...more recent posts
Nobody asked, but here's the personal update from yesterday. Nothing too interesting here. You've been warned:
Long day yesterday. My legs are killing me. Left here in the morning with no particular direction. Ended up on lower fifth avenue where I was reminded that it was Gay Pride day. Walked up the length of 5th (to the park) as all the floats were coming down past me. Very colorful. Of course I didn't have my camera.
The sidewalks were packed with people watching. Well, more than watching really. Dancing. Prancing. Shouting. Yelling. Everybody had some sort of camera. Lots of pictures. Lots of posing. And I kept hearing the same exchange: "...have a good parade!" This sounded just like what I remember from outside of grateful dead shows where people always parted with "...have a good show!" You have to say it as if you're not expecting the person to just watch. The spectators are the show. Everybody is performing. Everybody is on. Very nice. And seeing 280 pound bald headed men with moustaches twirling down fifth avenue in blue tutus is something probably everybody should see at some point.
[Update 6/26: rion.nu didn't forget her camera]
Eventually I cleared the crowd and made my way into the park. I had my eye open for Mr. Wilson, it being a nice day, and a weekend. But I wasn't really scouting for him as I have done a few times before. That's a different sort of walking. Faster. Head up and constantly scanning the horizon. You have to cover a lot of ground if you hope to find someone randomly. But yesterday I was just walking around. Real slow. Up and around the reservoir. I found a nice bench up on the east side and just sat for half an hour. Not even really thinking. My brain needed a rest.
Then off again back down fifth. Over two hundred blocks. As I said, my legs are hurting. Made it home in time for a quick shower and then off to the opening game of the Staten Island Yankees. They have a beautiful new ballpark at St. George, which is right where the Staten Island Ferry lands. And although I find it hard to believe myself, this was my first trip on the ferry. Amazing views of NYC. Again, I didn't bring my camera. I sat the whole way thinking how stupid I was as the great pre dusk light lit the clouds over my favorite view of the city. Really spectacular.
The park is nice. MB and H. did some graphics work for them, so I finally saw these big banners they made in their full glory. Must be nice to see your work so large. And so visible. They really did a good job. I have to think this is one of the nicest minor league parks. You sit in the stands looking out over the field, and then the water beyond, and then Wall Street rising in the distance. Very nice. This is single A ball, but the play was better than I had imagined. And it's actually sort of nice to see something short of major league quality. You get a much better sense of just how hard the game is. They missed turning some double plays that any big league team would have made look easy. But they weren't sloppy, it's just hard to turn it at second unless everything works out perfect. And it only rarely works out perfect for these guys. Much more fun than I thought.
After the game (which the Yanks won, by the way, 2-1) there were some fireworks from two barges just over the outfield fence in the harbor. Then we were back on the ferry (literally right there) and home again. We could see other larger fire works from the Gay Pride Day finale as we were crossing back to Manhattan. Everything seemed pretty festive.
Quick bite at Paladar, and home to bed. Must remember to do some stretching before any future adventures. And I guess remembering the camera would be nice too. If only I could grab stills from my optic nerve...
I can't wait to hear the story. Slashdot has been down for a couple of days. Unbelievable. My traceroutes get into exodus (where the servers are colocated) but then time out. I wonder if it's hard to bring a box back up when tons of people are pinging your site every second to see if you've managed to bring the box back up?
On the verge of AI? Cyc "is powered by an immense multi-contextual knowledge base and an efficient inference engine. The knowledge base is built upon a core of over 1,000,000 hand-entered assertions (or "rules") designed to capture a large portion of what we normally consider consensus knowledge about the world."
"HAL killed the ['2001'] crew because it had been told not to lie to them, but also to lie to them about the mission," [Douglas B. Lenat] observes. "No one ever told HAL that killing is worse than lying. But we've told Cyc."I hope they mentioned the thing about opening the pod bay doors too. (Amazingly, the LA Times doesn't even link to the Cycorp site.)
Douglas Hofstadter (of Godel Escher Bach fame) takes the other side of the debate: "I don't believe in the idea that intelligence is founded upon having vast amounts of facts about the world." I can see both sides. I don't really have a strong intuition about who's right, but this is clearly cool stuff.
Someday I'm going to collect all the links to articles of the "what's a weblog?" variety in one place. Someday. Real soon now. Anyway, here's another.
If you're interested in music on the internet you should know about Ogg Vorbis. Here's the faq.
I've been trying to put together a longer piece to say something about all these "free" and "open" software and file formats I like to push. It's come to my attention that maybe I've never explained it too well. This is turning out to be a difficult thing to write, but maybe just the small version will be enough to get started:
The internet might seem like a "place" (albeit virtual) right now, but I think that soon, as things progress, this idea will disappear. We're going to all live on the internet, except by then it won't seem like some other place. It will just seem like the world. It will be the world. What had previously been this new thing the internet will be micro miniaturized, wireless, and completely built in. It will be so pervasive and constant that it won't even seem like anything. So the fights over "free software" and "open source" aren't about making a "new economy" or somehow challenging capitalism. It's way beyond that. It's about securing fundamental rights for human beings in the new world. We're talking, in the end, over who is going to control the wiring of your brain.
What if a for profit corporation owned oxygen? Or multiplication? Or the color blue? This wouldn't make any sense.
Exactly. To return to Ogg, if I can't stream MP3s from my website without paying someone (Fraunhofer in this case) then unless I have enough money I won't be able to have a voice in the world (audio streams aren't only for songs remember, that's just an early popular application.) So fine, we won't use MP3. We'll use Ogg. It's important for there to be free audio codecs, and not just so that we can get all our music for free, thumb our noses at the RIAA, etc.... It's to protect the notion that all people, regardless of economic position, should be able to have a voice that can be heard. In today's world this is protected in some limited way by the inability of a company to patent the biological system that humans use to produce sound. But in the new world we won't always be using biological systems. We'll be using technological systems that companies are having great success in patenting and keeping secret and charging for and locking you into....
But as I think ogg demonstrates, you can't keep this sort of cat inside the bag. Someone will just design around you.
Don't miss: Sarah Macfadden one of a kind jewelry show.
Paul Ford writes some good stuff. From the heart. I don't know him, but I feel like I do. I wish him well. (Make sure you click through to Bridge and River Consecration too.)
I haven't done a long drive in quite some time. Probably yesterday was not the best day to have broken my streak.
I'm off to Boston for the night. Back tomorrow. My phone should work if you need me.