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Sunday, August 15, 2004 |
Roland's Sunday Smart Trends #19.
Here is my weekly collection of articles that were not commented here -- except if I missed them.
[snip]
The urban maze
Don't feel bad if you often get lost in cities. Network analysis shows their structure is peculiarly difficult to navigate.
Source: Philip Ball, Nature, August 13, 2004
[Smart Mobs]
5:39:47 PM 
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John Battelle on Searchstreams
Great entry on Battelle's Searchblog about the value of recording the journey of finding information on the Web.
That's when I remembered As We May Think, Vannevar Bush's famous essay in The Atlantic. I had read it earlier in my research, and was struck not by the idea of the Memex, which is well understood, but by Bush's explication of the problem - that knowledge and learning has become so complicated, so layered, so inefficient, that it is near impossible for anyone to be a generalist, in the sense Aristotle was. Bush's answer to this problem was the Memex, of course, but what I find interesting is the mechanism by which the Memex is made potent - the mechanism for capturing the traces of a researcher's discovery through the Memex's corpus, and storing those traces as intelligence so the next researcher can learn from them and build upon them.
Link
(thanks, Mark!)
9:28:19 AM
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 Dvorak's list of the ten most important software products of all time. My list would be different. Think C would be on the list, as would be Manila and MORE. I might have included Pointcast, it was a real eye-opener. Don't forget MacWrite and MacPaint. Director. PowerPoint and FileMaker. Notepad and Teachtext. ";->" [Scripting News]
Hmm. I don't really need to work on another top ten list, but this is an interesting domain. I think I might have to think about whether to think about thinking about what I think about this.
9:27:01 AM
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BSA Weasel == "Beagle Boys"!.
The Business Software Alliance (BSA) has announced an "anti-piracy" site, with a kids' mascot ferret, and a contest to call it a name.
The BSA weasel creature reminded me of something I'd seen before. Something shady, disreputable, criminal. Finally, I remembered! The BSA weasel looks like he's a member of a criminal gang in Walt Disney Comics, the "Beagle Boys":
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| BSA Weasel |
Beagle Boys |
Look at the family resemblance. Same shirt. Same pants (gang colors?). Same squinty, hooded, eyes. Same toothy smirk. He's even wearing something on his chest, which, making allowances for updating to the modern age, might be a Beagle Boys identification patch (more evidence of gang affiliation!).
Traditionally, the Beagle Boys were after Scrooge McDuck's Money Bin. They must be diversifying. There's certainly a big money bin around the Business Software Alliance, one to rival Scrooge McDuck. So the gang has obviously gotten one of their younger members to convince the BSA executives to take him into the organization (using his weasel-skills - thus explaining what would otherwise be evident stupidity in having such a mascot). While everyone is distracted at the official contest ceremony, the rest of the gang will attempt to pull a heist. Classic plot.
It all fits ....
[Credit: Beagle Boys image from Kit's Silver Age Comic Books ]
[Infothought]
Earlier coverage here at A blog doesn't need a clever name. I tried to find my own blogging about an earlier, Department of Commerce (I think) turtle mascot for safe surfing, but failed to find anything. Anybody know what I'm talking about?
9:24:54 AM
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Clay Shirky: The Possibility of Spectrum as a Public Good. I find your faith in technology disturbing. (e.g. Spread-spectrum does not "allow data transfer rates to be much higher than the carrying capacity of frequency considered as a virtual wire"; it actually does just the opposite, which is why people are switching to non-spread-spectrum technologies like OFDM as fast as they can.) [Hack the Planet]
9:13:18 AM
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