Just Data

Today's blog is brought to you by the letter Q for "My, my... isn't that interesting"... and these two articles:

The Legacy Of The CD: Innovation That Ate Itself


Phonograph Disks Run Crewless War Tank



Remember when CDs were introduced? In 1982, it was a high-tech wowfest: Hi-Fi music on a shiny disk just begging to be slotted into one of those damn flying cars we still don't have. For Joe Bagadonuts and Moms alike, it was something of an impenetrable mystery what music, a little rainbow mirror, and lasers had to do with one another, but it worked. Dire Straits played with crystal clarity off the little buggers while the How was tossed into the Arthur C. Clark "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" blackbox in the attic of the mind. For the technorati of the time, the idea of music encoded in streams of binary data may have been a bit less opaque but - and this is rather important - not even the bulk of the technorati intuited the long-range consequences of shoving a content-type like music into the binary Lingua Franca of computers. Music industry pundits looked at the physical media itself as some kind of penultimate concatenation of quality+portability (++buckets of mad loot as folks replaced old favs on old media with shiny disks); good old wall-garden bizModel salivation. And actually, it was smart thinking since all the tech at that time was tightly coupled packages of (tech+content+use)to-purpose biz/industryModels with no reason to think otherwise.

History, however, shows us that the real magic wasn't in the physical aluminized-polycarbonate media or the playback tech but in the binary encoding itself. Binary is about as portable as it gets these days. Have codec, will travel. Ok... a gross over-simplification but not untrue.

In 1992 and 1993, I was friends with a computer science genius who had a Sun Sparc workstation in his home that acted as an email and UseNet-mirror server for his little cabal of techie friends via this Internet thingy and a dial-up pipe. I knew a little bit about the Internet (a very little bit) which was about 100% more than anyone else I knew outside of this mad wizard and his crew. AOL and BBSs were still a big-ish deal. Tim Berners-Lee's WWW was just a cute widdle thing. Among the things that Mad Wizard and Krew were doing with their slice of Internet was... sharing music; ugly, overly-compressed clips but still music. I have no idea how they were doing what they were doing. They were also sharing pictures (but we won't go into that). The point? Like most everyone else at that time, my little brain hadn't closed the loop on the idea that what lived on those shiny CD disks was merely data until I saw Wiz and Krew sharing music over the 'Net. Before you think I'm breaking my arm patting myself on the back, know that the dime didn't drop all the way. No, it happened in stages: several years later when software began to be distributed on CD-ROM; Napster; DVDs; rich-media web pages; the embodied experience of ripping my large CD collection down for playback in Windows Media Player (a year after buying a 400-CD disk changer); Netflix online; my father replacing some of his smaller flatscreen monitors with a huge flatscreen TV; Kindle; smartphones. What a remarkable failure of my imagination, really.

Just data.

In the last few years, I've had some curiosity about when folks might have started finding themselves in this "just data" frame of mind. A couple of days ago, I stumbled upon the "Phonograph Disks" article originally published in November of 1934. Rather startling to think that 85 years ago, a "French scientist" looked at a phonograph record as a data storage medium for controlling tanks on the battlefield. Didn't work worth a damn but who cares because, in the end, it was a remarkable leap. A convergent leap. A bit ironic, too, when you consider the relationship between the analog photograph record and its usurper, the digital CD. Le petite bon mot.

Those of you in-the-know will be saying, "Yeah, I might not have known about the LP Tank thing but a phonograph-as-data-medium isn't much of a stretch from the pattern cards used many years earlier in Jacquard Looms (an example that's a staple in history-of-computer-science content) which Charles Babbage adapted for use in his Analytic Engine, and which became computer punch-cards, etc., etc." And you'd be right. But there is a big point that a great many people I know do not get: anything can be "represented" in some form or fashion by anything else, and anything can be encoded/decoded from This to That. Controlled movement of a tank can be encoded in/decoded from an analog signal represented as scratches in the surface of a photograph disk. Music can be encoded in/decoded from a string of binary numbers represented as reflectivity changes in the surface of a mirrored disk. A representation of the flow of goods across an empire can be encoded in knots in a string (the Incan quipu). And all that content whizzing around netspace is just (binary) data.

