Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

Couple more quick links I found recently.

• Picasa is an image management software tool written by Google, of all people. I don’t remember where I saw a reference to it recently, but I just tried it out, and it’s absolutely wonderful. Instantaneous response to typical image manipulations, an “I’m feeling lucky!” button ala Google when you just want it to make the image better, and a pretty reasonable user interface for browsing through images on your hard drive. In the 20 minutes or so I played with it, I really liked it. Check it out.
• An article over at Many-to-Many had a link towards a class being taught over at Stanford by Howard Rheingold called “Toward a Literacy of Cooperation”. Rheingold wrote the book Smart Mobs on the rise of spontaneous organizations. The class looks really interesting – I plan to spend some time going through the site at some point. I watched Peter Kollock’s talk about social dilemmas this weekend, where he made some points I liked:
  • All games sold for children are finite zero-sum games, not infinite games, using Carse’s terminology. He describes observing his nephew (?) learning the game Candyland, and figuring out that if he wanted to win, his opponent had to lose, so he started cheating. On the other hand, I’m hard pressed to think of what infinite games could be taught to our kids; most games are, by nature, finite.
  • He pointed out that, as I mentioned in my discussion of the Ultimatum Game, that our social brains are wired to handle repeated interactions with reputations, that communities can not form without those elements. The corresponding thing he asserted was that the way to destroy a community was to take those elements away. In particular, he pointed out that pseudonymity was the best way to destroy a virtual community. It’s even worse than anonymity, because with pseudonymity, I could log on as you and destroy your reputation. Trust is destroyed, and everything falls apart. I thought that was a great insight.
  • He mentioned the importance of forgiveness and generosity in such interactions. In particular, we need to build in generosity because information is often imperfect, so we might misinterpret a mistake as an act of aggression and respond violently (as the Tit-for-Tat strategy in the Prisoner’s Dilemma would).

  Looks like a class I’d enjoy. I’m going to try to keep a closer eye on the class blog and watch the videos as they’re posted. The latest speaker apparently espouses something called panarchy, which I’ll have to read a bit more on before I have an opinion.

I’ve been using del.icio.us more, so you can always go there to check out what I’ve been finding interesting in my trawls through the web, but I wanted to call out a couple specifically.

• I thought Paul Graham’s latest essay was really interesting and either inspiring or depressing depending on my mood. Inspiring because he is reminding me that I can and should be chasing after my dreams, no matter what my day job is. Depressing because his essay was aimed at high school students; shouldn’t I have a better handle on what I’m doing with my life by now? If nothing else, it points out that I should be trying to find a way to get more writing into my life; I have continued to regularly update this blog over the past year, which is astonishing given my lack of self-discipline. I need to sit down and start putting together some of these essays together into a submittable form and see if that goes anywhere.
• A conversation on Slate between Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, and James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds. It’s interesting to read their takes on each other’s books, but I’m mostly including a link to it because Gladwell mentions Gary Klein’s work. That Gladwell would have read Klein’s work before writing Blink should have been totally obvious to me, but for some reason it wasn’t.
• Interesting New Yorker article about how our armed forces are adapting to life in Iraq. I really liked the description of how the soldiers have found their own decentralized ways of sharing information, particularly through stories. I think it’s also a good description of the power of breaking the hierarchy wide open and letting everybody use their initiative. I think it’s the way of the future, and given how the army has led many management trends, it shouldn’t surprise me to see them in the forefront yet again.

You know the drill. I find some pages that amuse me. I yammer on about them.

• Many-to-Many had a couple interesting responses from Clay Shirky and danah boyd to this post about Wikipedia. I particularly liked this point by danah:
  

  My concern – and that of many of my colleagues – is that students are often not media-savvy enough to recognize when to trust Wikipedia and when this is a dreadful idea. They quote from it as though it cannot be inaccurate.

  This relates back to my thoughts about being an information carnivore, and reminding us of the dangers of consuming information without knowing its provenance. Wikipedia, as a community-created information source, just brings these issues into stark relief.

• Edge ran its annual survey of intellectuals with the question “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”. I like Edge – in fact, last year’s question about Laws was where I first read about Lakoff. Not as many interesting answers this year, alas.
• I liked this interview with Michael Schrage. Given my preference for rapid prototyping, I like his ideas about innovation, including in his book Serious Play.
• Given that I like Malcolm Gladwell’s stuff, I thought this Fast Company profile was interesting. I should really read Blink at some point.
• I read this depressing Economist article from their Iraq correspondent this morning (subscription necessary, alas). Here’s just a taste:
  

  “If anyone gets too close to us we fucking waste them,” says a bullish lieutenant. “It’s kind of a shame, because it means we’ve killed a lot of innocent people.”

