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Mind-changing thoughts for the new year

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Every year around this time John Brockman poses some Big Question to his Edge discussion group, a salon of scientists and intellectuals. The results are typically all over the map but you can almost always find something of value and/or use. This year’s question was “What have you changed your mind about?” Here are some nuggets I excavated from the sprawling pile:

BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin writes about how online communities need tending, describing BoingBoing’s experience with managing its comment space (the site hired Making Light‘s Teresa Nielsen Hayden to moderate). Her conclusion is that online discussions are best moderated by human hosts rather than voting systems or algorithms:

Plucking one early weed from a bed of germinating seeds changes everything. Small actions by focused participants change the tone of the whole. It is possible to maintain big healthy gardens online. The solution isn’t cheap, or easy, or hands-free. Few things of value are.

This isn’t exactly news; the gardening metaphor as applied to online conversation has a long history stretching back to the early days of the Well (and probably Usenet as well) and extending more recently into communities like Flickr and Wikipedia. But each new generation of online services needs to learn this lesson through experience; BoingBoing has managed it well.

Linda Stone writes insightfully, as always, about attention — and how we habitually hold our breath as we answer email (I tried observing myself and, yes, it’s true!):

I believe that attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit and that we can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with pharmaceuticals.

But lately I have observed that the way in which many of us interact with our personal technologies makes it impossible to use this extraordinary tool of attention to our advantage.

In observing others — in their offices, their homes, at cafes — the vast majority of people hold their breath especially when they first begin responding to email. On cell phones, especially when talking and walking, people tend to hyper-ventilate or over-breathe.

The rest is here.

Nick Carr — echoing ideas in his new book, The Big Switch, which I’m reading now — jumps off from a line by Chinese leader Hu Jintao to argue that the Net is becoming more centralized:

It’s not Hu Jintao who is deluded in believing that the net might serve as a powerful tool for central control. It is those who assume otherwise. I used to count myself among them. But I’ve changed my mind.

Kai Krause, who created software tools for designers that were hugely popular a decade or so ago, writes about the frustrating ephemerality of creativity in the software field.

Noting that “hardly any of my software even still runs at all,” he writes:

I used to think “Software Design” is an art form.

I now believe that I was half-right:
it is indeed an art, but it has a rather short half-life:
Software is merely a performance art!

A momentary flash of brilliance, doomed to be overtaken by the next wave, or maybe even by its own sequel. Eaten alive by its successors. And time…

Finally, Alison Gopnik, the psychologist and coauthor of The Scientist in the Crib, writes about the purpose of imaginative play:

Learning about the real world has obvious evolutionary advantages and kids do it better than anyone else. But why spend so much time thinking about wildly, flagrantly unreal worlds? The mystery about pretend play is connected to a mystery about adult humans – especially vivid for an English professor’s daughter like me. Why do we love obviously false plays and novels and movies?

…In fact, I think now that the two abilities — finding the truth about the world and creating new worlds — are two sides of the same coins. Theories, in science or childhood, don’t just tell us what’s true — they tell us what’s possible, and they tell us how to get to those possibilities from where we are now. When children learn and when they pretend they use their knowledge of the world to create new possibilities. So do we whether we are doing science or writing novels. I don’t think anymore that Science and Fiction are just both Good Things that complement each other. I think they are, quite literally, the same thing.

A fine insight — one that generations of readers of science fiction and fantasy know in their bones already.
[tags]edge, john brockman, xeni jardin, boingboing, online communities, linda stone, attention, nicholas carr, kai krause, alison gopnik[/tags]

Elvish brews

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We drink a lot of craft beer around here, particularly around the holidays. I have a strong bias in favor of local beer, not just for the usual reasons — support local businesses, reduce the carbon footprint, and so on — but also because, with most beer, freshness really does count. While wonderful beers are being made abroad, by the time they get here you can never be sure they’re in decent condition.

