Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Climate of Man has been running in New Yorker. Among the memorable anecdotes is one describing paleoclimatologist Peter deMenocal’s work with linking sedimentary data with archaeological findings. Here’s the trenchant bit:

Tell Leilan was never an easy place to live. Much like, say, western Kansas today, the Khabur plains received enough annual rainfall—about seventeen inches—to support cereal crops, but not enough to grow much else. “Year-to-year variations were a real threat, and so they obviously needed to have grain storage and to have ways to buffer themselves,” deMenocal observed. “One generation would tell the next, ‘Look, there are these things that happen that you’ve got to be prepared for.’ And they were good at that. They could manage that. They were there for hundreds of years.”
He went on, “The thing they couldn’t prepare for was the same thing that we won’t prepare for, because in their case they didn’t know about it and because in our case the political system can’t listen to it. And that is that the climate system has much greater things in store for us than we think.”

An uncomfortable parallel from yesterday’s The Coming Influenza Pandemic?:

A while ago we had a story on the government running computer simulations to plot strategies on containment. Nature is constantly moving, testing limits, finding openings without looking for them. This is proof that simulating is probably folly, and right only by luck. A deadly pandemic, if it occurs, will come only by the confluence of events which could never have been predicted, as all “accidents” are.

Posted by Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber:
‘But pray, sir, why must I not teach the young gentlemen?’
‘Because, sir, teaching young gentlemen has a dismal effect upon the soul. It exemplifies the badness of established, artificial authority. The pedagogue has almost absolute authority over his pupils: he often beats them and insensibly loses the sense of respect due to them as fellow human beings. He does them harm, but the harm they do him is far greater. He may easily become the all-knowing tyrant, always right, always virtuous; in any event he perpetually associates with his inferiors, the king of his company; and in a surprisingly short time alas this brands him with the mark of Cain. Have you ever known a schoolmaster fit to associate with grown men? The Dear knows I never have. They are most horribly warped indeed.
—Patrick O’Brian, The Ionian Mission, p84.

This morning I stumbled upon QuotePlay, which provides a bunch of the functionality I was whimpering about in the last posting. Wizard app, easy to set up and use, Answer to a Maiden’s Prayer. The path was as usual somewhat circuitous: one of the blogs I follow referenced Bag and Baggage, which implemented QuotePlay six weeks ago … so I played with it and immediately downloaded and sent a donation ($10: chickenfeed anymore, right?). Whew.

In the past six months or so I’ve become more involved in working with sound in digital environments. This proceeds by punctuated equilibria: I work with a set of hardware and software tools, and am periodically forced into rethinking the how and why –usually with the consequence that new tricks must be learned and new affordances purchased.
MP3 players are designed and equipped with the passive listener in mind, but I expect that some not-so-distant generation of the technology will allow the user to set markers and return to them. Now my only available method is to open the MP3 in an editor (Audacity, SoundForge, etc.) and clip/copy the section I want.
The point is that I have more and more occasion to manage sound files, but nowhere near enough appropriate tools for the tasks that arise, soooo:
(1) To make a sound file truly useful and repurposeable, I want the capability to call out a section, and ideally to encode that callout in a URL. I know this is possible, thanks to Jon Udell’s MP3 Ins and Outs and MP3 Sound Bites, BUT I don’t know just how to realize the possibility, and make it truly practical in the situations I’m working in.
(2) The other desideratum is a combination of utilities that makes it easy manage transactions with sound files: to mark the beginning (and ideally also the end) of a section, so that it can be dealt with easily as an editing task, and to make it easy to manage metadata for sections, so that the growing library of sound clips can be accessed and used at will.

As I was reading the H5N1 reports this morning, it occurred to me to look at what I collected a year ago, so I marked up the log files with links by date. I’m not sure just what use this has –the initial thought was to compare the tracking of spread and reports of deaths, to make some sort of analysis of how the emerging story was being covered.

My collection of stories wasn’t systematic, and perhaps emphasizes the bizarre (trained ducks replaced with racing pigs in a Vietnamese circus, reported 6 February…). I was as interested in how the story was being presented, how the press was voicing its response to what it was being told by “officials” and by its own reporters, as in the sequence of events.

In 2005, the blogosphere is a much more effective means to track events and to find commentary on the larger issues. At the moment, I’m especially impressed by Effect Measure (which covers a broad range of epidemiology issues) , Pathogen Alert, and recombinomics.com, but I have also set up RSS feeds for influenzapandemic.blogspot.com, and for occurrences in technorati and yahoo news [the latter two provide URLs that could be used with any RSS aggregator]. I haven’t been following my Google News search very assiduously.

Clay Shirky:

we are not driving a car, with gas, brakes, reverse and a lot of choice as to route. We are steering a kayak, pushed rapidily and monotonically down a route determined by the enviroment. We have a (very small) degree of control over our course in this particular stretch of river, and that control does not extend to being able to reverse, stop, or even significantly alter the direction we’re moving in.

quoted by Cory Doctorow, who continues:

…could just as readily apply to changes in copyright, lossily compressed music, or spam: they are characteristics inherent in the ecology itself. The discussion needs to center around how to exist in their presence, not how to change them.