  And not all of them were in cars. Since discovering that roadside bombs, known as Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), can be triggered by mobile telephones, marines say they shoot at any Iraqi they see handling a phone near a bomb-blast. Bystanders to an insurgent ambush are also liable to be killed. Sometimes, the marines say they hide near the body of a dead insurgent and kill whoever comes to collect it. According to the marine lieutenant: “It gets to a point where you can’t wait to see guys with guns, so you start shooting everybody…It gets to a point where you don’t mind the bad stuff you do.”

• Another Economist article, subtitled “Why people of the book have such trouble with language, truth and logic”, and which discusses the difficulties of treating sacred texts as holy writ. Such behavior leads pretty directly to me ranting about creationism. I figured I’d link to it even though it’s subscription only because it ties in well to some recent rants.
• I went to SFMOMA last week. The Glamour exhibit and the Roy Lichtenstein exhibit were pretty excellent, but the art that caught my eye was a picture that had been rotated into the ongoing Picturing Modernity exhibit. It was a print of a whole slew of postcard sized images by Eleanor Antin, each of which depicted 100 boots in various poses. You can see a few of the images at this site. Quirky and whimsical and utterly endearing. I wanted a poster of the whole set for my walls, but such a thing apparently doesn’t exist. I spent some time with Google, and even asked the artist directly via email. She did point me to the republished book of postcards, which would let me pull out the postcards and make my own collage. So I’ll order that, and figure out what I want to do later.

A batch o’ links from the last several weeks that I’ve been too lame to upload until now. If you want a more consistently updated feed of web pages I find interesting, I’m starting to use del.icio.us more regularly, and you can check out my saved links there.

• John Perry Barlow has been involved with a somewhat disturbing case recently. Barlow was, among other things, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, a co-founder of the EFF, and the writer of the infamous Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. He’s an ornery guy that will fight for his rights. So when he got busted coming back from Burning Man for drugs in his checked luggage, instead of pleading out, he decided to fight the case as the result of an illegal search. He feels that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has far overstepped its bounds as a protector of security, and extended it to enforcing other lifestyle choices.

  On the one hand, I think Barlow’s an idiot. Flying with illegal drugs in your luggage is just dumb, especially when you’re a well-known counterculture figure. On the other hand, the prosecution is even more scary. The idea that the TSA can get away with whatever they want under the guise of security is frightening. The fact that they wouldn’t even answer questions about their procedures due to the dangers of revealing “Sensitive Security Information” is downright Orwellian. And since I’m unconvinced that any of the security procedures actually make us any safer, I’m for anything that reduces their power. Neither side is particularly respectable in this case, but I have to lean towards Barlow’s side. It’s a tricky case, though, one worthy of thought. So I link to it.

• Anybody who’s read this blog for any length of time knows that I worship Joel on Software. His latest rant, Camels and Rubber Duckies, is an absolutely hilarious discussion of the difficulties and perils of pricing software. He rambles on for about 5000 words and in the end, has no solutions to offer, because people’s reactions to prices are so context-dependent (i.e. people will pay more for quality, but will go positively ballistic if other people are getting a better price). Pricing ends up being very difficult because you have to optimize along several different parameters at once. In light of my recent post discussing truth vs. context, I found this quote particularly entertaining:
  

  There’s a real strong tendency to assume that experiments done on large populations of people should work out just like experiments done with chemicals in a high school lab, but everyone that has ever tried to do experiments on people knows that you get wildly variable results that just aren’t repeatable and the only way you can be confident in your results is to carefully avoid ever doing the same experiment twice.