We've had many decades - and even centuries or millennia - to work up good, rigid cultural ideas about the importance of media and its interrelationship with technology. This rigidity is reflected in our language: TV is a medium, radio is a medium, newspapers are a medium, telephone is a medium... the new-ish stuff out on the Internet constitute "new media". These categories-of-media are privileged with ideas about their uniqueness (and that's not entirely incorrect) but at the price of also considering important, underlying "sameness". I know the medium/technology relationship is non-trivial but it is not the whole story because, right now, in the Post-Convergence Age, previously technologically-isolated mediums are converged, or converging, into the binary-encoded flow of netspace. The degree of convergence in netspace today rubs my face in the realization that everything from cave paintings in Lascaux and the invention of the alphabet to streaming video on smartphones and our social lives represented in social network sites share something profound in common. In this context, the medium/technology coupling seems less... deterministic... more like envelopes on a flow between This and That.

And what's flowing? Well, it's a lot of things but, down deep at the nubbins of it all, it's "just data". And that's as non-trivial as medium/tech uniqueness. This is one reason why I use "netspace" instead of "Internet". One day, we'll innovate away from a TCP/IP-based "network of networks"; WWW will disappear; words like "television" and "radio" will be challenging answers in whatever passes for Trivial Pursuit. Everything that is so very, very cool now will be as quaint as a steam-powered car or green text on a CRT monitor. But whatever it is we are doing right now with cable and Internet and smartphones and... - and have done for a long time with all the tech that came before - will remain, enveloped by new tech in ways we can hardly imagine. Netspace is not about specific technologies but about the flow between This and That that technology in all its guises has facilitated. Well, that's part of it...

"Just data"... another Double-Rainbow moment.

++vn

Convergence Blindness

Check out these articles:

As telecom industry evolves, success of Netflix is its biggest threat

Move Over, Apple! My Tablet Cost $200

So WTF do these two articles have do to with one another? Good question! Thought you'd never ask.

"Much of the telecom industry thinks that in a few years, people will watch TV and movies and surf the Web all with the same gear." (from the Netflix article) "The second observation is that these tablets are probably going to become cheap, near-commodity items, and maybe sooner than you think." (from the Tablet Cost $200 article) Still confused? At issue is the hedging of both journalists on where things are going... and where things sit right now. Now let's add a dose of, "It's really tough to compete against free," he said [Frank Pearce, co-founder of World of Warcraft developer Blizzard] at GDC. "No matter what level of quality you hit, there are a lot of people who are willing to sacrifice that for a cheaper version...The industry is changing in terms of the business model." (from Nintendo facing industry backlash over controversial comments).

"Tough to compete against free"... ya think? Welcome to the messy world of the Post-Convergence Age. Out there in the tech world is the dream of Toaster Tech, infoTech that works like (as reliably, as easily) a toaster. But where the Toaster Tech dream diverges from the metaphor is that infoTech/netspace "nodes" will never be single-purpose tech like a toaster but more like netspace Swiss Army knives. Special purpose devices, like toasters, are also walled-garden tech in the sense that purpose/function/use is isolated enough for to-purpose business models to be created. Telephone was once entirely walled-garden. Television was once entirely walled-garden. ISP/datacom services were once walled-garden. Cell/mobile services were once entirely walled-garden. "...in a few years [!!!], people will watch TV and movies and surf the Web all with the same gear". Really? 'Cause I can do that right this [expletive deleted] instant on just about every device in the house (media center computer, other computers, pads, smartphones, game consoles) and do it every day of the week. Them thar walls around the garden appear to have fallen down already, guy.

The real question is a Double-Rainbow moment: "What does it mean?????"

