Some discussion recently on the GNOME Docs List about how to best raise the Google ranking of the GNOME Users Guide. Our problem is that there are a bunch of old versions about that are out of date but still rank high. One way to raise the ranking, of course, is to link to it, which I am doing here.
Away
The New York Times had a story Thursday about how kids use instant messaging that is relevant to my current reading about Information Ecologies. The chapter I’m now reading defines the complex way in which an information ecology takes place – the interplay between the technology itself and the people who use it. The authors make the important point that the technology alone is not determinative. The authors say:
We cannot overemphasize a key point here: only the participants of an information ecology can establish the identity and place of the technologies that are found there. Indeed, this is a responsibility, not just an opportunity.
This contrasts with the luddite view (my word, not theirs) that technology is beyond our control and bends us to its amoral will.
Which brings us to Joyce Cohen’s story in Thursday’s New York Times. It’s a delightful romp about the way kids’ IM away messages have become a fundamental tool for communicating with and entertaining one another:
Away messaging, a function of instant messaging, has become something of an obsession on college campuses, providing communication, entertainment, procrastination and social life all rolled into one. “Students go online just to read their friends’ away messages,” said David Jacobson, a professor of anthropology at Brandeis University, who has taught courses examining away messages. “It’s a whole new dynamic that’s really remarkable.”
The software engineers who created the “away message” had no idea it would be used this way. These kids have bent it to their will.
The Cell Phone
I’m book-flitting and found an interesting title at the library on technology and culture called Information Ecologies by Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O’Day. They bring both software design and anthropology to the task, and are interested in splitting the baby between luddites and technoenthusiasts. This is an approach that interests me.
The fundamental question they are posing is this: Given technology’s presence in our lives, how can we best bend it to our will rather than bending to its. This question is central to the familial revolution triggered by our acquisition of two mobile telephones. I have resisted this for a long time, been dismissive of it, argued repeatedly that I’ve never seen a need, nor wanted the tether that a phone implies. But our three lives have become a logistically complicated three-body problem, and we realized a few weeks ago that a cell phone could be an enabler and a solution rather than an ankle weight. Nora’s activities are multiplying – theater, several clubs at school, tennis – and giving her the ability to call us on the move from one to the next in order to coordinate transportation, food and other necessities seems like a practical value. And allowing Lissa to be untethered while still executing her self-imposed role of enabling Nora’s complex youth also seem like a practical value. So Nora and Lissa now have cell phones.
We’ll see how the experiment works.
Nukes
The question of whether or when to resume new nuclear weapons design work is now formally on the table with the Bush Administration’s request to repeal a ban on U.S. research and development of low-yield nuclear weapons.
I am careful here in my personal blog not to express my own views about issues I cover as a journalist. I have what I believe is a good working relationship with both the leaders of the nuclear arms control community and leaders of the nuclear weapons community. I have spent more than a decade talking to both, and I deeply understand their arguments and the passion with which they make them.
Succeeding as a journalist in such a situation requires an odd state of mind – the ability to fully hold, entertain and understand contradictory viewpoints. I need to be able to embrace the arms control community’s argument that nuclear weapons are a fundamental threat to humanity. I need to be able to embrace the weapons community’s argument that nuclear weapons prevented (“deterred”, to use their careful word) world war for half a century.
I’ve spent countless hours doing that in this case – the bookshelf behind me of nuclear weapons policy books is filled with heavy tomes on the subject. Ultimately it has been a morally exhausting experience. The experience has allowed me to write sympathetically about both, and robbed me of any views of my own. In this case, an unwillingness to share my own views is not artifact or journalist’s deceit. It is genuine.
For most of the last five years I’ve hated writing about nuclear weapons for that reason. Grappling with this largest of questions is just too hard. But I do it anew this year because the question is back on the table, freighted with new nuances, in the context of a new world.
Not Me
This is not me:
John Fleck, in his stage performance ‘Blessed Are All the Little Fishes,’ confronts alcoholism and Catholicism. During the course of the performance, Fleck appears dressed as a mermaid, urinates on the stage and creates an altar out of a toilet bowl by putting a photograph of Jesus Christ on the lid.” Justice Scalia, concurring in NEA v. Finley.
The Bubble
As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been taking CD’s with me to work so I have music to help drown out the chaos around me when I need to write. I’ve been listening on the computer headphones, but decided yesterday to plunk down the astronomical sum of $28 and buy a portable player. It was a better idea than I realized.
First of all, the sound – Cheap electronics just keep getting better and better. But the really interesting part is the psychology.
I took my new toy with me yesterday afternoon to the library. I popped on the headphones and was in my own little world, surrounded by a bubble of personal space and privacy, oblivious to those around me. I guess this is the same bubble I’ve been needing at the office, a safe space in which to work. But I never imagined it would be transferable, able to follow me as I travel the world at large.
Roach
I grabbed three CD’s on my way out the door yesterday morning. (I’ve been using headphones to listen to music at work lately to drown out the chaos on days I need to write – mostly jazz, music without words.) I took Birth of the Cool, Brilliant Corners and Saxophone Colossus. I was looking at the lineup on Birth of the Cool and noticed Max Roach on drums. I grabbed the Sonny Rollins. Max Roach on drums. The Monk. Max Roach on drums.
So is there just one jazz drummer?
Actually, it was just a coincidence. I went through my jazz CD’s when I got home and there were lots other drummers. But it made me think that I don’t really pay much attention to the drumming. I pay attention to most of the other players, but the poor anonymous drummer….
So in tribute to Max Roach, I’m going to start paying attention.
Trees
I’m currently poking my way through Tree Rings and Telescopes, a biography of A.E. Douglas written in the 1980s by George Ernest Webb. Douglas was the astronomer who invented the science of dendrochronology around the turn of the 20th century. He was looking for a way to study sunspot cycles, figuring they would be reflected in growth rings in the trees. What he ended up inventing was a fundamental tool for archaeology and for climate research. It was a time when it was still possible for a scientist to be a great generalist – for an astronomer to have a profound influence on fields completely outside his own.
Signs of the Times
Called a source at the Friends Committee on National Legislation this morning. The music while I was being transferred through their phone mail: Give Peace a Chance.
Mandelbrot
My goofball daughter sent me this:
| This is my little bit of the Mandelbrot set. I got it from the mandelbit generator. You can get one there too. |
Methinks I must have raised her right.