• In a totally separate area, Jakob Nielsen discussed the importance of context in his latest column. For web usability, he points out that having sensible follow-up options available in response to a user’s previous actions is much more important than having a sensible global information architecture. People map their own way through the web. A good global architecture may help them find something the first time (if they understand the architecture and it maps well to how they think about the site), but after that, they want to extend their own path. Context context context. Yes, I’m on a bit of an obsession right now.
• Actually, as long as I’m rattling on about context, I’m in the middle of two books from my recent Amazon order which are all about the importance of context. One of them, Sources of Power by Gary Klein, discusses how decision-makers in time-critical life-threatening situations use a form of decision-making that he calls RPD, Recognition-Primed Decisions (something like that – I don’t have the book with me). He has studied firefighters, paramedics, and military commanders to demonstrate that they rarely use the logical “draw up a set of options, evaluate each option, and then take action” decision-making process that an MBA might use, because there isn’t time. Instead, they recognize aspects of the situation from their previous experience, and act immediately, to the point where several of them claimed they weren’t even making decisions – they were just doing what had to be done at each step.

  The other book, Managers not MBAs by Henry Mintzberg, bemoans the separation of MBAs from business context. He feels that the MBA culture derides the importance of knowing a business in making decisions about that business, from the prevalence of case studies to the fact that MBA students often have very little experience before going to business school. Because the MBAs have no context with which to evaluate what they’re told, they accept it blindly and the cycle of destructive decision-making continues. I just thought it was interesting that both of these books have similar themes at a time when I’m on this context kick myself. But anyway…

• I’m not sure how I found this thoughtful post about the impact of blogging, but I like it a lot.
  

  …millions of bloggers adding tens of millions of permanent links to the net every day have to be fundamentally shaping Google’s (and similar engine’s) results, and therefore the information gathering experience of the majority of the online world. I’m not saying this is good, or bad: but if it’s true, it’s terribly significant.

  From my own personal experience, I think he has a point. I don’t need a search engine for my blog; I just use Google. A lot of times when I’m writing up a post, I want to refer to an old post of mine. If I can remember a phrase I used (e.g. conservative postmodernism, I put it in Google, add in “nehrlich” and it will find the post for me. And I continue to be amazed by where links to my page pop up. Several of my book reviews are linked to across the web. People come across my stuff in the oddest ways. And, to take his point, posts like this links post are my way of contributing back to Google, of helping to put my imprint on pages that I think matter, by raising their PageRank via my blog. It’s a collective endeavor of deciding what matters. This would probably be a fruitful topic for a post of its own at some point, because it’s even better than a democracy, because if you don’t like what the majority (e.g. Google) thinks, you can always restrict the search set. Information spheres colliding. Ways of making context universes intersect. I’ll have to think some more about this.

That’s it for this round of links. I don’t know if I’ll get around to posting original content this weekend. For those of you who are dangerously addicted to the internet and are still online like me, I wish you a joyful non-denominational winter solstice celebration.

Since it’s been a while since I’ve written, I have a lot of links to put up and comment on. So here we go.

• danah boyd has made some really great posts to OMST recently. This one asks the interesting question: why are people interested in publicly articulating their social relationships? And this one examines the pitfalls in writing and reading an online description or profile, with the different contexts that may be in play – the person writing a “housing wanted” ad may describe themselves as neat (relative to their former-frat-boy slob roommate), but their new roommate may feel deceived when they move in because their standard of neatness is much higher. Really thought-provoking stuff on context and meaning in a low-information-bandwidth medium such as text.
• danah also pointed to this Salon article which is an overview of how the virtual world, once described as “a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live”, is becoming ever more intertwined with the real world, with the integration of GPS and other technologies that are tightly-coupled to physical location. I love this trend. I think that social relationships divorced from real-world contexts tend to be weaker and less meaningful (maybe that’s just me). I think that for social software to be meaningful, it has to benefit real-world relationships and networks. So this is another step in that direction. Augmented reality instead of virtual reality.
• I liked this column by Jakob Nielsen, outlining how many of the attributes we associate with progress are consequences of the Industrial Revolution, e.g. “In the physical world, you win by being big, with economies of scale in manufacturing, worldwide distribution, and branding. Most of these benefits accrue even if you’re mediocre, and in fact, you usually benefit from targeting the lowest common denominator.” In the coming age, we’ll move away from the things that used to work, and those of us that recognize the way things will hopefully evolve may have an advantage.
• Creationism is back. CREATIONISM?!?!?! Actually, the thing that scares me most is that the majority of people in this country believe in creationism according to a Gallup poll. The discussion in the comments section of that first post also scares me. Some of the creationists try to defend their position, and have nothing to fall back on except for repeated assertions (much like their president) rather than any sort of logic or argument. We need to start teaching good critical thinking skills in our country. Facts aren’t enough. Facts will never be enough. There is too much knowledge in the world for anybody to know even a sliver of it. To live in a world with an abundance of information, people need to learn the skills for evaluating claims made by authorities by applying some basic criteria.