Update: Clay adds this:

The Web, meanwhile, is chaos. Chaos! You can link anything to anything else! Dewey would plotz if he saw such a tuml. How on earth can you organize the Web? It plainly isn’t now, and it never can be.

I seem forever to be picking up books from my own past, and discovering in their pages the reasons I’ve harbored them for so many years. Often I’m sure I’ve never read the gems that I discover, but it may be that I just didn’t have the wit to understand what I was reading the first time around, and that I now have the context to appreciate significances that escaped the younger reader. Case in point today: Gregory Bateson’s Naven has been with me for 35 years or so (the price of the Stanford paperback was $2.95), and I just happened to open it today and find this, contrasting the ‘scientific’ and ‘artistic’ modes of exposition:

The artist is content to describe culture in such a manner that many of its premises and the inter-relations of its parts are implicit in his composition. He can leave a great many of the most fundamental aspects of culture to be picked up, not from his actual words, but from his emphasis. He can choose words whose very sound is more significant than their dictionary meaning and he can so group and stress them that the reader almost unconsciously receives information which is not explicit in the sentences and which the artist would find it hard –almost impossible– to express in analytic terms. (pg. 1)

Since …it is impossible to present the whole of a culture simultaneously in a single flash, I must begin at some arbitrarily chosen point in the analysis; and since words must necessarily be arranged in lines, I must present the culture, which like other cultures is really an elaborate reticulum of interlocking cause and effect, not with a network of words but with words in linear series. The order in which such a description is arranged is necessarily arbitrary and artificial… (pg. 3)

Some documents are of enormous historical interest, and ought to be more retrievable and more widely known. Dave Winer’s ‘Payloads for RSS’ (11 Jan 2001) lays out the potential of enclosures and multimedia files. Adam Curry pointed to the post in today’s blog entry… and it’s all right there: “you subscribe to channels instead of clicking-and-waiting… it’s a simple matter to teach RSS about multimedia payloads…”

Some more extracts from Design Engaged, to give a sense of its delights:

from Fabio Sergio’s freegorifero:

How much structure is really needed to create engagement?
…sites like Flickr and del.icio.us, where user-contributed bit-based constructs are puppeted to dance to the rhythm of hard-bopping metadata.
…
Because Flickr is not a photo-sharing product, and not even a photo-sharing tool.
It’s a bit-sharing platform [see this example, viewed as a slide show, to get the idea…]
…Flickr and del.icio.us are successful examples of platforms with “just enough” structure to enable growth, platforms that let the emergent behaviors of their users slowly give them peculiar shapes..

from Mike Kuniavsky’s Orange Cone:

Life is incredibly complex, and now it’s not just the scientists at the Santa Fe Institute and Wall Street mathematicians who know it. Many people see it and feel it. But most don’t know what to do about it. We can see patterns of compensation mechanisms appear. Nihilism, irony, fundamentalism and nostalgia are all ways to simplify the world. We are at the end of the prescriptive rationalist vision of the world and we’re waiting for the next framework to explain the world to appear. It has, but it’s going to take a while before it’s in full bloom. After all, it was 300 years between Giotto and Isaac Newton.

from All watched over by machines of loving grace: Some ethical guidelines for user experience in ubiquitous-computing settings
by Adam Greenfield:

By comparison with the World Wide Web, ubiquitous computing is vastly more insinuative. By intention and design, it asserts itself in every moment and through every aperture contemporary life affords it3. It is everyware.

…Imagine the feeling of being stuck in voice-mail limbo, or fighting unwanted auto-formatting in a word processing program, or trying to quickly silence an unexpectedly ringing phone by touch, amid the hissing of fellow moviegoers – except all the time, and everywhere, and in the most intimate circumstances of our lives. Levels of discomfort we accept as routine (even, despite everything we know, inevitable!) in the reasonably delimited scenarios presented by our other artifacts will have redoubled impact in a ubicomp world.

…no human society can survive the total evaporation of its protective hypocrisy.

There’s such a marvelous variety of convergent thought going on out there, to which I feel myself connected. I stumbled into the site for the Design Engaged conference (in Amsterdam, mid-November), perhaps via my feed from Stephen Downes’ Edu_RSS and a posting (by Chris Heathcote) that says

Ubicomp isn’t a box you will buy from your local electronics retailer, plug in, and switch on. It’s lots of really small pieces loosely, sloppily joined – glued together.

So this morning I did a search for ‘design engaged’ and found a wonderful collection of links to papers/presentations in which I rolled gleefully (think: spaniel in dead fish…) for an hour or so. Among the pieces that struck particular chords:

Fabio Sergio’s post-conference thoughts and their associated links
That Syncing Feeling (Thomas Vander Wal)
Elastic Space (Timo Arnall, with many astonishing images of “stickering, graffiti and flyposting”)

I decided to try out the new Microsoft blogging environment, if only to be able to tell others about it as a possibility (mine is another oook avatar), and to broaden my own thoughts about the phenomenon of blogging. This seems somehow much more my own space, though I’m not really sure why that is, given that I’ve so far done so little to personalize its configuration. It bears watching…