MentalPolyphonics.com

Ryley got me to take a look at this website called FitDay*. It’s supposed to be the most awesome diet/fitness tracker on the whole Internet. You can track mood, body measurements, meals, etc. (I have issues with the nutritional information, but that’s not the point of this post…)

The most interesting part of the website is the activity tracker. You can break your day down into what you do minute-to-minute to figure out how many calories you’re burning. It is quite finely-grained, to the point of neurosis. For example, now I know that all of the following activities burn 75 Calories/hour:

• watching TV while sitting
• watching TV while lying
• sitting quietly
• lying quietly
• writing while reclining
• reading while reclining
• talking while reclining

This continues throughout the activities. There are four different kinds of coal mining, six different kinds of tailoring and eight different things you can do in a steel mill. There’s an entry in there for my cobbler, my bookbinder and my furrier. If you switch from traditional “American Indian” dancing to 19th Century dancing, that’s a different activity. Walking for pleasure on a work break is different than walking to a neighbour’s for social reasons and should also not be confused with walking to and from an outhouse. Changing lightbulbs burns 151 Calories/hour.

Oddly, they only have three different kinds of sexual activities: passive - light effort, general - moderate effort and active - vigorous effort. Vigorous sex only burns 113 Calories/hour. If vigorous sex takes less work than changing lightbulbs, you’re doing it wrong (or maybe changing lightbulbs right).

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Before everyone was on Facebook, everyone was on MySpace; before that, everyone was on Friendster; archeologists are still digging for what came before that. This raises the question: what’s next?

Relationships are maintained through various social conventions that are basically equivalent to primates picking lice out of each others’ fur. Before social networking, you could only carry on relationships with a few people, mostly who were geographically close to you. Facebook allows you to maintain a larger number of relationships by doing stuff like sharing photos and writing on walls. But unlike the old ways of keeping in touch, social networking allows you to just maintain relationships at their present level without gradually improving the quality over time.

Facebook helps a little with face-to-face interaction by managing events. But compare creating a Facebook event to poking someone. The event is a much more formal activity with no chance for spontaneity. What is the F2F equivalent of a poke or a wall comment? And can social networking do that?

Consider hanging out at a coffee shop by yourself: if any of your friends are in the area they should stop by. It’d be rude to send everyone you know a text message. You could set your Facebook status to “Jared is at the coffee shop, come say hi”, but no one will see that unless they’re at home (and there’s too much noise in Facebook statuses to check them by phone).

The answer is geosocial networking: social networking that is aware of geographic locations. Every time I’m in a location where I’d like my friends to know, I tell the networking service. And every time I’m near one of my friends who’s broadcasting their location, the networking services lets me know.

There are already geosocial networking services that are interacted with via text messages*, but the thing that will really make them take off is when every teenager has a phone with GPS that can display pretty maps (eg: iPhone). Then Facebook is dead and your social life will flourish.

* I’m rooting for BrightKite over the US-only Loopt and Whrrl, the racistly-named GyPSii, and Dodgeball, which got bungled to death by Google.

Everyone knows linear thinking is bad. Yet organizing into hierarchies (tree structures) is presented as the pinnacle of rational thought. Dividing things and then dividing them again is a key activity of analytic thinking. But we should recognise that trees are often only the most pragmatic or least-worst structure. Some examples:

• companies have org charts, that get busted by project teams
• biologists argue over morphological taxonomies, while computers slowly build the phylogenetic tree
• political boundaries are drawn without regard to ethnic or natural organization, leading to succession and environmental destruction
• sometimes you’re happy to browse books by subject (albums by genre, etc.), sometimes a keyword search makes you hike all over the stacks

The biggest deceit is that mind maps are a super-flexible notation when they are nothing more than trees laid-out radially. Taking a concept and composing it into facets or aspects is fully exploring a box, not thinking outside it! That children are taught mind mapping as the lateral thinking tool is evidence of the inflexibility of our education system, nothing more.

Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin doesn’t have policies, she has narratives:

• She’s not pro-life, she’s I-had-a-baby-with-birth-defects.
• She’s not pro-abstinence, she’s I-didn’t-teach-my-daughter-about-birth-control-and-I-have-proof.
• She’s not pro-Arctic Refuge drilling, she’s my-husband’s-going-to-drill-there-got-it?
• She’s not pro-gun, she’s excuse-me-you’re-standing-in-front-of-that-delicious-polar-bear.
• She’s not pro-death penalty, she’s on-second-thought-stay-where-you-are.

In addition to her personal narratives, she used her acceptance speech to place herself in a non-partisan metanarrative with Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Clinton. These narratives of change and freshing thinking used to belong to Obama.

Being unknown isn’t a liability, it’s an opportunity for the media, and voters, to co-create her brand. Often giving the media this much power is seen as dangerous in politics, but McCain is an expert at media relations. For example, Slate magazine says “Palin’s candidacy is fun to cover” and “she’s a bio writer’s dream”. Although the media is critical now (because if it bleeds, it leads), this convenience and enjoyment will eventually bring them back to the trough of Palin’s narratives.

Obama’s narratives were largely used up during the primaries and Biden hasn’t produced new material since 1972 (right after skipping out on the Vietnam War, so the Democrats’d probably prefer the media don’t go there). What is there still to write about either of them?

Warning: this animation contains painful pitches, amplitudes, and images. Best not to blast it in headphones.

Chris pointed me to WOFL 2106. I love the film’s use of colour and shape and motion. Apparently David O’Reilly, the animator, is incredulous towards broadcast standards. His work is presented sans safe area and sans dynamic range compression, the subtle business logic filters through which we perceive most electronic media.

Here you go:

Big HD version here. See more of O’Reilly’s work here, especially this.

[Edit: updated “safe area” link.]

This weekend I tried to pirate Woody Allen On Comedy and couldn’t, so I bought it on iTunes.

Then on Labour Day Chris moved in and wanted to gank a copy of Bobb Deep: Queensbridge meets Kingston, by DJ Swindle (a mashup album of Bob Marley and Mobb Deep tunes). We couldn’t find it in the usual places, and the same solution presented itself:

My online music purchasing diaphragm popped, I think my finances are developing another leak. This whole iTunes+iPod thing is pregnant with poverty.

The World Wide Web Consortium is the successors of the people who created the web (kind of like how the Pope has a direct line of succession from St Peter, except St Tim is still head of the W3C). They are one of the main web standards-bodies, and are the authoritative source on things like HTML and SVG.

The W3C thinks the web is made of content provided by individuals. You are free to consume the content however you wish, using whatever tools are conceivable. Their plan to fully realise this is the Semantic Web: a set of standards for marking-up content with machine-readable metadata. This metadata allows content to be transformed and combined into content mashups.

Google thinks the web (or at least their part of it) is made of services provided by large service providers. Good service providers publish APIs that make it easy to query their services and specifications that document their output. These standards allow services to be combined and chained into application mashups.

Neither of these perspectives is more correct than the other. Google has so much data that you need a Google-sized computing cluster to process it. As the same time, it’s not clear that a Google database is the best home for pictures of my cat.

To date, web browsers have been built with a content bias. Any successful service must present their output in W3C content formats. If they also allow interactive use, that’s built on top of the content layer. This bias runs deep: Firefox is built on Mozilla’s Gecko engine using XUL, a user-interface content markup.

Chrome is Google’s response to that bias by making a browser that is more service-oriented. But Mozilla does not have a vested interest in either the content or service perspectives: Ubiquity is a step toward services (building on the idea of the Greasemonkey Firefox extension, I suspect). The danger of Chrome is not in the extension of Google’s monopoly itself, it’s that it gives them the power to leverage that monopoly to push their perspective farther than we may like.

Good news: today I hired a shrink. Hopefully I’ll be more pleasant shortly :)