It means that everything that can be represented in little old ones and zeros has been, and is available for consumption to some degree out there in netspace on every current device category we've created which can participate in netspace. Period. Turn the page. I'm not saying there aren't tech hurdles, lots of legal wrangling, and many obituaries to be written for companies that aren't on the cluetrain yet. And I definitely "get" the fact that pioneering in the Internet/Web space encouraged folks to pick the low fruit from the tree of marketing ideas by offering so much for little or nothing. Monetization is hard in netspace because we're all very spoiled by everything becoming a commodity with a value near $0.00... at the consumer end of the marketplace equation. The more accurate Netflix article quote would look something like this: "The telecom and old media industries believe that in a few years they will finally realize that people are already watching TV and movies, and surfing the Web on the same gear. In the meantime, telecom and old media will continue to pretend that walled-garden business models are King Schmitt on Krapp Hill, thus becoming textbook fodder for MBA students a decade from now but not before they bully (politely known as "lobbying") Congress into creating a host ridiculous old-industry protectionist laws that amount to life support for an end-stage terminal cancer patient who is in a coma after a hideous rollover accident in which in the head was severed from the body."

Putting on my business hat, I'm sympathetic about the bewildering changes that netspace has caused to the content-creation/content-delivery/content-consumption industries. (Good) content is expensive. Access tech into netspace is expensive. Having everything converged into a $0.00 commodity marketplace suxxor. But walls are going to net nuthin' because, in netspace, someone will always be willing to offer "it" - whatever "it" is - for less, and using Congress as a replacement for innovation is laughably sad. So... of course "...tablets are probably going to become cheap, near-commodity items." Remove the word "probably" and I won't be tempted to call you Capt. Obvious. And yes, Frank Pearce, it is tough to compete against free.

Let yourself go to the Double-Rainbow moment.

++vn

The Stupid Question

There has been a little education-related memeStorm in my neck of netspace in the last few days: current-events kvetching about state- and district-level budget deficits, increasing classroom sizes, teacher layoffs, school closures; quieter chatter about what it means to be in the sunset years of No Child Left Behind particularly in light of the data suggesting that most of the changes implemented since NCLB have had no, or modest, effect; and, infused through it all, brow-knitted worry about the seeming intractability of most problems in education. If collective interaction in netspace can have a "mood", then the adjectives I'd choose are "grim", "weary", "(not) optimistic", and even "rudderless". Fanboys of tech-in-ed are quieter as it becomes clear(er) that tech, at least as it has been implemented so far, is not a panacea, but tech-trolls are equally de-energized as the debate has firmly shifted from "if" info- and netspace tech has a role in education to "what" and "how". The low-fruit answers to the problems in education seem picked clean including (perhaps even "especially") firing money cannons loaded with circuits, software, and networks at ed and expecting (hoping) for something new to happen.

Frankly, I look at this winter-of-discontent as a good thing because now maybe we can finally get down to business… the business of recognizing that a Kuhn-style paradigm shift may be in the works.

First, I want to clean up a couple of anticipated nuclear misinterpretations of what I just wrote. I am not in the “education has failed” crowd. Why? With a little anthropology fairy dust, I see a remarkable accomplishment in what the U.S. and the world-at-large has accomplished in education when compared to human cultures across time and space. I also see education-as-enculturation and, thus, interpret our struggles to “reform” education as a collective recognition (belief) that the product(s) of our current structural, formal, institutional enculturation process are insufficient to our (collective) perceived needs – compounded by a lack of consensus about what these needs might actually be. It’s a protest with a chant that goes, “What do we want? We dunno! When do we want it? Now!” Yes, yes. I know that there are literally a million people working that problem, each with ideas about what education needs to be and do (and I tip my hat to everyone working the problem). But when you stand back from this Million Reformer March, what you hear is a very noisy… babble. No idea(s) exist at this moment which organizes the competing voices into major structures of consensus. The only thing close in scale is the ongoing process of creating national standards which, in the end, is merely a recapitulation of the old way of doing the education thing; the “old wine, new bottle” trick (standards-folks, my sensors indicate that you are powering up your weapons and preparing to fire).