  To take the case of creationism, I like Neil Postman’s idea of teaching kids the scientific method, and how we evaluate scientific ideas, and then letting them judge for themselves between evolution and other theories like creationism. Otherwise, we have a world where people faithfully accept the pronouncements of experts, where they have no way of making a decision when people they are told are “experts” disagree. This leads to situations like the rising tide of creationism (where one set of “scientists” espouse “intelligent design”, and every other legitimate scientist believes in evolution) or even politics (where a poll showed that 40% of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11 – as my friend Brad pointed out, the war in Iraq is perfectly justified, and in fact required, in the minds of that 40%, so the fact that Kerry came as close as he did to beating Bush is pretty astonishing). Anyway. Sorry. Creationism drives me bonkers. I spent an entire semester in high school arguing with a friend in art class about creationism. We’d both go off, read up on arguments for our side, and present them to each other. In the end, I realized I was never going to convince him. Ever. Because he was not using reason to evaluate which ideas to believe, but merely to rationalize them after having decided. Which is normal (heck, I do it all the time), but it makes it hard to change people’s minds.

• More polling sadness. According to Newsweek, 55% of Americans believe that every word of the Bible is literally accurate. 67% believe the Christmas story is literally true. I know polls can be misleading, but things like this depress me. I believe that the story of Jesus is a tremendously powerful one. But there’s so much stuff in the Bible that should clearly be treated allegorically. And of the stuff that isn’t, we do ignore huge chunks of it when it suits us. I have a point here about literalness and concrete thought vs. abstraction and the ability to think from different perspectives, but it ain’t going to come together tonight.
• More good articles over at Alternet. I didn’t like this one, proposing that the Democrats need to get back to economic populism. I think that’s just pandering in a similar fashion to the Republicans’ pandering on cultural issues. I would love to see a party step up and challenge its voters to agree that difficult decisions are necessary. Sometimes factories are no longer competitive and should be shut down. Sometimes abortions are necessary. We would prefer that it not be so, but life is hard sometimes. And parties that tell voters lies on these issues to win their votes may win elections, but they are destroying America. I want a party that commits to education and to critical thinking, but not one that panders to teacher’s unions or standardized testing. I know I’m totally dreaming, but I’d like to think that if we challenge people to step up, they will, as they did in WWII, and continue to do when given the chance for serious input (as Kunstler details). Instead, our political leaders are telling us to lie back down and go to sleep while murmuring sweet nothings in our ears. I know I live in a dreamworld. But, damn, wouldn’t it be nice?
• I also like this Alternet article where Larry Beinhart, who wrote the book that the movie Wag the Dog is based on, discusses the power of narrative, which is obviously a topic dear to my heart.
• Lastly, a couple good posts from Ideaflow, The 6 Myths of Creativity, and NASA’s vision of Prototype-as-Design.

Okay, so I’m utterly failing on writing more. Eit. Friday, I went and hung out at Christy and UBoat’s, Saturday I went for a bike ride up to Skyline Blvd and then went over to the Lantzes to play with Max, and this morning I played ultimate for the first time in a month, which hurt about as much as might be expected. Despite my claim that I’d try to stay in shape, I pretty much failed. Alas. So I was getting beat pretty good today on defense because I was sloooooooooooow. I did make a couple nice plays when I was marking on D, and I got a totally totally sweet one-handed left-handed layout grab for a score, so that pretty much made my day. You know it’s good when people from the other field tell you how good it was. This afternoon was a “Ow, ow, I’m out of shape” kind of afternoon. With football. I wish I’d had satellite TV, though, to watch the Bears win a game by a safety in overtime. How weird is that?

Um. Yeah. Sorry for the ramble there.

So, yeah, writing more. I figure I’ll at least toss up the links I’ve been collecting for the last little bit. And after this I’ll try to type up my AC2004 notes.

Right. To the links.

• While posting a reply to a column on outsourcing over at CNET last week, I found an article from a survey on outsourcing in the Economist this week. The only reason it’s notable is because I was pleased to note that the Economist feels the way I do about outsourcing, that it’s not only inevitable, but that it’s a good thing in that it means more people are doing more innovative work which will lead to productivity increases for everybody. To quote the article:
  

  What the worriers always forget is that the same changes in production technology that destroy jobs also create new ones. Because machines and foreign workers can perform the same work more cheaply, the cost of production falls. That means higher profits and lower prices, lifting demand for new goods and services. Entrepreneurs set up new businesses to meet demand for these new necessities of life, creating new jobs.

