Seb's Open Research
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Wednesday, December 10, 2003
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"We see people and things not as they are, but as we are."
Anthony de Mello (1931-1987), Jesuit Priest
(via D. Gurteen)
 11:04:29 PM
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Tuesday, December 09, 2003
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"Compressed time" is another frame of reference
Funny how looking at familiar things in a different way helps you rediscover the beauty in them.
I seem to remember that the movie Baraka (which I coincidentally just found mentioned alongside other movies in comments to this) starts out with a few great, reflection-triggering time-lapse sequences. Here's a relevant bit of Roger Ebert's review of that movie:
Time-lapse photography can be dismissed as a gimmick, but
for me it's something more than that. It's a visual demonstration of
how fleeting life is. Of how the decisions that seem momentous on our
time scale are flickering instants in the life of the planet, too
small to be observed except on the minute scale of human life.
Somehow the technique makes the earth and its inhabitants seem
touchingly fragile.
4:03:13 PM
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Living in a rut
Ming points to a beautiful post by Andy Borrows that struck a chord with many people.
[...] Life goes on, day follows day and we all get a little older, a little more sure
that our reality only extends as far as that wall, but since we do those things
together, no-one really notices. And so the wall gets a little higher, a little
thicker.
But then along comes blogging and it starts knocking holes in
that wall, through which you can glimpse exquisitely tantalising thumbnails of
the view on the other side; it creates links, threads that pass through those
holes and start to exert a tug thats almost physical. People, places, ideas,
challenges suddenly theyre all around in glorious technicolour and by contrast
this side of the wall is grey, shabby, lifeless, dull.
3:11:44 PM
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Scale-free heresy
New Scientist reports that 13th century Catholic inquisitors employed Crush the Connectors to fight heretic networks. So that's where the RIAA got its clues from!
[...]
It was only towards the end of the 13th century that the inquisitors
began to recognise the real problem. A few highly connected, highly
influential and highly mobile individuals were spreading heresy faster
than indiscriminate killing, imprisonment and "inoculation" could wipe
it out. The inquisitors had finally realised the importance of the
network's hubs.
Just as the internet has,
for example, Yahoo and Napster acting as short cuts to connect many
people using very few links, heresy relied on the activities of a few
influential people like William of Milan. If the church was to beat
heresy, this well-connected heretic - and others like him - had to be
stopped.
(via Monkeymagic, an interesting new blog on "creativity, madness, and knowledge".)
8:45:43 AM
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RSS feeds from Audioscrobbler playlists
I have a colleague who's going to love this. Alf has partnered with RJ at Audioscrobbler.com
to enable people to automagically obtain R(DF)SS feeds of whatever
music goes through their player. Using a RSS-to-HTML device like feedroll, letting others know what you've been listening to recently on your weblog becomes a snap.
The view from 10,000 feet is even more promising. All of
Audioscrobbler's data is published under the Creative Commons licence,
and so are the user feeds. Which enables clever people to build
crawlers ("Musicrati"?) and devise algorithms that exploit the
distributed database and add value, for instance by matching
participants' listening profiles (à la blogmatcher) or by building new playlists out of the raw materials.
In short, what Alf and RJ are effectively doing is applying the
people-as-filters pattern that is inherent in blogging from the domain
of text to that of music.
Update (3:30pm): Lucas Gonze complains that I'm "crediting the
work of the whole playlisting community to Alf". While I don't believe
I'm doing this, I'm sorry if my posts gave that impression. I did
become aware of playlist-sharing developments through Alf, and haven't
had the time to dig out the complete history of this exciting area.
Here's one of the early-ish documents I found; better links welcome.
12:28:00 AM
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Monday, December 08, 2003
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Humans matter
Found this nice quote in a (circa 2000) profile of Robot Wisdom blogger Jorn Barger by Julian Dibbell:
Accept that the Web
ultimately overwhelms all attempts to order it, as for now it seems we
must, and you accept that the delicate thread of a personal point of
view is often as not your most reliable guide through the chaos. The
brittle logic of the hierarchical index has its indispensable uses, of
course, as has the crude brute strength of the search engine. But when
their limits are reached (and they always are), only the discriminating
force of sensibility will do -- and the more richly expressed the
sensibility, the better.
4:54:57 PM
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Buried in snow, listening to Boombastic radio right now. Not half bad.
1:18:08 PM
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
4/22/2006; 12:13:29 PM.
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