I'm a planner, and a website creator, so what could be nicer than discovering an adorable eco-friendly burial option with a sweet website? I especially love the tiny 'eep' sound when you click on the scroll pointers, and the text is German-sci-fi funny.
Uono Cocoon"Our coffin manufacture provides individuality for idealists...Our company convinces its customers with pure shapes and timeless elegance."
Just what I was looking for in an eternal resting place -- a coffin that tells the other cemetery citizens I am an individual AND an idealist as I gracefully biodegrade!
Labels: coffin design, coffins, eco burial, eco-friendly
“We underestimated the deep emotional bond” they had with the original packaging, he [Neil Campbell, president at Tropicana North America in Chicago] added. “Those consumers are very important to us, so we responded.”
Among those who underestimated that bond was Mr. Campbell himself. In an interview last month to discuss the new packaging, he said, “The straw and orange have been there for a long time, but people have not necessarily had a huge connection to them.”
Anytime your packaging is compared to generic brands, you're doing something wrong.
I'm not really sure why I Googled "fermented foods," but it probably had something to do with the delirium that set in after I was woken up by the cat at 4am. Maybe I was thinking about pickling him. Anyhow, one of the first search results I clicked on was
this well-organized page on Wikipedia , not surprisingly listing over 80 of the top fermented foods in the world.
For those of you who slept through high-school biology class, "fermentation" is nothing more than the process of preserving or producing food through the action of microorganisms. While most of us are probably familiar with fermented fruits and grains being fermented to produce alcoholic drinks, the action of microorganisms to produce foods isn't something we tend to think about too much...at least not until we're forced to throw out some particularly stinky mystery food left to rot in the back of the refrigerator.
And let's face it: fermentation is really just rot. When it turns out well -- friendly bacteria multiplying and transmorgrafying simple foods in sterile conditions-- fermentation can produce some tasty stuff. When it goes wrong it can be vomit inducing.
Yum, yum!
The one thing about fermented foods is that they're not too subtle in the taste and smell department, especially when we're talking about fermented meats and fish. As a result, many fermented foods are a somewhat "acquired taste" for adults not brought up on the stuff. Because these tastes are acquired at an early age, many people (me included!) tend to find fermented foods we weren't exposed to as children to be pretty dang disgusting. But while Americans might gag at the thought of eating
fermented shark or
stinky tofu, there are plenty of red-blooded American's who love nothing more than to slather
rotten cabbage on their ballpark hotdog or shake a couple of healthy dollops of
fermented anchovies and spices into their Bloody Marys at Sunday brunch. It's all just a matter of taste. I guess. Or insanity.
Even so, there are some tastes out there so extreme that even people who claim to like them have to admit that holding their noses to get down the first few bites (or slugging back shots to wash it down) is essential to the...errr....enjoyment of these delicacies. So, without any further ado, here are some of the scariest fermented foods in the world:
1.
Hákarl : When something makes
Anthony Bourdain declare it to be "the single worst, most disgusting and terrible tasting thing" he's ever eaten and causes
Gordon Ramsay to puke, you know it has to be a bit on the pungent side. And this Icelandic dish has got "pungent" down to an evil science.
First, Icelanders catch a basking shark, chop off its head, and throw away its guts. Do they dig in right away? Not if they don't want to die: this fish is loaded down with nifty chemicals such as uric acid (yeah, as in urine) and trimethlamine oxide, the chemical that breaks down to make up the main ingredient in rotten fish odor.
After the shark is prepped, they dig a hole in the sand and drop it in. Yup, that's right: they bury the dang thing in a shallow grave! Then they place stones on top so that the juices that come out as it rots get pressed out. How thoughtful.
Then they leave the shark. For months...sometimes up to 3 months. Once it's nice and rip they exhume it, cut it into strips, and hang it up to dry for a few more months. Basically the idea to is create the shark equivalent of the
Crypt Keeper.
Then they eat it. But not until they scrape off the brown crust that develops and cut it into
tiny cubes served on toothpicks.
2.
Rakfisk: Not to be outdone by the Icelanders, the Norwegians have developed their own version of rotten fish appetizer called Rakfisk. Unlike the Icelanders, the Norwegians have the good sense to serve it wrapped up in flatbread with sour cream, onions, and potatoes to kill the taste.
Want to make your own Rakfisk? Just go catch yourself some trout or char, throw away the guts, scrub out the blood, dunk 'em in vinegar, and throw them in a bucket with some salt for a few months, and weight them down so the juices run out. Eat.
By the way, according to Wikipedia, Norwegians eat 5,000 tons of this stuff every year.
3.
