Nikon has put together an amazing interactive site that puts the world in perspective, literally. This is one site you must check out.
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Jesse Stay, an online friend of mine, has weighed in on the controversy surrounding the release of copyright material owned by the LDS church by Wikileaks. He says,
As an author, and Social Media developer, and Mormon, I thought I’d pipe in on what I think of the WikiLeaks issues going on. It’s as simple as if J.K. Rowling were to have her content posted and shared on WikiLeaks - she’d be doing the same thing! This is a matter of copyright, not secrecy.
I encourage you to read his full blog post. Excellent.
Sphere: Related ContentThe chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder plans to raise $9 million to create an endowed chair for a professor of conservative thought. But some on the liberal campus say his quest for intellectual diversity is too radical.
Sphere: Related ContentFor those of you who follow my Shelfari list, you will know I have been engrossed in a book by Jonah Goldberg titled Liberal Fascism. This is one of the best political books I have read in years and a book I recommend to everyone–especially my liberal/progressive friends. The book helps to create a genealogical record of modern progressivism which to me was a very surprising history. I think many conservatives and progressives lack a good understanding of the historical underpinnings of their beliefs.
I have been very surprised by the visceral reaction this book evokes, especially amongst my friends on the left. Surely, the Hitler mustache superimposed over the smiley face is designed to grab attention and sell more books. I should make clear, that this book does not attempt to link modern progressives with Nazism or Hitler. Jonah goes out of his way, as the author, to make sure it is clear that is not his intention. His goal is to set the record straight about where fascism lies on the political spectrum. It was and is a phenomenon of the left not the right as is so commonly believed.
Here is the author Jonah Goldberg talking about it.
Because of the reaction to the book, I am adding another video clip where Jonah is talking to Will Wilkinson of the Cato Institute about the book and the reaction to it. You can see it here:
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/8244
Sphere: Related ContentWell, here you are at your college graduation. And I know what you’re thinking: “Gimme the sheepskin and get me outta here!” But not so fast. First you have to listen to a commencement speech.
Don’t moan. I’m not going to “pass the wisdom of one generation down to the next.” I’m a member of the 1960s generation. We didn’t have any wisdom.
From The Guardian online:
Jonathan Zittrain, the amiable but intimidatingly brainy 38-year-old professor of “cyberlaw” at both Oxford and Harvard universities, thinks we shouldn’t forget the Hush-A-Phone story: it shows that unimaginable future innovations depend on our present-day technologies being “generative”, or open to being fiddled with. (A personal computer is generative: it can be programmed to do things the manufacturer could never have predicted. A coffee-maker is not.)
Sphere: Related ContentBut things are looking grim, Zittrain argues in his new book, The Future Of The internet And How To Stop It. While we rightly fret about censorship of the web, a cause with which Zittrain has been closely involved, we’re missing another serious problem, beneath our noses. To put it briefly: those gadgets you love so much — your iPod, your iPhone, your BlackBerry, your PlayStation, your Sky+ box — may be killing the internet.
Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, has posted on what he calls the “social surplus” or the time we gain by participating in the culture versus just sitting back and watching it pass by pursuing activities like watching TV.
Clay specifically cites TV, and singles outs sitcoms, as a sort of glue holding society together as we transitioned from the Industrial Revolution to post WWII society with higher GDP per capita, better life expectancy and more free time. Now imagine if all that time spent watching TV could be put to use and benefit of society–the social surplus.
Shirkey’s back of the napkin stats are compelling
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus.
That is huge. Think of it another way,
this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
Time to turn off the TV and start participating…
Sphere: Related ContentCalifornia Republican John Campbell yesterday introduced in the House his “Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is Act,” which would amend the tax code to allow individuals to make voluntary donations to the federal government above their normal tax liability. The bill would place a new line on IRS tax forms to make this easy.
Mr. Campbell says he has heard the “cries” of those wealthy Americans – Mrs. Clinton, Warren Buffett, Barbra Streisand – who reject the lower tax rates passed in 2001 and 2003 and complain that they and their fellow rich don’t pay enough. “It’s a great injustice that citizens wishing to fulfill their dream of paying more taxes cannot simply check a box on their 1040 form to make a donation,” he says. His bill would give liberals a chance to salve their consciences without having to raise taxes on millions of Americans who already feel overtaxed as it is.
Still, don’t expect many to take Mr. Campbell up on his offer. The Treasury already accepts voluntary donations to decrease the nation’s debt; last year it received all of $2.6 million. Apparently even most liberals would rather keep their money, or bequeath their estates to charity rather than to the IRS.
Sphere: Related ContentAmazing video of the Caminito del Rey in Spain. More info on the pathway can be found at Wikipedia.
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