Newitz says that GooTube is dead. She says this in an article called "GooTube is Dead," in which the "I" in "Is" should be capped but is not. Excerpt: Another possible reason why Google bought YouTube is because it fits with the company's copyright reformist agenda. Google has already been testing the limits of corporate activism in the copy wars with its frankly awesome Google Book Search. This controversial project, which led to a lot of legal chest-thumping in the publishing industry, allows people to search the full text of thousands of books. Maybe YouTube will be a kind of Google Book for movies, with fully-searchable videos that allow artists, students, and film geeks to appreciate the motion picture in a whole new way.
• We watched the Spike Lee Joint Inside Man tonight. Not bad! Somewhat implausible, but it kept you thinking the whole time. I'm probably going to listen to the director's commentary tomorrow.
• Dilbert creator Scott Adams has successfully rewired his own brain!