Igunaq: Not so big on fish? Well if you find yourself hanging out with the Inuit then you're in luck! Rather than stuffing sharks in the ground, these folks like to cut up a bunch of
big juicy walrus steaks and then bury them in the ground to improve their flavor! How long does a walrus sirloin need to nap beneath the soil before it's considered prime Igunaq? Not a paltry 3 months like those wussy Norseman! No-sir-ree! To make good Igunaq you've gotta leave it long enough so that it can decompose and ferment and then freeze again...usually a full year.
4.
Shiokara: Now the Japanese have more than their fair share of rotten foodstuffs, but as far as I'm concerned Shiokara is right up there at the top of Foods That Make Sean Want To Vomit Just From
Their Pictures. The description's pretty nasty, too. Heck, even the Japanese consider this stuff to be "chimi" or one of the "rare tastes" that take time to acquire.
Basically the method's the same as other fermented fish: salt it, bury it (in a container), wait for it to rot, and enjoy. But rather than be limited to pedestrian fare like shark and trout, the Japanese have branched out into other sea critters suitable for rotting including:
- cuttlefish (ika no shiokara)
- squid (hotaruika no shiokara)
- sea urchin (uni no shiokara)
- fiddler crab (ganzuke)
- and even sea cucumber (konowata)
Apparently it tastes like anchovies. Yeah. Right.
5.
Stinkheads: Oh, but let's head back up north again for some new rotten fish flavors. Thought that Hákarl and Rakfisk sounded gross? Well at least their names made them sound kind of cool, like some obscure Norwegian DeathMetal band your little brother discovered at summer camp last year. But sinkheads? STINKHEADS? There ain' no gettin' around the fact that they are exactly what they sound like: salmon heads (oh, and guts, too!) placed in barrels, covered in burlap, and left to rot for a week. It's a
traditional food of the Yupik in Alaska. Interestingly enough, the Yupik who had switched to more modern methods of fish rotting using plastic buckets are now being encouraged to go back to barrels because fish rotting in plastic is more likely to generate botulism. Imagine that.
6.
Chicha: If wine and beer seem like wussy drinks to you because they're produced under sterile conditions (yuk!), why not try some
Chicha? A traditional fermented beverage of the Amazon, Chicha is traditionally prepared by women who chew up cassava root (sometimes with plantain mixed in) until its nice and pulpy and then spit the resulting juice into a communal bowl. Once the bowl collected sufficient quantities of cassava/banana- spit it's set aside for a few hours to allow wild yeasts to ferment the brew. Once it's acquired a blue-white opaque color, it's time to chug!
Oh, and be warned: Chicha is traditionally served to arriving guests in Amazonian homes. If you're visiting, maybe it'd be a good idea to tell your hosts that you need to lie down as soon as you arrive.
7.
Stinky Tofu: You've gotta admire a food that's honest about its shortcomings right up front. A popular snack and main-course ingredient in East and Southeast Asia, Stinky Tofu is just what it says: tofu that stinks (apparently like "rotten garbage or manure," according to Wikipedia). Aficionados claim that the stinkier it is, the
better it tastes.
Stinky Tofu can be found mainly in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan where it considered the "unofficial snack food" and is served by gazillions of stinky street vendors of served up in restaurants with names like (I'm not kidding) "Dai's House of Unique Stink."
I think I might have lived there in college.
8.
Kombucha : I actually first heard of this stuff when I saw it referenced by one of my Facebook friends (and former co-worker). She made some comment in her status about her Kombucha being finally ready to drink and not having heard of it before I Googled the word to find out what she was talking about. I kind wish I hadn't.
What is Kombucha? Well, while the ever-so-lyrical Chinese refer to it as "Immortal Health Elixir," (you gotta wonder about something with that kind of tag line attached to it), the ever-pragmatic Russians call it what it is: чайный гриб or "tea mushroom."
Yeah, "tea mushroom." It turns out that Kombucha is sweetened tea that been fermented with a solid mat of microoganisms called a "kombucha colony." Consisting of acetic acid bacteria, yeast, and a whole mess of other bacteria with unpronounceable names, the "kombucha colony" forms
a large mat (that "looks somewhat like a pancake" according to Wikipedia) on top of the tea. Apparently you don't eat the pancake along with the tea.
Why do people drink this stuff? Well one reason might be because the homemade stuff gives you a buzz: homegrown mushroom tea can contain up to 1.5% alcohol...not enough to knock you out, but probably enough to take the edge off your morning if you have a few cups. The other (and more publicized) reason is that like most stuff that tastes like crap it's supposed to be good for you. Kombucha contain glucaric acid, a chemical that's supposed to detox your liver and prevent cancer.
If you want to make your own at home,
this wikiHOW article provides step-by-step directions.
9.
Tibicos: Those of you with a yen for rotting your own food at home (and an aversion to dairy products or other non-gray-and-glistening sources of probiotics) might also want to try out Tibicos, a
delightful gelatinous bacteria culture also known as "water kefir," "sugar kefir," "Japanese water crystals," or "California Bees" (though the latter sounds like something you'd find on UrbanDictionary.com).