• Several good thoughtful articles over at AlterNet about the aftermath of the election. I liked this one on continuing the fight, this one about building progressive media (although I think he’s short-sighted in not figuring out how to leverage the liberal blogosphere), and particularly one by Don Hazen, the chief editor of AlterNet, asking us to face the music and admit that the progressive movement as currently constructed ain’t working. In particular, I liked the line “In the end, people vote for core values, and generally we don’t know what ours are, and when we do know, we have a terrible time explaining them.” which ties into my belief that we need to work on developing our message. AlterNet in general is pretty cool. I sent them a donation earlier this year when they offered copies of Lakoff’s latest book.
• I thought about going to this free conference at Harvard about how the internet is changing politics, but decided that my life was too crazy, so I’m going to punt. But it does look neat.
• The San Francisco Symphony released its new recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, aka the Resurrection, last week. This is exciting because it’s the first album that I’ve recorded with the symphony – it was recorded at the concerts this past summer. It’s an awesome recording. Admittedly, I’m biased. But I can tell you that many sections of it still raise goosebumps, and the first time I listened to the final movement (the part where we sing) on the CD, it brought tears to my eyes. And it’s a pretty good bet that it will win a Grammy of some sort, given that the Mahler 6 recording won “Best Orchestral Performance”, and Mahler 3 won “Best Classical Album”. It’d be cool to win a Grammy. It’d go well with the Emmy I won for Sweeney Todd (well, okay, I didn’t win an Emmy, but the production did, and I was in it. Technicalities count, right?). Then I’d just need a Tony and an Oscar to round out the collection. Yeah. Right.

Okay, not as many links as I thought. Oh well. I think I’m going to punt on the AC2004 notes for this evening – a friend called me up while I was working on this, and I ended up talking to him for an hour, and now it’s late, and I think I’m going to stock up on sleep for the week. Maybe notes tomorrow. Not that anyone cares. La la la. I could write complete gibberish and nobody would ever know! Ah, the freedom of having no readership. Wait, was that my out-loud voice? Oops. Bye!

As usual, a couple links that I want to share.

• I really liked this San Francisco chronicle article describing Laura Cunningham, the manager of the French Laundry. In the account of my visit, I raved about the experience, and how everything was tuned so well for customer enjoyment. It turns out that Cunningham has trained her staff in every aspect of making sure a customer has a good experience, from choreographing their movements with the help of a professional dance coach, to teaching them how to impart their knowledge to diners in a non-condescending way. She has apparently spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the whole experience beyond the food as amazing as possible, and it definitely shows.
• Mitch Kapor is a well-known internet activist. He was one of the founders of Lotus, and then went on to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a great organization dedicated to preserving our liberties online. He has continued to take an interest in online organizations, contributing to organizations like Baobabs and CivicSpace. I read this Alternet article about Kapor’s site Of, by and for, where he’s attempting to open up a political dialogue about self-governance and democracy. Interesting idea – I like his take on things in the Alternet interview. The site itself doesn’t do a lot for me yet, although I liked this reference to Thomas Jefferson’s Inaugural Address, which is a powerful speech.

A few quick links that I thought were interesting.

• After thinking about it, I did sign up to go to the Accelerating Change conference. If you’re interested, the Early Bird rate has apparently been extended to this Sunday, with a $50 discount thrown in if you read this post. At some point, I’m planning on writing up a participant statement, which I’ll share here, of course.
• I really liked this Salon article (you’ll have to get a Salon day pass to read the whole thing), pointing out “Thanks to the Net, we’ve all got access to poll numbers, fundraising figures and endless political gossip — and we all know exactly what the candidates need to do to win.” I’m certainly as guilty of it as anyone. Does this ability of anybody with an internet connection to get informed about politics and offer ideas make for a better democracy? I’d like to think so. Even if all the ideas aren’t accepted, just having an active idea marketplace with more participants leads to better informed citizens, I think. Now if only more people were actually interested in thinking about this stuff…
• I also liked this VentureBlog article detailing the demise of mass marketing, and the rise of the “long tail”. It refers to this Wired article which goes into the idea in more detail, but the basic idea is that in a world of scarce attention and mass production, products are aimed at the lowest common denominator; since you can only produce a few things, you need them to appeal to the most people possible. This explains the pablum we see on our televisions (broad comedy has, well, broad appeal), hear on our radio stations (mass-marketed teen pop idols), etc. Only the 20% of products that will appeal to 80% of the population are worth pursuing. In the new world of personalized inventory, vendors can target the long tail – the 80% of the products that will only appeal to small subpopulations. Amazon and eBay are the obvious leaders of this trend – one of the reasons I tend to buy from Amazon rather than supporting my local bookstore is that Amazon has _everything_. The most obscure book I can think of, that probably only a few hundred other people want to read? It’s there, and will show up on my doorstep in a few days, whereas my local bookstore would never have it, and would have to special order it at extra cost, etc. eBay does the same thing. It’s an interesting idea. And one that appeals to me, since my tastes tend not to overlap with the mass market.

