Banapana

The Net Makes You Stupid, Just Like TV?

Oh good lord. Why is that every medium that comes along has to be analyzed in this completely non-productive, irrational way. Nicholas Carr over at Atlantic Monthly is jumping on the bandwagon of the Google-makes-you-stupid folks. He starts with something I’ve heard a thousand times anecdotally from others:

My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

“Oh nooo. I’ve been using the internet and now I can’t concentrate.” It’s not the net, it’s you. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. The net doesn’t make you unfocused, you do. I’ve been using the web since it was and although I went through a period where I realized I was just too distributed through various channels, I got ahold of myself and started prioritizing and organizing. I learned to use tabs while browsing. I got NetNewsWire. I stopped reading everything right away and started building chronologies of stuff TBR (to be read) on del.icio.us and now Laterloop.

Not only can I still read books, I read books that are longer than human history. That’s right, I put that link there to distract you! You can’t resist clicking on it, can you!? No, because the web and email have made you an unfocused idiot. The problem here, Carr—the only problem—is that while you are literate, you are not web literate. It’s changing the way you think because you don’t know how to control it. It’s no different than television, folks, either you know when to turn it off, or you’re a couch potato. It ain’t the TV that’s the problem.

Peter Gabriel Announces thefilter.com

This is kind of tough, because I am a huge fan of Peter Gabriel—not only as a musician, but as an interactive artist who has often been very far ahead of the curve. But this latest effort, a new site to help you sort through all the media out there is a real loser. One among many, in fact.

For starters, the site has all the trappings of a me-too effort that is easily three years late to the game. Among its competitors I would count Amazon, Last.fm, Pandora (my favorite), Finetune, Imeem, musicfilter.com as well as some other fronts (i.e. besides the web) like iTunes and music magazines (remember those?) Then to make matters more difficult for themselves, thefilter.com is going to filter everything!—music, movies, web video and tv.¹ And the thing is, most of the sites that I’ve listed above actually get it wrong anyway. Seriously.

Itunes manages to predict lots of things that I like but have heard before. The same goes for last.fm. And I have used the heck out of both of those sites. But its a simple fact that my own regular explorations of blogs and sites and rss feeds (and listening to what my sister likes) allows me to find tons of more stuff than any recommendation engine. Except for one.

Pandora.com that can actually recommend music I’ve not heard of before on my own and the clear difference is in methods, with last.fm and iTunes and all the rest using the “neighbor” model (people who like what you like also like…) and Pandora actually employing a lot of DJs to catalog tracks. They call it the music genomeproject and it’s brilliant. Until computer algorithms are good enough to actually analyze the sound files and not just people’s listening habits, foraging new frontiers is going to be very hard for them.

The filtering process is becoming a truly necessary component of the web and what is really going to continue to drive new customers to the long tail and the frontiers but this neighbor filtering process is just not up to the task. Tastes evolve and not necessarily at the same rate in the same direction. None of the examples I’ve listed of these filters that use the neighbor system have introduced me to anything.

Of the nine movies that thefilter.com wanted me to rate in order to join (a poor usability decision, by the way) I had seen three. That just doesn’t bode well for the site. Nor does the fact that it is a series of lists of music that I have to listen to and rate. So, let me get this straight; filtering is good because it makes it easier to hear new things, you just have to do a little work first. There’s no way you could, say, import a playlist of mine from iTunes? Sorry, but thefilter.com is a day late and a dollar short.

By the way, small note here, but what’s the difference between those last three options anymore? ↩

Death By Cute

Asketh Google an ye shall receive! I typed in “Death by Cute” and got an excellent entry on the new Hello Kitty AR-15 rifle. All is well with human kind.

Graffinima

From Buenos Aries and Baden and the obviously bent mind of Blu comes this beautiful animation called “Muto“. But don’t suppose this is just any animation, this is a motion piece done on public walls over what must have been a period of weeks or years. The soundtrack, created by Andrea Martignoni [^1], is appropriately strange and stilted. The lack of standing camera work on the animation gives it a very unsettling life, like watching time-lapse footage of slow-moving living artwork. This is one of the most creative ideas I’ve seen on the internet in months.

[^1:] I’m not clear yet at to whether this obscure mp3 link is the same Andrea Martignoni, but the sound is similar. I’m looking into it.

Cyborgs Among Us

The inventor of the super-hyped segway scooter has accomplished something a little more serious: highly impressive mechanical prosthetics.

Find Your Ideal Career

This is the latest in psychometric computational assistance! Just answer a few simple questions and the Jobbotron will email you your ideal career! Need proof that it works? It’s run on a Cray 15 and brought to you by the folks at You Look Nice Today—how could you go wrong?

Your Project For Today

Matt Robinson told me to do it. I did it, and now I’m telling you to do it. Wave at a stranger and keep waving until they wave back at you. It will work; you will both smile!

Iron Man Coming Close to Reality

I feel like I should maybe add a category to this blog, like “Things That Used to be Fiction,” but this article over at Physorg illustrates just how close we currently are to the summer’s biggest blockbuster so far.

In Response to Radar & Robert Lanham

I could really take a hatchet to this utter whinefest, this gooey-mass-of-over-generalizations of an editorial by Robert Lanham. But I’m just going to say one thing in response to his statement that the Millenials, “[are] always doing stupid shit, but rarely getting called on it.”

Are you ready, Mr. Lanham? Good. George W. Bush. ‘Nuff said.

Introducing Powerset

Despite the fact that “Semantic Web” has been trending down (at least in Google searches), it seems like more web sites devoted to it are popping up these days. I’ve been messing around with Twine for a fews weeks now and it seems pretty useful, although it definitely can’t accomplish what they claim. ¹ A new one that I stumbled into, via KurzweilAI.net is Powerset. My 30 second review is that I tried searches on two pretty obscure subjects that I’ve been reading about lately, the St. Petersburg factor² and kriegsspiel. Basically, I got the same search results at wikipedia, powerset and google—no immediately discernible differences.

A few nice things do stand out about Powerset. The ajaxy integration of content into the search results page is definitely a step up from Google’s fairly wimpy page snippets. This feature alone would make it much easier to peruse results for accuracy and usefulness.³ I’m also impressed with the fact that Powerset appears to be gathering data from Freebase—an important open source database of information that’s a fundamental step towards creating a semantic web.

But if you ask Google and Powerset the question, “What is math?” you get pretty different answers. Google says:

a science (or group of related sciences) dealing with the logic of quantity and shape and arrangement

Powerset says:

MATH is an American Improv/experimental band formed in Woodstock, New York in the mid 90s.

While this may be true, I don’t think it wins the semantic claims any points. True enough, if you ask “What is mathematics?” you get a better answer. But shouldn’t a search engine claiming semantic abilities understand synonyms? Apparently, not yet. But I’ll definitely keep using Powerset and report back as I understand more.

In short, they claim that it can be a replacement for Del.icio.us and your blog and most things social. They don’t apparently understand some important rules about personalization in this regard. ↩
Weirdly, no one, including Google, had any information about this, which seriously makes me question its existence, since I’ve only seen one reference in a book so far! I’ll definitely have to post about it later. ↩
This reminds me, I really wish someone would create a feature that would allow you to eliminate search results from repeated searches. Like, let me save a search and then slowly cull it down to what I think are the relevant results. The data from those individuals who did the culling would surely be useful to the search engines. ↩