Consisting of sugar, yeast, and a bunch of nasty-sounding bacteria, Tibicos forms grey blobs when cultured and a gives off delightful byproducts such as lactic acid, ethanol, and carbon dioxide gas. As a result of the CO2, Tibicos is often bubby and can be drunk like a bacteria-laden soda. Yum!
10.
Natto: If you really want to start your morning off right, grab yourself a cuppa Kombucha and cozy up to a plate of Natto, a popular Japanese breakfast of fermented soybeans served over rice.
Supposedly Natto was invented when soldiers cooking soybeans for their horses were attacked and packed their beans into straw bags so they could get out to the battle. A few days later (must have been a long battle!) the soldiers unpacked the bags and discovered that while the beans had become kinda stinky they tasted pretty good. They offered some to their boss Minamoto no Yoshiie, he liked it, and a new tradition was born!
They must have been brave soldiers: apparently natto smells like ammonia and produces "
spiderweb-like strings" when you pick it up with your chopsticks. While descriptions vary, it apparently has a lot in common with other regional delicacies of the world such as Australia's Vegemite and French Blue Cheese.
I think I'll stick to cornflakes.
Believe it or not, some of the most popular toys for 2009 look like they're going to be brainwave powered.
Uncle Milton's Toys (kind of a creepy name for a toy company, IMHO) just unveiled
The Force Trainer, a gizmo that allows you to control a ball in a tube using nothing but brainpower. Apparently the gadget uses a simple EEG (read from a band that you place around your head) to control the rising and falling of a ball on a column of air generated from a fan. The trick (according to
this article) apparently is to "think of nothing." Perfect training for American kids, I guess.
The gadget is to be priced around $100.
It's not the first of its kind, however. Here are some of its predecessors (and contemporaries):
Hitachi Model Train Brain-Powered ControllerBiofeedback GamesEmotiv Systems EmotivEPOCOCZ Neural Impulse Acutator (NIA)NeuroSky MindFlex
Ouch! Some
really bad product names.
Wacky
sand fountain in Saudi Arabia.
Possible explanation.
The
hilarious story of Prawo Jazdy, Ireland's worst (and most notorious) driver.
The weird tale of the
polar twins.
Wahooo!
Wrist watch phone a'comin'! iPhone hides in shame (
and it should).
9 Real-Life Mad Scientists.
Oh, and
8 Humiliating Ads Starring Oscar Nominees.
Top 10 Arguments That Can't Be Won. The definitive list.
This is how it could end.
Yes, I'm old. I remember watching The Hardy Boys on television.
Now you can, too.
Everyone currently in Congress or working on Wall Street should be required to wear
these.
Speaking of which... See
here, too.
Woah! Pictures of
single atom quantum dots.
How trends move through
culture networks.
OMG! I would SO love to work on this:
Radio Shack up for review!
OK. Enough. Now
go waste the rest of your day.
(note: I posted this to my Facebook notes last night, but I thought I'd share it here, too.)
The Quantum Imperative
January 21-February 19 , 2009
Why should we do good?
Answers to this question can be found in faith, in the belief of a divine purpose and the need to fulfill that purpose. But that doesn’t work for everyone. I believe in that divine purpose and I believe in God. I have faith. But I’m just me. Why should anyone act ethically? Why should we all (as our new President said at his inauguration) have hope and work for the betterment of all when it seems like our own individual actions can have so little (or even no) effect? Why do good?
Perhaps the answer has nothing to do with faith and everything to do with the physical nature of reality itself and the way that we’ve come to understand the nature of reality and the universe. Maybe the universe itself wants us to do good?
Let’s start with quantum theory. One of the cornerstones of this theory is that the act of observing shapes the universe we inhabit, collapsing the cloud of possibilities that existed before the observation to resolve into what we see. The observer effects the outcome through the act of observation. Actions effect reality.
Next let’s look at chaos theory and the idea of how small changes in a system can ultimately have very large (and fundamentally unknowable) effects. This is commonly referred to as “The Butterfly Effect,” an idea that a butterfly flapping its wings somewhere in the world can lead to a chain of events that culminates in a hurricane somewhere else in the world. And while this sounds like a wacky idea, I think that humans have always had an intuitive grasp of this idea as evidenced by the ancient proverb that leads from a lost horseshoe nail to defeat of an empire. Small changes to a system can lead to enormous changes, though predicting the exact outcome may be impossible due to the inherent chaos in the system.
Finally, let’s look at the nature of information. Science today asserts that information cannot be destroyed. Stephen Hawking has spoken at length about this idea in his theories about how black holes work, but the basic idea is that information that is created never can completely go away. It can be made virtually undetectable through entropy, but information created in the universe can never be truly erased.
