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Sam Harrelson on March 8, 2008

Dunbar’s number has been popularized as the supposed cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships: the kind of relationships that go with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person.[1] Proponents assert that group sizes larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced policies and regulations to maintain a stable cohesion.

Dunbar’s number was first proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who theorized that “this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size … the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.” On the periphery, the number 150 also includes past colleagues such as high school friends with whom a person would want to reacquaint themselves if they met again.[2]

Dunbar’s number – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Light Cone RSS

Sam Harrelson on March 8, 2008

Light Cone RSS

“From the moment of my birth, light [that I could have influenced] has been expanding around the Earth and light [which could influence me, from an increasing distance of origin] reaching it – this ever-growing sphere of potential causality is my light cone. Today… My light cone contains 46 stars. HR4523 will be reached in in 4 weeks.

(Data taken from the utterly excellent An Atlas of the Universe, which has maps from the solar system out to the the Local Group and beyond. There’s a lovely 3d map of stars within 50 light years, the data from which is used here. If you have data for beyond 50 light years, please let me know and I’ll add it – until then it’ll only work for people born after 1954.)”

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Sam Harrelson on March 8, 2008

having complete deja vu. i wonder, if lost is correct, and we are all time shifting back and forth in search of “constants” that will keep us anchored in one time frame or another.

given that our small human brain has no real conception of the grand scale of time/space and the other three dimensions, it’s possible that we’ve got this whole timeline thing wrong.

i hope so.

Sam Harrelson on March 8, 2008

“This is from Kim Stanley Robinson’s short story Mercurial, which isn’t really about the city at all although it plays a large part. It’s a detective story about an art collector on Mercury. With this city, resistance to the motive force is used to generate large amounts of electricity. The city slides round the entire planet, slowly, again and again. They sell the electricity to other planets.”

Slide 4 of 50 (Sci-fi I like, Fictional Futures, Goldsmiths)

Masochuticon

Sam Harrelson on March 8, 2008

Masochuticon

“I’m interested in the leftover parts of finished works—the trimmings, truncations and remainders. Interested in collecting them. Those more so than the marginalia, working drawings or other preparatory material.”

Dell Looks to the Clouds

Sam Harrelson on March 8, 2008

I live my online life in the cloud, so it’s great to see a major hardware manufacturer start to heavily ponder the shifting trade winds away from desktop based applications towards web based apps…

More Conversations: Dell Launches Cloud Computing Blog – Direct2Dell – The official Dell blog: “Starting today, members from our Data Center Solutions (DCS) team will support a group blog called In the Clouds. It will focus on cloud computing and the backend server, storage and architecture required to make it work. If you’re not familiar with the concept of cloud computing, think using web-based e-mail from Yahoo, Google or AOL (see link for their slick integration with Silverlight), or uploading videos to YouTube, pictures to Flickr, or microblogging with Twitter. When you do those kinds of things you aren’t storing them on your local device.. you’re storing them ‘in the clouds,’ or to a remote location in the Internet.

So, why start with Cloud Computing? The short answer is there’s a lot happening in this space right now. Take a look at what Adobe’s doing with their AIR product (go Twhirl!) that they recently brought to market. Google continues to surge forward with their Google document apps (Spreadsheet Forms and Google Calendar synch are two recent enhancements that rock), and this week at MIX08, Microsoft is rolling out some cool stuff with Silverlight 2.0 and Internet Explorer 8.

What this all means is that we’re at the beginning stages of a shift from the model of the past where applications and all the content created for them were stored locally. This shift has the potential to increase the types of Internet-connected devices we use to consume and create content (check out the good discussion Scoble has going about the battle for web-based content on mobile phones).”

Are you in the cloud or are you sticking with your desktop?

Light Cone RSS

Sam Harrelson on March 8, 2008

http://interconnected.org/home/more/lightcone/

“From the moment of my birth, light [that I could have influenced] has been expanding around the Earth and light [which could influence me, from an increasing distance of origin] reaching it — this ever-growing sphere of potential causality is my light cone. Today… My light cone contains 46 stars. HR4523 will be reached in in 4 weeks.

(Data taken from the utterly excellent An Atlas of the Universe, which has maps from the solar system out to the the Local Group and beyond. There’s a lovely 3d map of stars within 50 light years, the data from which is used here. If you have data for beyond 50 light years, please let me know and I’ll add it — until then it’ll only work for people born after 1954.)”

Untitled

Sam Harrelson on March 8, 2008

“This is from Kim Stanley Robinson’s short story Mercurial, which isn’t really about the city at all although it plays a large part. It’s a detective story about an art collector on Mercury. With this city, resistance to the motive force is used to generate large amounts of electricity. The city slides round the entire planet, slowly, again and again. They sell the electricity to other planets.”

Slide 4 of 50 (Sci-fi I like, Fictional Futures, Goldsmiths)

Masochuticon

Sam Harrelson on March 8, 2008

http://masochuticon.com/

“I’m interested in the leftover parts of finished works—the trimmings, truncations and remainders. Interested in collecting them. Those more so than the marginalia, working drawings or other preparatory material.”