The Music Hack Day in NYC had lots of cool stuff being done, from Meta Data flows (esp around Sound Cloud) to cool Musical Instrument creation. The result: nearly 200 participants, hundreds (yes, hundreds) more on a waiting list, and over 70 projects completed in a weekend. The ChuckPad using Chuck and a $125 Novation Launchpad sounds very cool.

Zed Shaw is using the Chuck language for mixing music and physics. Sounds promising for Stimulating Learning Projects. *Chuck however is good for sound because it (more)

I have my Private Wiki running with PikiPiki on my MacBook Pro. I use Notational Velocity to synch that directory of notes (~2k of them) to the SimpleNote cloud. Then I use FlickNote on my Archos70 Tablet so I can read/write over there and later synch back up. I rarely edit with the SimpleNote WebApp or with Notational Velocity. Longer past notes at 2011-07-20-ArchosAndroid[[Private Wiki]]. (more)

Venkatesh Rao suggests the fruits of Technological Revolution-s cycle through "material, object, and cognitive" motifs. *Why is this cycling important? Well, for all you futurists out there who are stuck in a mental rut asking yourself, what’s the next big thing (Huge Invention)? the next big thing is almost certainly not going to be a thing at all (object motif). It’s going to be a material motif. So the right question is what’s the next new material? (more)

Venkatesh Rao has left his nice job for an undefined Free Agent future. He's contemplating how many Life Style Company-s are based on a Business Philosophy rather than a Business Model. A business model is about how to Make Money. A business philosophy is about redefining Money... A business philosophy is also not a normative construct like a Mission or vision. It is about viewing the economic realities of life in a way that helps you make financial choices. So a business philosophy, at its simplest, is a motto about money that actually works. (more)

Venkatesh Rao on Fertile Variable-s and Rich Move-s. *Optimization is based on models, and this failure mode has to do with what you have left out of your model (either consciously or due to ignorance or a priori unknowability). If there are a couple of dozen relevant variables and you build a model that uses a half-dozen, then among those chosen variables, some will have more coupling to variables you’ve left out than others. Such variables serve as proxies for variables that aren’t represented in your model. I’ll overload a term used by statisticians in a somewhat related sense and call these variables fertile variables. Time is a typical example. Space is another. Money is a third, and particularly important because ideological opinions about it often blind people to its fertile nature. Physical Fitness is a fourth. Fertile variables feed powerful Pattern-s of action based on what I will call rich moves. (more)

Paul Graham's excellent "Hackers (Hacker) and Painters" piece What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things... (more)

FaceBook has reached 1 Billion active users.

I'm inspired to write this by this article about owners of a restaurant getting hate calls and even threats because they refused to allow Mitt Romney to have a campaign stop at their place. (more)

Cory Doctorow on on the Gary Taubes article about the diet aspects of Physical Fitness. (more)

A 9.7in EInk Kindle was announced today, for summer delivery for $489. (more)

JamesHughes on the potential battles between the George W Bush administration and the NBIC crowd. The NBIC's initial report stunned even the most optimistic techno-utopians with its predictions of rapid human enhancement, life extension and nano-neural interfaces in the coming decades. Turns out that when people on the cutting edge of the molecular, information and cognitive sciences begin to talk about merging their fields and applying them to extending the human body and brain, things get very transhumanist (Transhumanism) very fast - nanobots or no nanobots... These attacks from the pulpit have put the fear of God into Roco and the NBIC program. At the recent February meeting of the NBIC in New York City, which I attended, Mihail Roco objected strenuously when panelists such as "neuroethicist" Zack Lynch began to wax poetic about the posthuman implications of the endeavor. Bush appointee Philip Bond, undersecretary for technology in the Department Of Commerce, was on hand to endorse the NBIC program, but made a special effort to note that its implementation should respect ethics and "human dignity.".. The week after the USC report, in an example of the kind of bold bring-it-on leadership we've come to expect, LeonKass and the Bush administration replaced two of the most forthright advocates of Stem Cell research on the President's Council on Bioethics with three prominent Christian right-wingers.

Distinguishing this from Extropian attitudes is messy... (more)

The Reading Machine (Thinking System? Thinking Space?) (hardware + software) I want.... (more)

Austrian School (more)

Group responsible for the Limits To Growth report

author (more)

The Senate will be voting on a bill that will direct American military resources not at an enemy shooting at our military in a war zone, but at American citizens and other civilians far from any battlefield — even people in the United States itself... The worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial provision is in S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Bill, which will be on the Senate floor on Monday. The bill was drafted in secret by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) and passed in a closed-door committee meeting, without even a single hearing. (more)

Current RDF/Object Browser questions to research: (more)

A single-user application that recognizes different entity types and connections among them. And can then make that data available to other applications running on the DeskTop our out on the net. Semantic Web, RDF. (more)