So we have a few basic principles of physical reality: 1) decisions shape reality; 2)small changes can lead to massive changes in the universe; and 3)information that is created cannot be destroyed. Taken together, these principles lead to what I call The Quantum Imperative: it is always in our own best interest to do good in the world.
Why? Because if we understand that our very existence can shape reality (even in a very small way), if we understand that small changes can lead to massive changes, and if we understand that information we create can never truly disappear, then it stands to reason that everything we do has an effect on the world in real and very permanent ways. That effect might be extraordinarily small, but it does exist. And these effects add up.
OK. So if this is all true, then it seems to me that we can either effect positive change in the world or negative change through our actions. And if we’re affected by the universe (just as we can affect it), then adding positive effects to the system not only effects the system as a whole but also improves our own individual lives as elements of that system. The same holds for negative effects, too: acting in a way that does not take into account the system as a whole (acting wholly out of self interest or acting negatively on the system) effects the system we inhabit negatively and therefore effects ourselves negatively. Therefore it is always in our own best interest to do good in the world.
The moral philosophies that have shaped our world seem to echo these principles. Karma can be explained this way (what goes around comes around). Kant’s Categorical Imperative can be explained this way. The teachings of Jesus can be seen this way. Jung’s Collective Unconscious can be explained through this realization. The Golden Rule makes even more sense in this context. Any moral philosophy (religious or otherwise) that exhorts us to have a positive effect on the world can be explained (and bolstered) by the understanding that everything we do effects everything else.
Interestingly enough (and maybe this is a great example of synchronicity), the morning after the inauguration of President Obama I came across a quote from Martin Luther King that does a much better job than I of summing up this argument:
“Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.
The most stunning part of all of this for me has been the realization that they physical nature of reality seems to be constructed in a way that affirms the idea that doing good matters. To me that reaffirmed my faith, but even if you have no belief in a higher power, it seems to me that if nothing else such a realization is a sure cure for the nihilism that seems to plague postmodern culture. What we do isn’t ultimately meaningless. What we do matters.
The other part of all of this for me is a new understanding of The Power of the Small. Because if small actions we take have the capability of affecting the system in unexpectedly large ways, then it’s always worth (using a Pascal’s Wager sort of reasoning) doing good even if what we do seems small and ultimately useless (or futile). If everything we do has an effect on our reality and what we create through our actions cannot ever be destroyed and if we believe that small actions can, through chaotic action, lead to large changes then it stands to reason that when faced with the choice of taking a small action for good or taking an action that adds to the negative in the system (which may be the same as taking no action at all)-- and knowing that everything we do ultimately effects our own reality-- erring on the side of good is the surest bet. Negative actions are more likely to have negative effects, even if we have no way of knowing the ultimate effects on the system as a whole.
So small actions are worthwhile actions. They’re also the way to move towards larger change. As any good project manager will tell you, the best way to make sure a large task gets accomplished is to break it down into actionable units that can be completed in a reasonable amount of time. While this understanding is something that so many understand when it comes to completing tasks, it seems like something that people forget when doing good. If a good action doesn’t have an immediate (or somewhat immediate effect), what we risk is losing faith that our actions can have an effect. The feeling that what you do has no affect is what we all call “despair.” Knowing that one’s actions always have an effect on the universe means an end to despair.
When freed from despair, one of the major barriers to doing good is gone. No longer do we have to feel that our efforts are without effect or that they are wasted. Giving a homeless man a sandwich one day and having him forget and ask you for money for food the next day (as if he doesn’t know you) no longer has to make you feel that you’ve wasted your efforts. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t remember your act of kindness: the kindness that you extended the day before has added (in an unknowable but positive way) to the overall good in the universe. Just because you can’t change his universe doesn’t mean that your action had no meaning. It’s bigger than that. And it does. And your life is better, even if in an infinitesimally small way.
I understand that there are probably an endless number of counter-arguments to what I’ve described here, not the least of which is “what is good?” I don’t dismiss that argument, because it’s a valid one (and the subject for much more thought). However, even if “good” is ultimately undefinable in an ontological sense, we all know what it is. Good makes the world better, if only for a moment. Yes, there are definitely more (and ultimately unknowable) effects of the actions that we define as “doing good,” but there’s no denying that improving someone else’s life (if only for a second) is always and undeniably a “good.” Yes, it may have unintended consequences, but they are beyond our control and therefore not our concern. But at that moment-- the moment that we connect with another human being and help them rise up out of despair and hopelessness and turmoil-- is within our control and does improve our lives as well.
The universe is just wired that way.
It’s a false dichotomy to assume that you either have to act in your own self interest or for the greater good. Acting for the greater good is acting in your own self interest.
