I recently wrote the title in an email to a discussion list I participate in. I'm not sure where it came from - whether I read it somewhere or heard someone say it - but I am fairly certain that it is true. Even as I read my own words echoed on the discussion list, I wondered at the truth of them. I could not find a weakness, but I did find abstraction inherently assumed in the statement. It is fair to note what is assumed, in fairness to myself and others.

Expectations are derived from many things. Part of expectations are heuristic - learned things. A child might think that an orange tree can produce bananas - in time, we can hope, that the child will learn the difference. Society does that - though, in all fairness, society is also seemingly committed to the same level of thinking that creates things people perceive as problems. As Albert Einstein once wrote:

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Despite itself, society has managed to progress - but as Ayn Rand notes:

The course of mankind's progress is not a straight, automatic line, but a tortuous struggle, with long detours or relapses into the stagnant night of the irrational. Mankind moves forward by the grace of those human bridges who are able to grasp and transmit, across years or centuries, the achievements that men had reached - and to carry them further.

The bridges of which Ayn Rand writes would seem to coincide with the ratchet mechanism through which society has seen progress - sometimes, the ratchet slides back, but somehow society manages to move beyond any slips. The trouble isn't progress, the trouble is stagnation. { Read more }

A random thought that has been wandering through my head for years knocked on the doorway of my consciousness a few days ago. There has been something about 'Collective Intelligence' and the derivative 'Smart Mobs' that has always bothered me. Factor in issues of communication, democracy and the ever buzzworthy term 'Social Networking' (which is nothing new), and things get pretty complicated because they are all written of separately. Oddly, that reflects exactly what I am writing about now.

We can concede that things that are worked on collaboratively have a chance of being better than things that are worked on by an exclusive subset of people. Open Source projects such as Linux and Apache Web Server demonstrate this. Despite itself, Wikipedia does the same to, in my opinion, a decreasing extent (perhaps following the rule of diminishing returns). Yet there are literally thousands of collaborative software and content projects that fail all the time. It is troublesome to consider how elite the successful collaborative works really are. The DotCom boom demonstrates the contrast quite well - for every successful web project during that period, such as Amazon.com, there were about 300 failures. Those are not good odds. Granted, they were not all collaborative projects - it is quite likely most weren't - but it demonstrates a disparity in statistical representation when we talk about success in conjunction with technology. { Read more }

The question comes sooner or later:

Where are you from?

I:

• was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and stayed there 3 years.
• lived in Dayton, Ohio for 6 years.
• lived in Trinidad and Tobago for 6 years (maybe 7).
• lived in Dallas, Texas for about a year.
• traveled around the US for a bit over a year. Fun year.
• lived in Ozone Park, New York for 1 year.
• joined the Navy and traveled to all sorts of fun places for 6 years.
• got out of the Navy and lived in Ozone Park, New York for about half a year.
• moved to Orlando, Florida and lived there for about a year.
• moved to St. Petersburg/Clearwater, Florida, for about 6 years.
• moved to Trinidad for about 4 years to keep an eye on the old man.
• travelled Central America and the Caribbean for a year. Lots of places.
• returned to Trinidad to settle some issues and decide on where next to be - 2 years now.

So where am I from? Why do you ask? I am from Not Here. Any questions?

And did you notice I didn't ask where you were from?

In having a hard drive crash, I've been reloading the main system... all... day. Its something I have never really enjoyed - the time spent waiting for something to be ready, and the long periods of time it takes to download updates and code through the cocktail straw of a pipe I have in Trinidad. It is like watching refrigerated molasses ooze.

And yet, it is clean. It is the wiping of a system that had grown cluttered in ways that I had not appreciated in some time. A system that, in 2005, was new is once again new in 2008 - through the failure of a hard drive. And I find myself not wanting to install too much on it. It is light. It is fast. It is clean. It doesn't have the gigabytes of documents I had on it - thankfully, I had already backed those up. It doesn't have the years and years of emails stored away, it doesn't have all that junk I was slowly sifting through - some of the junk older than the computer itself.

Clean. { Read more }