The other clean-up detail is around the use of “paradigm shift”. I love Kuhn and think he was onto something with the whole paradigm thing. However, I don’t love the way that “paradigm shift” is tossed about by a very many others. Most folk’s ideas about what constitutes a new paradigm are… ridiculously unimaginative, woefully small, and completely within the old paradigm they think they are breaking. Quantum physics was a new paradigm that stranded even greats like old Einstein himself. Standards (fact)-based education is not. (Anticipating an ad hominem attack, I employ honest evasive maneuvers by stating for the record that while I may sound a bit “superior” in my delivery, I am not making any sort of claim to having “The Answer” but I do think I have a tiny little question or observation or two up my sleeve.)

So… while you’re sharpening your knives, can you point me to where in this big old education system of ours we’re seeing trend-lines from actual data that makes anyone resoundingly happy and hopeful? Yeah, me neither. But we’ve tried a lot of things over the years, haven’t we? While U.S. education has been the object of near-constant reform efforts for a couple of hundred years, Sputnik induced a collective pants-wetting over education that we’re still cleaning up from today. Actually, I view this high-energy do->fail (sometimes succeed)->learn cycle as a good thing, especially in light of the enormous delta we face in every area of our world and our cultures. I think we individually and collectively fail to appreciate and reflect upon this change-delta we’ve created for ourselves; it’s not trivial and it has real and present impact upon the problem of education. In fact, that sense of discontent about the products of education today are symptomatic of our incomplete recognition that culture-delta-v is higher than education-delta-v, coupled with the reality that institutional education can only be a “lagging indicator” of culture-delta. Institutions take time to change.

One premise that I’ve offered here is that the low fruit has been picked. Any disagreements? Is this a claim that can be evaluated to true-ish? Another premise I’ve offered is that these low-fruit-solutions have come up short, either producing negative (says a victim of New Math), no, or only modestly positive results. Restated, we have had no out-of-the-park home runs, have we? (sorry about the sports metaphor :P) Again, any disagreements? If premise one and premise two are true-ish, then we must turn our attention to premise three: we need to do something different… really, really different. How different? I can’t say… but that’s the nature of the paradigm shift isn’t it?

Kuhn suggested that there is a macro-process involved in human research, invention, and innovation. We collectively work within a range of what we think we know (a paradigm) until, eventually, our efforts start to fail and/or undermine the known. Being stubborn creatures (apparently *lol*), we cling to the old known until we are dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that the old known is bankrupt. If we’re lucky, some (deviant) person or group has been working on what the new-known might look like. Us lowing herds then waddle over to the new known and make it the (new)old known and, voila, a paradigm shift has occurred. Pretty spiffy and magical, eh?

There are some tricky bits to this process. One, paradigm shifts hurt. We love our known-knowns, and we build careers around them. What kind of career does one have when the new-known is a career assassin? And what about those deviant folks that just won’t let a known-known live in peace? Paradigm killers are dangerous folks to the established order of things. Two, how does one go about evaluating a new paradigm from the perspective of the old one? The issue here is that some folks going about trying to invent new paradigms are… using kind and generous words… working zero or low-probability vectors of discovery and invention while others are merely inventing/discovering things that look utterly ridiculous from within the old paradigm (can anyone say “God doesn’t play dice with the universe”?). See the difference? *lol* Evaluating and separating new paradigm wheat from chaff is more difficult than separating uranium isotopes… and with greater consequences, too. I do not have any idea how to solve that particular problem, but neither did Kuhn in the end. Three, I never had the impression from reading Kuhn that he thought that much in the way of control could be exercised over the paradigm shift process. [Paradigm shifts] happen like “creativity”, “eureka moments”, “epiphanies”, and “Great American Novels”.