The Russians have a word for people who invent whimsical things that may or not have any practical value: "Kulibins." The word comes from the name of an 18th Century Russian engineer named Ivan Kulibin who created all sorts of wacky stuff but unfortunately died penniless and in obscurity.
Want an example of a real "Kulibin?" Check out
this story about
Mikhail Puchkov, a guy who invented a submarine in his backyard during the Soviet era and has now finally been able to register it as a real boat. Talk about perseverance!
As a relative newcomer to Facebook, I'm amazed at how quickly people from my past have appeared back on my radar, with spouses and kids and daily lives shared in pictures and video. It's really incredible how well the service has their search algorithms tuned to the different networks each user belongs to–schools, employers, family, geography; it's like a mainline fix of "Where Are They Now" direct to the cerebral cortex.
However, as with any other remotely-hosted online service, there are caveats and gotchas, which was one of the reasons I resisted joining for so long. This past week they quietly changed their
Terms of Service policy to claim ownership of everything on the site, from users' five-word status updates to uploaded videos. As one might expect,
this did not go over very well with the user base.
You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.
What that means, in a nutshell, is that the picture of your puppy you posted two months ago could be used in a commercial for Facebook
or resold to
anyone they choose. And, if you've logged into your account since February 4th, according to the language in their TOS, you've accepted these terms, even if you never read them.
As a longtime web citizen and onetime hosting provider, I learned early on only to upload things I don't mind sharing with the world–because once it's on the web, it's in the public domain forever. It's pretty common knowledge that
employers use Google, MySpace, and Facebook to vet their prospective employees, so I figure people have probably gotten a little smarter about sharing incriminating pictures these days (
or maybe not). I'd also guess that most people post pictures and video to the web with little or no regard to how it could be reused by someone else, and even if it was, chances are, they wouldn't care.
But that's not my point here. What's most disturbing about this story is the way it was handled by the company itself. These days, it's pretty standard boilerplate in any online TOC to say something like
By using or accessing _____, you agree that you have read, understand and are bound by these Terms of Use ("Terms"). We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change or delete portions of these Terms at any time without further notice. Your continued use of _____ Service after any such changes constitutes your acceptance of the new Terms.
Do you like that Catch-22? In order to read the new terms, you have to log into the service. Simply logging into the service means you've agreed to whatever they decided to say without actually having read it. This is the same sneaky behavior credit card issuers have recently gotten into hot water for (suddenly hiking interest rates, confusing rate structures), which has
prompted Congress to step in and add legislation to curb abuses in that industry. While it's doubtful the government will do anything to outlaw sudden changes in TOS agreements, it's time our industry started operating more transparently and stopped claiming ownership over everything. Many brilliant minds have considered this problem, and
Creative Commons has developed an excellent framework for sharing, attribution, and compensation of user-created content–the framework of which is already baked into photo sharing sites like Flickr. Now is the time for online services to do the right thing and show more respect to their user communities.
It's difficult terrain to navigate and we're going to make some missteps, but as the leading service for sharing information we take these issues and our responsibility to help resolve them very seriously.
So, there you have it. In the meantime, be careful what you share with the internets.
Labels: attribution, legalese, sharing, TOS
Wow.
Chris Jordan's prints speak for themselves. What a way to make tangible the enormous numbers we all take for granted.
Here's a great example: a zoom into a print depicting the amount of energy wasted every minute in the US due to inefficient residential electricity usage.
My friend Wolfgang Allen sent me an interesting email this morning:
Have you noticed that "set top box" is a doubly obsolete phrase?
Whenever people in the media speak of the digital t.v. converters (that will soon prevent millions of old people from ever watching t.v. again) they call them "set top boxes". For one thing there t.v. "sets" went out in the 50's. most has been integrated since then. Unless you consider a television with an integrated tuner that is not being used because it is hooked up to a cable box to be part of a "set" when paired with said cable box.
Also, most televisions have no top to speak of these days. I suppose you could duct tape a digital converter to the top.
If you haven’t been following the whole digital TV switcheroo, you may be surprised to discover that
almost a third of TV stations are planning on switching over this week , with the rest following later in the year. You may also be surprised to find out that the “set top boxes” that will allow ordinary folks to watch the new digital TV are
a bit hard to come by , meaning that potentially millions of people are going to suddenly find themselves without TV.
I could opine about the horrific way this whole thing was handled and how it will probably affect a disproportionate number of lower-income people who can’t afford cable and satellite and how it’s
going to affect advertising but I won’t. Plenty of others have done that. No, what really fascinated me about Wolfgang’s message was thinking about all those words that we still use for technology that doesn’t exist anymore.
