The Impersonal Filter Bubble

The dangers of web access being too personalized. Hat tip to Johnnie Moore.

Like most things we need both in balance – totally open linking and personally (contextually) filtered channels. Clearly our personal filters need to be known to us personally …. or they are impersonal filters. So now you know, if you didn’t already.

The idea that it inhibits active dissent seems entirely spurious. Criticism is all too easy. Anyone wanting to dissent actively needs active intent to get off their ass, not find dissent opportunities on a plate. That’s a good reason for filtering.

Phone Pictures

Everyone takes pictures with phones these days, but these are pictures of people with phones. Particularly love the adjacent images 13 (Beatles) & 14 (Katharine Hepburn).

A Hard Day’s Night meets The Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

Hat tip to The Slate. Talking of which, I love the “scientific” treatment of this taboo subject, and this “commercial” treatment of used books.

System Complexity Hits Home

Discovery News article on the complexity of computer systems in domestic cars, prompted by the recent Toyota recall. Hat tip to Donald Firesmith for the link on LinkedIn.

More lines of code than F22 / F35 / B787 / A380 avionics systems.

I have experienced that complexity myself recently. Last year I bought a new car and was staggered to discover a 500-page manual explaining its operations, along with a 200-page companion manual for the GPS and radio systems. One of the new features touted was the much larger glove compartment, a size probably dictated by that of the required manuals.

And nobody reads the manual any more, anyway. Interesting to compare the modular replace vs repair consequences as “the system” gets this complex, with say Crawford’s messages in “The Case for Working with your Hands“. Will humans ever really “buy” the loss of control, the detachment from the real.

Strategic Direction

Post from Anecdote about Values, Direction, Identity and Purpose of an organization. Interested in how Values and Purpose are captured right now, but I thought the arrow diagram that separates Strategy (direction) from Strategic Goals / Targets / Plans is really useful. So many people confuse a strategy with a plan.

German Fun With Bagpipes

Chaos from Schelmish. Hat tip to Marsha.

The Case For God

I picked up once before on Karen Armstrong as a TED speaker; a breath of fresh air in the God vs Science fundamentalist debates. I bough a copy of her “The Case For God” yesterday and just started reading.

Yep, she’s good. She lumps Ditchkins (Dawkins / Hitchens) and Harris together but Dennett is listed separately. Thank god for people with imagination, says this atheist.

Well I didn’t know …

…. that neither CBGB’s nor The Marquee Club currently exist.

(Interesting this scrapbook page from Clemen Pull, has lots of gig adverts that also include Scarecrow, at The Marquee, The Lord Nelson, The Windsor Castle, Upstairs at Ronnies, and more … Pretty sure I saw Scarecrow only once at The Marquee, but I see they were there three times in 1976, according to The Marquee commemorative site.)

Northern Lights

Stunning Aurora Borealis image.

(If that image is stunning, this one is strange.)

Philly First

My first time in Philadelphia, PA. Arrived Saturday afternoon at a Midtown hotel right in the middle of the Midtown Village Fall Festival. A little of Oktoberfest about it, but mostly just all the bars and restaurants within one block of the hotel doing their thing on the streets. Reminded me again why I’m missing the enormous variety of US beers; several local pale-ales and Dead Guy on draft.

Odd transatlantic flight experience; on the left side didn’t see land until we flew over Martha’s Vinyard with Nantucket Island’s unmistakable outline fully visible (and all the boats whizzing between them). I guess there must have been a great view of Long Island, NYC and the Jersey coast from the other side of the plane, but didn’t see land again on the left side until we banked inland just north of Atlantic City on approach to Philly.

Walked the length of Walnut and Chestnut this morning, through the medical and historical districts and spent some time on Penn’s Landing on the Delaware. Interesting place.

Too Much Information, Professor

Neuroscientist Sebastian Seung talks about his feelings in the TED Talk “I am my Connectome”. The sum total and pattern of synaptic connections between our neurons (of course this ignores other non-neuronal mental activity) is a huge and complex graph. (Billions of neurons with thousands of connections each … he mentions some stats.)

At the 7:45 mark an excellent illustration of one tiny component of the overall complexity.

And he uses the well used stream (river) metaphor for upward and downward causation. You (your mind / your brain) are your connectome; it both supports mental activity and it is shaped by it. Nothing really new here, but so well delivered. Just the opposite of the reduced science of the post before last.

Talks with feeling, but ends on testable science. Integration is the third-culture.

[PS love the English language feature that “you” is ambiguous singular or plural individual. You “are” whilst your mind or your brain “is”. Actually, just racking my brains, that’s true in many languages I know.]