We have a problem. I detect out there in the world a feeling that we don’t have unlimited amounts of time to solve the education problem. I feel it, too. Oh, I could lay out the social justice argument and say that we are harming each generation that has to suffer through an edSystem that doesn’t arm it with adaptive traits. I could point out that, at the world-collective level, we face dire problems like global climate change that really demand an all-hands effort from a well-educated populace. I could also suggest that our current range of socio-political-economic systems across the globe are creaking under the strain of disparities in education and opportunity, or observe that replacing the high school diploma with a college diploma as the new minimum ticket for full participation in the economy is having… interesting… consequences. Whatever justification suits, I believe that many of us hear the clock ticking. So if we have picked the low fruit, and the low fruit hasn’t gotten the job done, then we’re left with inventing more difficult (to conceive, to develop, to implement) solutions, up to and including undergoing a full-scale paradigm shift in education. If it is a paradigm shift we need but (real) paradigm shifts are difficult-or-impossible to cause, control, or evaluate (and threaten to make a lot of career-invested folks and institutions very unhappy), then we are in a bit of a pickle, aren’t we? And time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into an uncertain, high delta-v (and potentially dangerous) future.

I wish I had an answer. But I do have a question. Do we really have a good handle on what we know about education right now?

I ask because I see an awful lot of folks in different disciplines not talking to one another. I also see that our knowledge has grown so large that we’re forced by scale to specialize in increasingly narrow ways. I see that our tools for organizing, evaluating, and even finding knowledge are not keeping pace with our needs. I sense a… resistance… to big picture/big theory thinking; notions like “transdisciplinarity” seem a bit… contaminated… with marginality. I feel… amused… when adjectives like “national” are tacked to the problem of education and… sad… when I do not hear the voice of anthropology anywhere in the mainstream of discussion about education. I see many word-concepts being invented but too often find myself sipping that damnable old wine again from a shiny new bottle. I see assumption-based canon running amok to redutio ad absurdum ends. I see a lot of structural investment in the way things are and I see this investment functioning as an individual and collective “confirmation bias” working against what might or should be. In the end, I’m not convinced that even the best and brightest working on the problem of education really grok the full extent of both what we already know and the real scale, scope, and complexity of the problem.

I think we need to spawn an effort to collect and evaluate everything related to education and learning, and put it into one big pile: biological, neurological, psychological, social, cultural, political, economic, etc. The head, the tail, the whole damn thing. I don’t know how to cause a paradigm shift but I suspect that it’s possible to increase the probability of one occurring. Insight is often the result of a change in perspective, and perspective is often a matter of knowledge… and some damn good questions. I wonder what we would find while trying to sort out a big, messy pile like that?

Why did I write this diatribe (in addition to the reasons given at the start)? The catalyst was an article I read this morning called “We Can’t Teach ‘Critical Thinking’ Until We Learn How to Assess It” (http://etcjournal.com/2011/03/07/we-cant-teach-critical-thinking-until-we-learn-how-to-assess-it/). We love answers, don’t we? The core of our evaluation models in education are all about answers, usually in the form of regurgitation of learned facts but also well-reasoned opinion sometimes; our evaluation paradigm is “fact-answer”. But what about questions… damn good questions… the kind of questions that cause insight or precede it… the kind of questions that make an old paradigm quiver and a new paradigm flicker in your peripheral vision? What about this saccharin platitude that there are no such things as stupid questions? I’m sorry but I do think that there are stupid questions (ready photon torpedoes)… or, being of a more charitable spirit, questions that suggest that the asker hasn’t really spent much time or effort on those sorts of things which precede good questions, like paying attention or staying awake or thinking. But if we allow that not all questions are “good” then we also allow for the possibility that questions can be evaluated. Hmmm… assessing questions. Grading questions. Making question-asking an educational priority. What a strange and ridiculous thought, but a thought somehow related to critical thinking… and to the problem of reforming education itself… and to the process of paradigm shifting, more generally. Almost... deviant.