But I couldn’t resist buying a tasting run of the entire line of Ridgeway Brewing’s holiday line, which I found by happenstance at the local Beverages and More. Here’s what I got:

Bad Elves brews

I knew the names and art would delight my kids. I couldn’t know, but found out, that these brews were excellent. Turns out Ridgeway is a project of the brewer from a beloved brewery in Henley-on-Thames called Brakspear that recently shut down.

Anyway, the Ridgeway line — Bad Elf, Very Bad Elf, Seriously Bad Elf, Criminally Bad Elf, and Insanely Bad Elf — are escalatingly stronger beers, from 6 percent alcohol to over 11, ranging from a sort of British take on an American IPA (Bad Elf) to a monster barleywine (Insanely B.E.). I loved them all. The hops and barley varieties Ridgeway uses are quite different from the ingredients typically used by American microbreweries, and, after years of drinking West Coast beers, I enjoyed venturing afield.

(If you’re into beer, I recommend William Brand’s California Craft Beer newsletter and blog.)

Remembering Bob Watts

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I was deeply saddened to hear from my former colleagues at Salon that Bob Watts, who served as Salon’s art director for many years, passed away early this morning after a long fight with cancer. (Joan Walsh’s remembrance is here. And here are other remembrances from Salon people.)

I knew Bob from his start at Salon as a photo intern in 1998, but worked closest with him during the dark years after the dotcom bubble burst, when Salon’s prospects were dim and budgets were slim. Some of Salon’s editors fought their own guerrilla battles against our financial woes by spending money they didn’t really have, and it was my job as managing editor to try to reel them back toward reality. I never had to do that with Bob: at the end of each month he’d calmly deposit the art department’s report on my desk, and it was so reliably in order and under budget that, I confess, I took to reviewing it less and less closely over the years. It could simply be counted on, as could he.

Stereotypes paint the artist as undisciplined and indulgent. Bob wasn’t a stereotype; he was the real thing, and so he approached his work with care and consideration, balancing his own abundant inspiration with the needs of the people around him, working fast on ridiculously tight deadlines to create consistently delightful images.

He must have produced, literally, thousands of Salon cover images over the years, each one a witty or moving or beautiful little time capsule. I will miss them, as I will miss him.

Why the primaries don’t matter

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Today’s Iowa caucuses mark the moment when endless months of vapid punditry collide with the cold reality of the preferences of real voters. I welcome that. But I am blissfully indifferent to the outcome of the primaries. The horse-race-handicapping that will fill the headlines in coming weeks feels meaningless this year.

Whoever wins Iowa, New Hampshire, and the super-Tuesday blitzes following, it seems certain that there will be a strong Democratic candidate and a weak Republican nominee. The GOP leadership knows this, which is why it’s so glum. The Republicans will field either Romney, a fake; Giuliani, a joke; Huckabee, yet another Southern former governor with a lot of faith and no understanding of the world (that worked so well last time!); or McCain, a former maverick who has lashed himself tightly to the sunken ship of the current administration’s failed war policies and is detested by the Republican “base.” I do not see how any of them could win the White House in the current climate. (And no, I do not think Ron Paul is going to ride a dark horse to victory, either.) This may prove wishful coastal-state thinking, and a lot can happen in the next 10 months. But that’s how it looks today.

I have minor preferences among the Democratic field — I find Obama’s freshness and Edwards’ populist fervor a little more inspiring than Clinton’s “I’m competent” pitch. But any of them would make a good president, and any of them would put an end to the governmental nightmare of the past eight years, and that’s all that matters this year.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall suggests that the DC press corps’ long love affair with McCain would be a substantial boon in the general election.
[tags]primaries, iowa caucuses, 2008 primaries, 2008 presidential election[/tags]

Audio compression: sound and lack of vision

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I wrote earlier this year about the controversy over the level of compression in contemporary recordings — how it flattens out sound, fatigues the ears and makes music all sound the same. In Rolling Stone Rob Levine has now produced the definitive piece on the subject. It’s worth a read.

