Soul Jam: shared joy, art & wisdom

TarenSK: MIT On About The #AaronSwartz Evidence: Misleading and Insufficient

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 17:52:50 -0400

TarenSK: MIT On About The #AaronSwartz Evidence: Misleading and Insufficient:

Below is the response from Aaron’s father and me to MIT President Rafael Reif’s statement this morning, along with newly released email exchanges between MIT and Aaron’s lawyers about the evidence.

Edit: Read/watch my speech last week at MIT about its investigation, evidence, and the protective…

NTS

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 15:57:36 -0400

home improvements - perpetual kid (0.1)

schedule improvement - gcal updated

notebook replacement needed.

last night my housemate and I agreed: we miss ken shan.

physical refresh

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 08:00:06 -0400

The host-guest relationship is deeply ingrained in me. Having a guest over is motive enough to change major aspects of schedule, house, and work.

A year ago a former girlfriend came to visit and led directly to better relationships with my housemates and landlady. A month ago I decided to start using airbnb, because I had an idea to help them change the sort of network and service they provided, and had my first request the next day for that very night. By the time they came to stay at our place, our furniture and library layouts were different, and our house was better prepared for visitors of all kinds.

Likewise being a guest at someone else’s place can make me absorb their timing and traditions almost without thinking, in a way that other contexts rarely do.

I’m trying to give away or sell most of my gear and furniture, updating technology and redistributing beautiful books; and feel like having guests over continuously for a few weeks. Alas there’s no great way to broadcast that ‘more than usual interest’ energy, though couchsurfing offers a limited version of it. What I really want is a much much better notion of ‘global status’ — Noah Glass would understand.

The Anthony Judge sites

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 11:06:00 -0400

Anthony Judge has worked for a few decades on cataloging global civic initiatives to prepare for the future, through international development, nation-building, cybernetics, modern futurism - a mix of the traditional and the esoteric.

He currently maintains a quartet of sites meant to work together as a spectrum of creative thought about this process, and how to facilitate better large-scale collaborative problem solving the world over. These ideas have resonance, and his writing (on a site of personal essays), while slipping at times into the literary-criticism jargon of academic cybernetics, is prolific and studded with occasional gems.

Traversing some of his linked projects brought me back to Andrius K, someone I met a while back through OLPC thanks to his interest in basic education. (to my great satisfaction, he uses a public work-group and mailing list for some of his significant personal mail.) I was reminded that the world is full of such creative thinkers — people who truly want to help realize a society of sharing and constructive problem-solving on the scale of billions of people — who do not see centers and generational Projects to join. They end up looking for unrelated work, and meditating on their views of potential futures alone, or in philosophical writings.

But we live in an age of connection and quick action, where dreams can be shared and made real in weeks rather than lifetimes. We need somehow to find a better way to combine the efforts of these amazing people, rather than shunting them into religion (via the desire to share and improve the lot of man) and education (via the desire to teach new ways of doing things).

[Re]construction set for a global village

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 10:52:40 -0400

One of my 17 key elements of a scalable adaptive world is a “Civilization”-style sport, where individuals and teams compete to produce a significant piece of technology from its predecessors as quickly and robustly as they can. Over time, this work would build up cultural expertise in how to develop all manner of tools and tech from a variety of starting points.

The Open Source Ecology movement has been discussing some relevant ideas, including that of a ‘Global Village Construction Set’ — a set of 40 basic tools with which one can [re]create a global village from scratch, with low energy requirements and open plans. The openfarmtech blog posts conversations with, for instance, “individuals who [build] steam and gasoline engines for fun”.

Valuing, slimming, joining sources

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 10:42:06 -0400

Information (fat) sources of importance need to be summarized (slimmed down), categorized, linked to related knowledge elsewhere and pointed to from a shared and unified space of ideas. This can take a long time, especially for low-grade sources (that is, those with much repetition, lack of clarity, or limited application).

Sources need first to be valued. Take the Buckminster Fuller Challenge site and library of ideas. These are some 500 ideas, many finalists from past years’ competitions. Their value is related to their worldchanging focus, quality, detail, capacity for reuse, &c. The value of slimming and sharing them is also related to how locked up they are in their current format (in this case: ideas and their metadata are uneditable, and almost uncommentable — comments are *invisible* unless one signs in, and not indexed by search engines).

Any system that recognizes contributions to global knowledge needs a rough system for such valuation. Another example: the textbooks at lightandmatter.com see only limited reuse, and are often unknown by people searching for science textbooks online, and there is value simply in resharing them or creating a better mechanism for such sharing. (Sites such as Wikibooks, cnx, ck12, flat world, &c currently *all* have avoided redistributing them.)

WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST HUMAN MEMORY?

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 10:10:03 -0400

emerging from tumblrdom one too bright morning with keys beneath my fingers and love songs in my ears

Sattinger and love

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 09:56:00 -0400

The laughter in her voice always reminds me of Q. Delicious.

An aquarium frozen in time, waiting for the souljam to begin.

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 08:47:20 -0400

An aquarium frozen in time, waiting for the souljam to begin.