Happy Holidays from a Point of Pale Light

One of my favorite pages on Wikipedia (and yes, our planet is going to get real interesting in a few hundred thousand years):

Timeline of the far future – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “Due to its northward movement along the San Andreas Fault, the Californian coast begins to be subducted into the Aleutian Trench. Africa will have collided with Eurasia, closing the Mediterranean Basin and creating a mountain range similar to the Himalayas.”

My 7th grade students frequently ask me how humanity will do with the sun going supernova and all in about 5 billion years. I remind them we’ve got bigger problems much much sooner than that (climate change, rising sea levels, gamma ray bursts, meteorite strikes etc).

Carl Sagan was, as usual, spot on about our pale blue dot. So let’s do the best we can with the time/space we have, while we can.

via Kottke.org

Learning And the Fragility of the Web

Kevin Marks has a great post connecting the notion of necessary complexity with the state of the web and our willingness to throw all of our content (pics, music, text etc) into the hands of silos and walled garden social media networks:

Epeus’ epigone: The Antifragility of the Web: “If youā€™ve read Nasim Talebā€™s Antifragile, you know what comes next. By shielding people from the complexities of the web, by removing the fragility of links, weā€™re actually making things worse. Weā€™re creating a fragility debt. Suddenly, something changes – money runs out, a pivot is declared, an aquihire happens, and the pent-up fragility is resolved in a Black Swan moment.”

The latest Instagram debacle over who owns user generated pictures points to a rising tide of web users who want more than just partial ownership of what they create simply for the sake of sharing. We’ve had another system in place for over a decade now with blogs and feeds.

Of course, it’s much easier to slap a filter on a photo and upload it to Instagram or Facebook and reap the benefits of the likes and comments received rather than uploading an image to a hosted blog and going through the necessary hoops of making sure your friends are subscribed etc.

However, this complexity begets savvy users and people who understand the fragility of the web and its main currency (the link) and why a web that is open and not centralized around one corporation is worth protecting

It’s one reason that, as a teacher, I’m big on portfolios (blogs) written and curated by each student and interlinking with other student blogs. In some small way, I hope this learning process helps young people who are setting the stage for the next iteration of the social web to appreciate what it means to have an individual name space and participate in the democracy of the commons rather than just the fiefdom of Facebook.

I’m picking up Taleb’s Antifragile tomorrow (I’m back to reading dead tree editions of books for philosophical reasons but that’s for another post).

Congress Drops Requirement to Obtain Warrant to Monitor Email

Disturbing that our notion of electronic presence is so different than our notion of physical presence (the government can’t go through your mailbox on your lawn, but going through your mailbox in a Google server is no problem) and that our law surrounding electronic communications are based on 1986 paradigms:

Congress, at Last Minute, Drops Requirement to Obtain Warrant to Monitor Email | Hacker News: Currently, the government can collect emails and other cloud data without a warrant as long as the content has been stored on a third-party server for 180 days or more. Federal agents need only demonstrate that they have ā€œreasonable grounds to believeā€ the information would be useful in an investigation.

Collards for Christmas

collards

Nom nom nomā€¦

Collard Greens, How To Cook Collard Greens, Mess O’ Greens, History and Recipe of Collard Greens: “Collard greens became the official vegetable of South Carolina when Governor Nikki Haley signed Senate Bill No. 823 (S823) into Law on June 2, 2011.”

One of my favorite parts of being from SC is our love of collard greens. Sure, there are better tasting vegetables out there, but nothing says history like a good plate of collards.

I’ll be cooking some up for Christmas dinner tomorrow.

Personal Drones like Personal Computers

Personal Drone

The Drones Are Coming – Business Insider: “For example, if you’re a surfer who wants footage of yourself tearing up the waves, you would press a button on your ‘follow-me box’ and the droid would fly out to you, position itself above you, and start shooting. Once the battery gets low, the droid would detect that and land itself on the beach.”

I’m typically very optimistic about most developing technologies that have the potential to augment our lives and even improve humanity. Google Glass seems to freak out lots of people, but I think it’s a stunning and potentially revolutionary technology (especially for education and classrooms).

However, the concept of wearable computing differs greatly in my mind from the rapidly advancing tech and industries around drones. Whether for military and law enforcement uses or news and information gathering to what’s described in the above article with “personal drones,” there’s a lot to worry about from an ethical point of view.

True, every new or developing technology has its positive and negative ethical implications for greater society (or societies). However, drones are one of those technologies that I’m not sure has a positive surplus over the obvious negatives.

I have no doubts we’ll have the ability to have personal drones in the future, as much as we now have personal tracking devices we carry literally everywhere (aka smart phones). I’m sure they’ll offer many benefits not yet though of. Yet, where’s the line between helpful and dangerous?

What Google Reader Might Have Been

I miss reading my friends and people I learned from daily via RSS in (the old) Google Reader. Here’s an amazing walkthrough of what could have been…

Google’s Lost Social Network: “Pre-Twitter, it was the essential aggregation tool for news and information junkies. But Reader had also became a social network in its own right. Four years on, with Google+ ascendant, these same social functions were marked for elimination. And so, its users fretted, was their beloved Google Reader.”

Innocence lost, indeed.

But where do we go?

Fever?