newspeak

This Is Bad: The US Drone Fleet Has Been Infected With a Virus – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic.

Whoops.

Caving to Washington? \.

These  issues are not trivial. Copyright rules and laws affect the ways we think of doing knowledge–its discovery as well as transmission. And it seems that the trend is for a regime where the rich have infinite access, for they can afford it, and the rest do not.

Cookery masterclass: Alain Ducasse | Life and style | The Observer.

An interesting account of Ducasse, who seems inclined to Alice Waters’ style and quite opposed to molecular cuisine. There is, I suppose, a kind of sociology to the intervention of technology: to perfect nature, to present nature in its Platonic form, or to go beyond the boundaries of nature altogether, and to use nature as a springboard.

Chez Panisse\’s \.

Sigh. I used to live not far from Chez Panisse and remember fondly when the café (upstairs) opened: friends of my friends worked there, as servitors and also bakers. This was when I was in my baking and cooking phase, and wanted to go pro, something I did achieve in NYC not long after, as a baker. But in Berkeley, early 80s, I’d go to the Café often–free or very inexpensive food, see, and it was good–and very seldom (like, never) to the restaurant below. That luxury was deferred until years later, when I could actually afford it. And by which time, alas, my passion for food had been subsumed by my passion for bike racing and running….

But my passion for cooking, and for tasting, has oddly returned. I spend the time I’m not thinking of politics, economics, law, copyright, open source, management, on recipes, combinations, tactics, styles of cooking and food preparation. And to say that there is a coherence to all this is simply to state what is obvious–to me, for so long, to more and more; and it has nothing really to do with middle-class gourmet-gulch fantasies of political importance. I hope.

Starkness Falls – NYTimes.com.

Suppose the euro falls apart. The primary engines, Germany and France, no doubt have anticipated this and probably think: so what.

I suspect there is more to the what than the so.

The Mosaic Pre-Man | The Scientist.

Once upon a time, we’d have thought of this as the “missing link,” but we don’t think that way any longer. In fact, it’s not entirely clear how we ought to think, as the narrative continuum given by fossil evidence–a layering, articulated by time’s measured deposit of dirt and other crud over the bones of interest–is inadequate. It does not give us a sense of the horizontality of genetic movement. Each layer, rather, is a black box from which we can induce a cause producing the effect, but it’s never adequate.

So we learn, instead, that humans were always promiscuous and that they were not, it seems, particularly selective. How could they be, in an age when there really were not that many? So that what counts now as H. sap. is snap, shot into the present, of the past episodically expressed, with no clear memory of how it got here, let alone there.

The Mosaic Pre-Man | The Scientist.

Once upon a time, we’d have thought of this as the “missing link,” but we don’t think that way any longer. In fact, it’s not entirely clear how we ought to think, as the narrative continuum given by fossil evidence–a layering, articulated by time’s measured deposit of dirt and other crud over the bones of interest–is inadequate. It does not give us a sense of the horizontality of genetic movement. Each layer, rather, is a black box from which we can induce a cause producing the effect, but it’s never adequate.

So we learn, instead, that humans were always promiscuous and that they were not, it seems, particularly selective. How could they be, in an age when there really were not that many? So that what counts now as H. sap. is snap, shot into the present, of the past episodically expressed, with no clear memory of how it got here, let alone there.

Study Shows How Well Manufacturers Keep Android Phones Up To Date.

Interesting. I wonder if this fragmentation is good or bad, whether it is the sign of a healthy and diverse economy or the sign of nodes of isolation whose failure to cross communicate (aka communicate) signals a failure of the commons market.

Put another way: it’s good that there is difference; monoculture is bad, as it is vulnerable in the same way a genetic monoculture is. But too much difference is also a problem, as it does not lead to the healthy exchange of genetic identity but only a crowd of monocultures, each vulnerable, and indeed, each *more* vulnerable, as they are simply smaller.

Rick Bookstaber: LinkedIn Weak Links.

“Weak links” means more than the term suggests; it refers to a kind of second-order (or more) connection. These weak links, which we see so much now in social networks, operate and have always operated, strongly as market connectors. The article is worth reading, as are the references.

Open Source Data Journalism – Happening now at Buzz Data eaves.ca.

A rather good article on “open source” analysis of data. The key point here is that the contributors to the data visualizations may not be experts in the global economics field the data fits into but are in working with data, identifying obviously relevant data, and in presenting it in ways that make for better analysis.

That is: open data systems, open data journalism, leads to discoveries that were unanticipated. This is the nature of the physical library that afforded the patron browsing rights. Discovery comes by accident and coincidence. So does the opportunity for freedom. (But then one must understand what one has, and that is hard.)