Many of us still talk about “taping” programs even though we know our DVRs actually record things to hard drives. Many of us probably have parents (or grandparents) who still refer to their refrigerators as an “icebox.” We still think about buying audio recordings at “record stores,” though you’d be hard-pressed to find a store that sells vinyl records outside of specialty places catering to audiophiles or DJs. Besides, a lot of DJs now use CDs for “scratching” even though a needle never comes anywhere close to the surface of their shiny discs.
Telephone technology seems particularly resistant to changing language. Most of us still talk about “dialing” a phone, though it’s hard to remember what it was like to actually move a physical dial around with an index finger. Our phones “ring,” but our “rings” sound more like electronic beeps than the sound of a clapper hitting a bell (unless you’ve downloaded a “retro” “ringtone” that samples an old phone bell sound). Even though we spend more and more time talking on our mobile phones, we still refer to people being on the non-existent “line.”
Even though computers haven’t been with us nearly as long, we still use terms today that don’t make a lot of sense anymore. Radio announcers still urge us to “log on” to websites as if we have to go back to a command line in order to visit a web site. While we still refer to the top page of a web site as a “homepage,” few of us are thinking about the days when people put up personal “homepages” that greeted them when they started their browsers. In fact, the word “page” itself seems pretty archaic when “pages” don’t exist for us to “page through” but are generated (for the most part) by databases serving us content some of us still read on our “terminals.”
Other anachronistic words still tenuously cling to our everyday speech about technology. While few of us own clocks with mechanical innards that make noise, we still refer to clocks “ticking” to mark the time. We “snap” pictures with our digital cameras even though there’s no shutter to “snap” (though many make a reasonable facsimile of the sound to remind us of what we’re doing). We “video” our kids, though it be tough to spot a camera with a video tape in it at most birthday parties. And we still refer to “shorthand,” though most of us couldn’t describe what real shorthand looks like (or, crazier yet, take our own shorthand notes).
I wonder what words we’ll cling to as we move forward. Will we still refer to recording a show as “tivo-ing” something after TiVo the company is long gone? Will we still refer to the Washington Post and New York Times as “newspapers” long after they’ve stopped being printed on paper? Will academics still write “papers” in a world where their words never actually get printed? We will still “fax” documents after the last fax machine (formerly “telecopier”) is gone? Will we speak of “editions” when printed books are a thing of the past? Indeed, will we still be reading “books” when they’re delivered electronically? We will still “file” our “files” in “folders” on our “desktops” when their analog equivalents are long forgotten?
Language has a way of changing far more quickly than most of us notice. Remember “webzines” before “blogs” came on the scene? Remember when linked texts online were referred to as “hypermedia?” Who uses the whole phrase “world wide web” anymore without irony or “electronic mail?” Even the most common operating system in the world – Microsoft Windows—sounds somewhat anachronistic in a world where having little square areas we can move around on our computer screens isn’t such a big deal anymore.
Perhaps using obsolete words for new technology is a way for us to nostalgically blunt our fear of the new. By making that link to the past those of us who have to weather change are able to feel more comfortable. “The kids” may have no idea what the reference is, but to them it doesn’t matter: a word’s a word and it just gets assimilated as quickly as all the other words that pop into and out-of our culture and our language. Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned here by those who develop new technology: innovate, yes…but give us something to hold on to so we don’t feel swept away by change we can’t control.
Labels: digital tv, language, set top box
...this guys looks really worried about it! (taken from an ad on Discovery.com)
Researchers at Portsmouth University in the UK are currently working on a universal emulator for video games that would allow people to play pretty much any video game ever made. Their reasoning is that while the software has been saved, nobody has the capability to play the games and this inability for future generations to play these games is, in their words “a cultural catastrophe.”
I agree. Video games are one of the
primary art forms of the 20th and 21st centuries and their loss to history really does represents a huge loss to our cultural heritage. Imagine if hardware problems prevented us from experiencing all the paintings, sculpture, and music of the last few decades.
But the problem of the inaccessibility of computer-based work to future generations isn’t just limited to video games. Vast amounts of knowledge and creative work lie mouldering on floppy discs, Syquest drives, and Zip discs all over the globe. Future historians who dig into our intellectual (and business) output will rarely have access to manuscripts: only finished documents (or nearly-finished documents), if they can access those documents at all. Whole swaths of art and culture will be lost, irretrievably locked up in dead media or lost to the delete key or the reformatted hard drive.
There have been some attempts at preserving dead media and the electronic traces of our intellectual output. Bruce Sterling’s now-defunct
Dead Media Project attempted to catalog and preserve old data formats and media storage devices. The
Internet Archive Project has been saving snapshots of the Internet for over a decade now. But even if we save the Internet and archive old commercial media formats, there are still probably thousands of terabytes of data that will never see the light of day, stored in boxes in basements, heaped in landfills, or destroyed forever.