Links links links. Yes, I know I try to keep this blog to original content (or at least original to me) (I’ve got several longer pieces I’ve been mulling over that haven’t quite come together yet), but occasionally a set of links comes in that I want to share.

Extreme Democracy Future Salon

I’ll probably attend this tomorrow evening. I’ve been to only a couple of the Future Salons, but it’s a good group, and this looks like a particularly interesting topic, given how much I’ve been ranting about politics this year. I’m excited about seeing Zack Rosen’s presentation on CivicSpace, which I only heard about today, and then noticed that he was going to be at Future Salon tomorrow. He’s working on developing software to enable bottom-up grassroots political networking (he started it for Dean’s campaign, and has continued it with funding from a couple angel investors). Very neat stuff, and along the lines of some of my pipe dreams. Except that he has motivation. And competence.

Lawrence Lessig at SDForum

I really like Lessig’s work, and have read Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace and The Future of Ideas, but not Free Culture yet. So he’s speaking next week. He’s being introduced by Dan Gillmor, the author of We, the Media, a book that intrigued me recently. I’ll probably attend. The entire Distinguished Speaker Series this year looks promising, actually. I’ve been to a couple before, including Paul Saffo, but I always forgot about them. Fortunately, they finally started an announcement list for these talks, so I should be attending more of them.

A march to irrelevance

I really liked this article over on Alternet about how many liberals’ idea of protest is thoroughly antiquated in this new century, invoking a 1960s-era mentality that is pointless in today’s world. Well written and thoughtful. I’ve had similar thoughts – last year during the anti-war protests in San Francisco, I asked my friend who participated what he was trying to accomplish – he said “We have to show people that we’re against the war!” – “By annoying your neighbors who probably agree with you?” “Well, we have to show the whole world!” “Do you think you’re being televised elsewhere?” “Well, it’s important!” I wish I had been more eloquent, as this writer is.

Federalist Paper #10

I think I was reading the social interface design forum at Joel on Software, when somebody invoked this Federalist Paper, in response to how the designer can attempt to prevent cliques from forming. And this paper does a pretty good job of identifying how factions form, and what we can do to try to minimize their influence. It’s interesting how several of their recommendations start to fall apart in the age of mass media. But the insight into human nature is unmistakable. I should really sit down and read the Federalist Papers at some point. And Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. And all sorts of other things. *sigh*

George Lakoff’s class Language of Politics

My hero, George Lakoff, is teaching a class in the Language of Politics this term. danah boyd is taking the class, and hosting a blog for those of us that aren’t Berkeley students. Neat stuff. Two articles I’ve read so far that I particularly liked were one on reinventing the Republican party in a way that would actually appeal to me a lot, and one on reinventing the Democratic party, also in a way that appeals to me. Yay being a swing voter. Or at least a swing personality. I’m looking forward to following along with the class.

The college national championships of ultimate frisbee were televised this year on the College Sports TV network. Unfortunately, that’s not one I get – I think it’s on deep cable someplace, or maybe only satellite. But they kindly have decided to post the video to several of the games online (they are archived down the right side). I’ve watched the first couple this weekend, and it’s actually kind of fun to watch it with a couple different camera angles and expert commentary. The other thing that struck me was how the offense has such a huge advantage at the highest levels. It really is like volleyball in that the side that receives scores the vast majority of the time. Of course, to get to that level requires everybody on the team to have great throws, great cuts, and be in incredible shape. I’ll be there any day now. Yeah. Right.