Could taking a fresh look at the value of questions (vs. answers) be important? Or is that just a stupid question? For those of you who do, in fact, believe that there are no such thing as stupid questions, I expect my questions to be treated with the politically-correct gentleness they deserve. *lol* For the rest of you… game on!

++vn

An (Im)modest Proposal for the Solution to Everything

Ah, who cares about the deficit! The only reason I care about the deficit is because our international credit is maxxed which means we don't have enough coin to "encourage" more countries to our right, and supremely successful, way of life.... We'll never have peace until we force everyone to choose American-style democracy and freedom. Since before the American Revolution, one of our mottoes has been "Live Free or Die!", a slogan that we mistakenly interpret as "I will live free or die trying" when, in fact, it really means "Hey world, choose freedom or we'll kill you" (funny how distorted things like that get over time). I bet if we get another 5 or 10 aircraft carrier battle groups, a bunch more countries will see the error of their ways.

Here's my budget reform plan: What we really need to do is collapse all federal departments into the Department of Defense so that we can streamline administration of federal programs (thus saving a ton of money) and better align our budget with our priorities (saving the world from its own stupidity).

Think about it! The public ed system could then focus on subject matter more relevant to the defense of our great nation instead of silly wastes of money like music, art, literature, or world history. What does "liberal arts" have to do with anything? Classroom management problems would simply disappear if teachers had the latitude that military instructors have to enforce discipline. Colleges and universities could be reformed to a military academy model. National infrastructure programs could focus on getting the best bang for the buck instead of wasting time with contradictory local priorities. Social Security could be rolled into the VA. Medicare and Medicaid could be integrated with the outstanding military medical system. Welfare programs could be integrated with the military induction system so that we could stop all those ticks and leeches (welfare moms and deadbeat dads) from sucking blood off of hardworking Americans (we've got several thousands of miles of borders to guard don't we?). How much money could we save if we got rid of the U.S. Aid program entirely? And while Tang and Velcro are a couple of nice things from civilian scientific research, military research gave us the Internet and the Hummer! How cool is that!!! Oh, and think about how we easily we could solve the housing crisis in this country if the inventory of foreclosed homes became"base housing"! Oh, oh... the PX system is nice right now but imagine if Walmarts were turned into PX's! How cool would that be? And turning around the consumer economy would be easy with a bunch more spendy grunts around. Have you ever seen an E-3 without a large screen TV and an awesome smart phone??? Of course not!

*sigh* I could go on and on but the reality is that our national political discourse is too dishonest to recognize the brilliance of my plan. The evidence for the genius of my ideas is right in front of them! Think about it... have you ever seen the U.S. military protesting like those stupid teachers in Wisconsin? Of course not! You ever see soldiers forming unions? Of course not! And who saved Egypt's collective bacon? The Egyptian military, of course (a military patterned after, and trained, funded, and provisioned by, our own incredible military system, I might add!). Instead, the Libbers and Repluglicks and Boston Tea Baggers will keep bleeding this great nation dry with a bunch of stupid ideas instead of reaching out for a model of governing and administration that WORKS: the Department of Defense!

(all hail the Ori)
++vn

The Customization Cluetrain (or Another Tech-as-Narrative)

Article Link: VW unveils new model of microbus loved by hippies

VW shows off a 180+ mile-per-charge electric kool-aid sequel to the hippie fav microbus that may or may not see production *yawn... I mean, niccccce :P*. Ok, I like looking at it but in the same way I liked looking at the Stargate: SG1 episode "1969"; cute but leaves me thinking "filler". The "V" in VW must stand for "version" since nearly every car in their lineup is a version of another car. So why am I posting (for reasons other than being a troll *lol*)? This quote: "...uses an iPad to control the entertainment system, climate control and other functions."