What does this mean for our culture? Some have noted that the switch to digital will lead to a culture that has
more in common with ancient oral cultures than the written culture of the past millennium. Not only is this move one that shares characteristics with how people interacted in a “talking” culture rather than a written one, but it also means a world where knowledge is potentially ephemeral and “stories” eternally malleable. Permanence, in the sense that the written word inscribed on physical media such as paper (or stone or metal plates) were “permanent” goes away and art and culture become of the moment, without surviving for future generations.
Is it a big deal that a scholar of 20th century culture in 2100 might not be able to play Donkey Kong or experience Dean Koontz’s creative process? Yes, it is a big deal. It’s a big deal because without being able to examine the cultural artifacts of past times or see the process that one of our most influential authors used to create his work, we can’t truly understand the culture of the time Donkey Kong was played or Koontz’s books were published.
If you think about what will survive into the next century, you can imagine what future historians will come to understand about our time. Our machines, our buildings, and our cheap plastic goods might make it but little of our contemporary art will. So much of what influences our lives now is ephemeral and even if archived has very little chance of being archived on media that someone from 2100 will be able to access. Our thinking and our art and our culture will have to be experienced through the lens of the physical objects we leave behind, a lens that surely will distort anyone’s view back through it.
What do we truly know about ancient oral cultures? Very little beyond some chipped stone tools and some paintings on cave walls. What motivated them? What stories did they tell? How did they raise their children? A million questions will forever go unanswered because the answers existed only as movements of airwaves just as ephemeral as the bits that move between our computers now. The long view of history will be nearly dark, punctuated by a couple of dozen centuries where writing ruled and structures were built to withstand the rigors of time. After that, with the advent of the digital age, culture becomes dark and impenetrable again, with only a few traces remaining for the lucky to find. Who we are will be overshadowed by the “what we did,” as long as “what we did” involved architecture, machinery, or consumer goods.
If you're a Facebook user, you've probably been bitten by the "25 Things" bug.
Slate has a fascinating article today about how the spread of this meme mimics exactly the contagion curve of epidemics; they even quote an epidemiologist!
Money quote:
"The best hope for someone looking to start a grass-roots craze is to introduce a wide variety of schemes into the wild and pray like hell that one of them evolves into a virulent meme. If evolution is any guide, however, there's no predicting what succeeds and what doesn't. Just look at the platypus."
Labels: social media, viral
I’ve been reading
Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge (Damien Broderick, ed.) and was really taken by an essay called “The Great Awakening” written by the indomitable mathematician/trickster/sci-fi author
Rudy Rucker . In this essay Rucker tries to look forward to what humanity will be like one million years in the future (it’s the theme of the book after all!) and envisions a future where quantum computing and nanotechnology gives rise to “
orphids,” unseen nanobots that cover the Earth (and us) enabling us all to communicate telepathically and have perfect knowledge about what’s going on everywhere all at once. Rucker calls this “
omnividence.” And while
omnividence may present a few privacy issues (what else do you expect when everything in the world is covered by sentient, telepathic critters that see and hear everything and transmit what they gather to all of us?), he posits that perfect, shared surveillance will eliminate crime, make us all a lot closer, and give us access to the shared talents (and thoughts) of everyone on the planet at once.
Yes. I hear you shaking your head. But this is a million years in the future, folks.
Even if it does seem a little far fetched, the idea of a future where we all know what each other is doing all the time due to ubiquitous electronic links does seem to be a natural extension of the trend vector launched by social networking services such as twitter and Facebook.
Coincidentally, right after I read Rucker’s piece,
Rob Beal forwarded
this article from VentureBeat which points out that while pundits have been predicting that twitter will be killed by Facebook’s opening up of their API that allows status updates to be syndicated out to other sites, both services are still thriving. MG Siegler, author of the post, points out that one hasn’t killed the other because while Facebook asks the question “what are you doing?”, twitter asks the question “what are you doing right now?”, an important distinction. While it may make sense to say that you’re noticing that “apparently everyone at the bus stop is confused about what to wear when the weather starts to change” on twitter, posting “Sean Carton is apparently everyone at the bus stop….” on Facebook results in a fairly nonsensical statement.
It’s an interesting argument and one that has helped me understand the whole “twittering” thing a little bit more. I still think it’s a fairly moronic (and
wayyyyy overhyped) waste of time but thinking about Rucker’s and Siegler’s articles together made me realize why the services have taken off so much: because they tap into the universal human desire to shout “Hi! Here I am! Look at me!”
From the paintings on the rock walls of
Lascaux to the building of the Pyramids to the
messages beamed out by the SETI project to the stars, humanity seems programmed to want to make our presence in the universe known and connect with others. So much of what we’ve done as a species has been focused around this urge. The understanding of the urge may have differed over time – at one time we built temples to shout out our intentions to the Gods and now we beam messages into space to aliens we assume must exist—but the urge remains the same. “Here I am, universe! Look at me!”
