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Bill explains how to turn Turkeys into meat. But then, aren't we all made out of meat?

Update: OMG turkeys!

Technorati Tags: meat, thanksgiving, turkey

John Markoff's Web 3.0 piece was an odd conflation of various kinds of "if only the world were a simpler place" AI dreams, actually triggering a full 10⁶ microLenats on the bogometer. I wouldn't have commented on this, except that my copy of John Scalzi's The Android's Dream came today, and I read this passage that summed it up well:

In the end, however, it was not capability that limited the potential of artificial intelligence, it was hubris. Intelligence programmers almost by definition have a God complex, which means they don't like following anyone else's work, including that of nature. In conversation, intelligence programmers will speak warmly about the giants of the field that have come before them and express reverential awe regarding the evolutionary processes that time and again have spawned intelligence from non-sentience. In their heads, however, they regard the earlier programmers as hacks who went after low-hanging fruit and evolution as the long way of going about things.

It is exactly this tendency, as observed in ourselves and others, that led to the observe, document, simplify, then converge approach set out in the Microformats process.

Technorati Tags: bogosity, meme, microformat, microformats, web 2.0

I saw danah's call for help with her timeline of social software, and remembered Chris Locke talking about sixdegrees.com on his EGR mailing list. There, I saw the email from Chris that started me blogging, 5 years ago today.

Looks like I posted 4 times that day, on memetic engineering, Geoffrey Nunberg distorting Samuel Johnson by selective quoting, Chris Locke on Johnson, and tracing over pictures.

I saw Denise Howell at the Web 2.0 summit yesterday, and she reminded me we both responded to the same call.

In the Telegraph, Tony Blair writes about the 'need' for ID cards

The case for ID cards is a case not about liberty but about the modern world [...] I know this will outrage some people but, in a world in which we daily provide information to a whole host of companies and organisations and willingly carry a variety of cards to identify us, I don't think the civil liberties argument carries much weight.

I think I've heard this before - The Jam, in 1977

This is the modern world that I've learnt about
This is the modern world, we don't need no one
To tell us what's right or wrong -
Say what you like cause I don't care
I know where I am and going too
It's somewhere I won't preview
Don't have to explain myself to you
I don't give two fucks about your review

If Blair is explictly pitting modernity against liberty, Evelyn Waugh's closing of Scott-Kings' Modern Europe seems apposite: "I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world."

Technorati Tags: Blair, liberty, modern, Open Rights Group, ORG, politics, UK, Waugh

De vermis.

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days --
Perhaps you will not miss them. That's the joke.
The universe winds down. That's how it's made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you'll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

This modern commonplace book is continually inspiring and amusing. I never met Mike Ford, but read enough of his words at Making Light to miss him now.

Technorati Tags: auctorial, philosophy, words, writing

Only successful scripts should get financed

That’s what angels want first and foremost. Good scripts. Because they know that they can get good producers, good directors, good actors, good everything. But good scripts are harder to come by.

BTW, have you ever wondered why angel investors exist in only two investment genres, filmmaking and software development? Now you know.

Now JP does mention development hell, which was best described by Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman:

Whedon: I find that when you read a script, or rewrite something, or look at something that's been gone over, you can tell, like rings on a tree, by how bad it is, how long it's been in development.

Gaiman: Yes. It really is this thing of executives loving the smell of their own urine and urinating on things. And then more execs come in, and they urinate. And then the next round. By the end, they have this thing which just smells like pee, and nobody likes it.

Tonight at the Vloggies, Jerry Zucker (who built his career on satirising movie clichés) spoke of the opportunity to avoid the mess of Hollywood:

We were just experimenting, we were playing, we were having fun with this whole new field... We had to build a theatre with 150 seats to bring people in to watch it. What you have today is the possibility to take this stuff and send it around the world, for nothing. It is going to change the way we view entertainment. The studios in Hollywood are already a mess - this is going to change entertainment, and you are all at the beginning of it, so good luck and god bless

I think JP and JZ are both thinking about the same thing as I spoke about last week, where the internet undoes the need to pitch a story to fiscal gatekeepers, instead enabling anyone to speak in public, and for us all to decide who to listen to. This brought to mind a stanza from the Faithless song 'Not Enuff Love':

Whoever asks my name
Or where I came from
People fear contamination
If they tarry too long
I carry a strong
Sin of despair
It's in the air
I'm broken and hard to repair
I may mistaken be
But I patiently wait
On the path to humanity
I sit at the gates

Here's to forcing open the gates, and keeping them wide open.

Technorati Tags: Hollywood, software, podcasting, VC, Venture Capital, video, vloggies

Their online banking seems attractive, but it has a fatal flaw.

It doesn't show a running balance with each transaction, just a mythical 'available balance', and a long list of 'pending' transactions. The trouble is, the pending transactions become actual at different times. In particular, any debits become actual before any credits. So, if you have a large pending deposit of, say, your salary, a few small transactions that come through first can take you overdrawn. Wells Fargo will then charge you $33 per transaction for these overdraft transactions. The $33 doesn't pend at all, it just disappears from your account into their profits, along with all the interest they are earning on 'pending' your deposits.

As I said, avoid Wells Fargo banking.

Technorati Tags: banking, ethics, extortion, Wells Fargo