It appears that someone else realizes that smart mobile devices (smartphones, pads) contain the minutia of our identities *and* realizes that these tidbits might have relevance to customizing/personalizing our vehicles. I say "someone else" because I tossed this observation out as loose talk in a conversation a month ago. The argument goes like this: 1) car companies have spent a lot of money over the years creating all sorts of proprietary, walled-garden customization gizmos that, as a whole, have probably cost more in development than they've earned, 2) car companies, by and large, know jack about UI (user interface) design, 3) tech is moving so rapidly that "today's" cool features (cooked up years ago, given common design-to-market cycles in the auto industry) are less-than-fresh almost as soon as they hit the market, 4) since folks are already loading their smart devices up with personal identity, 5) and know how to use their devices (presumably), 6) and are used to "there's an app for that", 7) why not ride the cluetrain to limiting the design of vehicle controls to "core systems" plus a common interface standard with smart devices, 8) so that smart devices perform the heavy lifting on customizing (really, providing the data for customizing) and controlling (a little trickier what with potential reliability/availability issues in smart devices compared to vehicles) what is customizable in a vehicle.

Some flavor of this thinking appears to be at work in VW's decision to use an iPad in "microbus: redux". That's cool.

Gone would be the search through the manual for that one silly way to set the driver-side seat adjustments. Gone would be pushing buttons randomly on the good-looking-but-useless flatscreen control panel on the dash that is different in every car that has one. Instead, pop open an app, use controls you already know, and race down the road in a lovely bubble of your own idiosyncrasies. Rental car companies! Are you listening?

Yes, yes. I know the devil is in the details but I also know this: I'm not the only one that gets pished transferring parts or the whole of my identity to make tech go. And I also know that the smart-mobile category isn't going away anytime soon (the Zombie Apocalypse being the major foreseeable crimp in the trend). So get busy, peeps! Post-Convergence means that isolated (and isolating) innovation will fail and the distinction between "device" and "person" is almost meaningless. Ride the cluetrain so that we can ride in comfort in any vehicle we plunk our cybernetic selves into. Now off with you... and don't come out until you're done! And while you're down in the Mad Scientist Dungeon, make me that fusion powered flying car that was promised to me in the "21st Century" *cue dramatic music sting*.

++vn

Argh... wiggle me jelly!

One viewer was "weirdly excited" by this machine *facepalm* making me want open up a can of Pop-Psych on his @ss... but then I realized the video was making me want to channel my inner pirate. An image flashed through my head of a pirate ship attacking a fleet loaded with New World gold, firing broadsides of pre-wiggled jello from spring-loaded bases, red and green and yellow giggly deserts arching through the air, savagely splintering decks and hulls with stir-and-chill goodness, picket ships sinking as mortar crews finish off the hail of destruction with non-dairy whipped topping, pirates boarding the flagship with sharpened spoons in their teeth. Wow... Like Apple, the creator of this machine has created a narrative of how technology should interface with a life. :P

Ctrl-Alt-Del

Where'd the old content go? To SenseiGinsu. Hey, doing is learning... and I learned that I wasn't writing in VN's bloice. I also learned that I'm a person of two minds who needs two blogs to express himself. SenseiGinsu is the rational academic me; VN is... something else. :P

Some of you who know me well know that I've been frustrated by the lack of what I call "personas" in netspace. Some of you have even given me stinkeye because you think that personality is unitary whole backed by some crystal-worshiping nonsense about finding your "true self". So I say to you, *bleh* -and- if you really are just one version of yourself in all situations then you might need to think long and hard about how honest you're really being with yourself 'cause what I see is folks being different flavors of themselves in all kinds of situations. I've see it informally and I've seen in with the professional eye of an anthropologist. And I'm backed up by a bunch of social psych, sociology, and anthro lit.

Something else: at first, I worried a bit that folks might not "get"... take seriously... discount... pre-judge... dismiss... (dunno) my SenseiGinsu side if they saw the Nepharious side. Well, phunk that! is my thinking now. Once someone gives me a manual for living that I don't have to scrape off the bottom of my shoe, I'll consider trimming myself down to a one-size-fits-all personality. Until then, I'll be riffin' on life.

All hail, Nepharious and Ginsu! *lol*