But if humans are programmed to want the universe to know they exist, why do other humans listen to them? The answer is simple and the flip-side of the urge: we want to know we’re not alone. It’s no good just to shout into the aether if nobody shouts back…even if what we hear is just our own echo. Being recognized means taking a step towards immortality because if someone else remembers us, we can’t truly die.
The universal urge to be heard is one of the most basic urges that seems to drive our technology. Thinking about social networking in that sense makes its rapid rise seem inevitable. When looking towards future technologies and their viability using this understanding as a yardstick to measure the potential success of that technology seems to be a good heuristic. Will a new technology allow us to be heard? Will it allow us to hear others? If so, then it’s a good bet.
Silicon Alley Insider recently calculated that printing the New York Times costs more that twice as much as it would cost the Times to give every subscriber a free
Kindle. According to their calculations the Times costs $644 million per year to print whereas buying a Kindle (priced at $359) for each of their 800,000 subscribers would cost $297 million! To top it off, the Insider references inside sources at the Times as saying that their $644 million printing estimate is so low as to “not even be in the ballpark.”
So why are they still printing the New York Times? While I don’t have any inside sources there, I’m sure the reasons are the same as why we’re all still doing a lot of dumb stuff we do: because that’s the way it’s always been done. There are traditions to uphold when it comes to America’s “newspaper of record.” There’s a dedicated infrastructure in place to service the great Paper Monster. People like their paper. You can’t read an e-book in the shower. You can’t wrap a fish in a Kindle.
At a time when the economy is in a deathspiral overall and the newspaper industry is over a barrel in particular, the Times not looking at alternatives like transitioning to electronic delivery is fiscal irresponsibility at its worst. As ad revenues go down and the newspaper industry as a whole struggles to stay afloat, it’s irresponsible of the management of the Times to not question everything they do.
Why not go fully electronic or perhaps move to a model where subscribers get electronic delivery and newspapers are still available on newsstands? Why not offer subscribers a discount to take electronic delivery (on their free e-book reader) while offering subscribers who won’t part with their physical paper the choice to pay extra for a printed copy priced to reflect the actual cost of printing? I’m sure that a few hundred million dollars in savings would go far to help ease the Times’ financial woes.
The problem that the Times suffers from is the same one the record industry suffers from: they’re mistaken about what they actually sell. They think they’re selling papers when what they’re actually selling is the information contained on those pages. The rapid and ubiquitous rise of digital music players (as opposed to the slow adoption curve of digital reading devices) has forced the music industry to confront the fact that they were never selling CDs (or records or tapes or other physical media). What they were selling was the information contained on those hunks of plastic. In both cases (newspapers and CDs), the distribution medium has been confused with what it contains. And we’ve all seen (or are seeing) the results.
So what to do? The music industry –while its still struggling to come to terms with the separation of information from the media its distributed on—offers some object lessons. Through outlets like iTunes and eMusic they’ve been able to distribute music for far less than they could when they were selling hunks of plastic in physical storefronts. Audiophiles (or those overcome with nostalgia) have complained, but whole new industries have arisen to meet their needs through the sale of tube amplifiers, vinyl, and other analog playback and distribution media. Web sites such as
Musicstack and
SoundStageDirect offer millions of vinyl records at premium “audiophile” prices. Those who want analog sound can still buy
tube-based systems …at a premium, of course. If there’s a need the Market will fill it.
Tough times are tough times, but they also represent an opportunity for us to question old assumptions. In a world of decreasing resources, increasing fuel costs, and downward price pressures, we should be examining how to move from atoms to bits at every opportunity. The first step is to examine the core assumptions of what we do and not to confuse the medium with what it contains.
I'm an eco-freak (self-confessed), so when I came across this product the other day via a curious targeted ad/link at the top of my goggle mailbox... I couldn't resist: Bamboo laptop!
The
ASUS Bamboo series promises the user the ability "to have a more personal relationship with the computer." There's also discussion of a seamless harmony of technology and nature, and improved 'tactility' with a fresh scent.
At long last! A sweet-smelling Vista machine!
While I'm all for building with bamboo (sustainably harvested, of course), this laptop seems as environmentally-friendly as a
1946 Ford Woodie wagon. True, it has 'arresting aura of spirituality' and a hybrid engine that reduces energy use, but is it really worth it?
A veneer of sustainability, while welcome and perhaps profitable, is all this machine represents. I think I'll wait until they start making computers out of edible foam peanuts -- with a removable memory chip -- before I jump on the bamboo bandwagon: I won't have to haul the machine on long trips and can eat it, instead, over latte at the airport! Now who do I talk to about this...
Labels: $100 dollar laptop, bamboo, eco-friendly, green laptop, green machine, green technology, new laptop, sustainability, sustainable technology