The most depressing part is the discussion of the remastering of old recordings to fit this new norm (apparently the new Led Zeppelin collection is a case of that).

My gold standard for rock recordings are the records (my older brother’s) that I first heard through my father’s KLH, lying on the living room floor, in the late ’60s: the White Album and “Abbey Road,” “Tommy,” the Kinks’ “Arthur.” Normally I’d be delighted to hear of new remasterings of such albums — but now I’ll think twice before buying them. Make the Arctic Monkeys sound monotonous if that’s what they want — but don’t ransack music history!

At the end of Levine’s piece, this passage struck an ironic note:

Bendeth and other producers worry that young listeners have grown so used to dynamically compressed music and the thin sound of MP3s that the battle has already been lost. “CDs sound better, but no one’s buying them,” he says. “The age of the audiophile is over.”

What’s funny is that the people who consider themselves real audiophiles — who read The Absolute Sound and invest in tube amplifiers — sneer at CDs as limited and thin (they rely on sampling, unlike analog recordings). Of course, these are typically classical listeners; for popular music, even CD-quality is now endangered.
[tags]compression, audio, sound quality, music, recording[/tags]

The value of coming clean about mistakes

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The 10ZenMonkeys blog has the transcript of an extraordinary speech by Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland delivered at a recent conference for the Craigslist Foundation. (Found via BoingBoing.)

This passage about admitting your mistakes is worth taking to heart, particularly for those newsroom veterans who scratch their heads over posts like my last one:

Number Three, Don’t Lie. This is for real. There is something about the relationship between the not-for-profit sector, the government, the foundations, and the donors that creates a massive incentive to lie — flagrantly, and often.

And it’s not just a one-sided thing. The relationship between not-for-profits and foundations is like the relationship between teenagers and parents. You don’t really want to tell them everything that’s going on, and they don’t really want to know. So there’s this dance of deceit, shall we say.

“What’d you do this weekend?”
“Oh… Studied! With my friends.”

And the parents say “Good! So glad to hear that!” Because they don’t want to know. And so what do you say?

“How did the year go?”
“We had success after success! All goals were met, and a good time was had by all.”

And what was there left to say? “Good! Good!” They don’t want to know about the youth in your program that cussed you out and set the building on fire. They don’t want to know that you hired somebody once again who was a complete idiot. They don’t want to know, and you don’t want to tell them, and therefore we all stay very ignorant. Then the actual innovation curve has flattened out, because nobody’s telling the truth about what we’re going through any more. We’re all self-deceiving and trying to make it look good.

At the Ella Baker Center, we adopted a reporting form that freaked out our board and advisors. It was very simple: highlights, low lights, and lessons learned. We created a discipline in the organization that we would report out the bad stuff. First of all, everybody knows the bad stuff anyway, because the person you fired is talking right now, so it’s not like it’s not out there. But did you learn anything?

Program officers at foundations, donors, and philanthropists are just inundated with lying, false crap. And they know they’re being lied to. If you took all your annual reports and just read them end to end, you’d have to conclude that we’re now living in a socialist paradise. Everything’s going well, people are being served, and all the children are happy. And then you look at any newspaper, and it’s very clear that we might be fudging a bit.

So my experience has been that donors and program officers love to actually get the truth. They don’t punish you for it if you learned something. I think if all of us started to confess a little bit more, we would learn a little bit faster.

Journal buries massive correction (or, why people dislike the media, example no. 7394)

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I was flipping through my Wall Street Journal this morning when I noticed something unusual. Buried deep in the paper’s Weekend section was a long list of names that took up a full half page and featured, at the top of the column in small type, that bashful word “CORRECTION.”

I looked more closely. The list was apparently a new version of one that had appeared a month ago in the same section, as the centerpiece to a cover story titled “How to Get Into Harvard” about how different elite high schools around the country fared in placing graduates at elite colleges. Now, there are myriady ways one could take issue with the premise of such a piece. But now it appears that, on its own terms, the article’s ranking was totally screwed up. Today’s Journal publishes a new list that is substantially different from the first one, and much expanded.

