Tag: technology
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too abstract
Abstraction is the practice of peeling away the unnecessary, the unimportant, and the unwanted to arrive as some ideal, yet unreal representation of where you started. It happens in any discipline where we try to represent the real world in a fabricated realm of ideas or concepts. In computing, abstraction takes on a guise of…
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humans interacting with computers
I was first introduced to the concept of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in the spring of 2002 while working on a system that would ostensibly tell Congress where the money they allocated to the Intelligence community in the “black budget” was going and whether or not it was producing valuable returns. This, of course, was never…
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Dragons
The Internet and the World Wide Web represent what happens when you build a system that structurally subverts the mechanisms of constraint that allow a government to regulate the behavior of community members. Typically, this has been seen as a good thing because it was initially done by benevolent tinkerers and lots of people benefited…
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humanity is not important
Atoms in the human body: 7 x 1027Atoms in the human race: 5 x 1037 Atoms in the universe: 6 x 1079 Atoms in the human body / atoms in the universe: 1 x 10-52Atoms in the human race / atoms in the universe: 1 x 10-42 Zero percent of the atoms in the universe…
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Scaling Standards
Level Human Geographic Organization Logical 1 Personal Device Individual Personal-Area 2 Family Home Workgroup Local-Area 3 Tribe Neighborhood Team Campus-Area 4 Community City Co-Op Metro-Area 5 Clan Region Company Wide-Area 6 Nation Continent Government Nation-Area 7 Species Planet MegaCorp World-Wide
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Conceptual Unpacking
Part I – Preconceived Notions First, there were the dinosaurs, but they got too big and died… Then apes, walking, fire, farming, religion, government, empire, enlightenment, capitalism, industrialization, computation, networking, porn, social media, cloud, and AI happened. None of which means very much at all in the eyes of the universe. But it does mean…
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EIS: Building Integrated Systems
Anyone can set-up a computer, and if you can set up one, you can set up two. Almost anyone can plug those two computers into a hub or switch and get them to talk to each other. If you can do that, then replacing the hub or switch with a broadband router isn’t much harder,…
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Price premium for time sensitive video
Watching NFL games live on television incurs a 1912% price premium over the same game time-shifted from Sunday to Tuesday.
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Google’s War on Hierarchy, and the Death of Hierarchical Folders
This article – Google’s War on Hierarchy, and the Death of Hierarchical Folders – talks about the issue of organizing filesystems for human interfaces, specifically it talks about the difference between Microsoft’s desktop and Google’s search paradigms. It seems to me that the search paradigm, especially when used in this context to replace hierarchy, is…
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Nationalism in Cyberspace
In a story titled “Bush administration annexes internet,” The Register talks about how the U. S. Department of Commerce intends to “retain control over the Internet’s root servers indefinitely.” This is a reversal of previous U. S. and may in some way be a response to U. N. attempts to control the internet. What is…