I assume that, upon the appearance of the first list, the Journal was inundated with complaints and questions from those fancy private schools that, for one reason or another, failed to make the list. (The one I attended many years ago, Horace Mann School in New York, was absent from list number one, but made it to the bottom of the corrected ranking.) For better or worse, this sort of ranking means everything to these schools and the parents who pay fortunes to send their kids to them. Surely the Journal’s editors knew that; heck, they probably send their kids to the same schools.

So strike one against the paper was simply fumbling such a predictably emotional piece of research. Presumably the paper knew of the problem within a matter of days, if not hours. Strike two is for not publishing an immediate notice that the original list was going to be disavowed and replaced. (At least I never saw such a notice, and I’m a regular reader.)

But the third strike-and-out goes for the way the Journal buried this massive correction. The original story gets front-page play; the correction turns up on page 7, under a tiny header. (It is similarly difficult to find on the Journal web site.)

The authority of the professional media is under massive assault today for all sorts of reasons, many legitimate, many not. But some of the most gaping wounds are self-inflicted. Twenty, 30 years ago, maybe a publication could get away with this sort of sweep-it-under-the-carpet defensiveness. Today, it just looks ludicrous. If you blow a front page story, you should admit it on the front page. Even if it’s “just” the Weekend section.
[tags]media, corrections, wall street journal, high schools[/tags]

Bush administration history in 100 words

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I recently found and enjoyed University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Kors’ “60 Second Lecture” summary of human history (thanks, Boing Boing and Mark Hurst). It’s wonderful on its own terms, but the tenth bullet — “No one who teaches you knows what will happen” — kicks it up onto a whole different level.

As longtime readers may have noticed, I’ve cut way back on the political blogging this year. Partly it’s because my personal energies are focused elsewhere. Partly it’s because the political blogosphere is now crammed with people saying much of what I would say. And partly it’s because there has really been so little one could do or say this year other than wait out the final awful twilight of the worst presidency of my lifetime.

But I have to say I’m inspired by the spirit of Kors’s elevator-pitch-style lecture. As a year-end exercise, and to make up for the long silence here, I offer this 60-second, ten-bullet-point, 100-word overview of the achievements of the Bush Administration:

  • Lost popular vote but won in court, claimed mandate.
  • Spent budget surplus on tax cuts for wealthy.
  • Squandered post 9-11 unity on bid for “permanent Republican majority.”
  • Stockpiled terror suspects at Guantanamo with no rights; instituted shameful regime of torture.
  • Led nation falsely into Iraq war, bungled occupation, destabilized Mideast, trashed U.S. military.
  • Diplomacy-free, unilateralist foreign policy eroded American influence worldwide.
  • Attempted to scuttle Social Security via “privatization.”
  • Destroyed Justice Department’s nonpartisan tradition; used prosecutors to punish enemies and throw elections.
  • Undermined Constitution through “signing statements.”
  • Blocked global warming solutions.
  • Will retire to ranch in year; we face lifelong cleanup.

[tags]60-second lectures, bush administration, 100 words[/tags]

A year of Code

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It really has been a great year for Dreaming in Code — many thanks to all of you who helped make it so. The book started off with a rush of interest sparked by Joel Spolsky; I got to present the book to interested crowds at Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, and talk about it on a bunch of radio shows; and sales of the book held steady all year.

Now it’s the season of year-end lists, and my book has turned up on the Chicago Tribune’s list of “Our Favorite Books of 2007”. Some kind bloggers have also put it on their year-end lists — I’m grateful.

I’m also happy to have received a detailed and thoughtful write-up by Michael Schrage, the longtime technology columnist and commentator, who selected Dreaming for his list of favorite books of 2007 in Strategy and Business.

The paperback is due out in February, with a new epilogue, taking the Chandler story further down its still open road.

And, yes, there’s another book in the works where that one came from. I should be posting more about it pretty soon now…