Forget I Before

To my Fall 2014 students...

2014-12-23T14:13:00.000-06:00

Saints,

If you are reading this, you are probably at the end of taking a course with me, and have chosen to include me in your social media sphere. Thank you in each and every case.

And, thank you for being part of a very challenging and rewarding semester! I have had access to hundreds and hundreds of pages of intelligent and thought-provoking writing, research, and commentary. With nearly 100 students this semester, I KNOW I didn't get a chance to work with you as closely as we could hope. It is my wish that I get to know the Saints as well as I am able, and in a progressively meaningful context. My office hours and the studio are always open to you as resources. I look forward to working with you in the future (note the non-apophantic language here).

The Media Literacy publication will be available over break and in the Spring in digital and print forms. I will have a few physical copies available in my office. It turned out well. I would grade it at 170/200 XP. This means that it was the best journal I have seen published in my Media Literacy courses, and that is an achievement! It could have been even stronger if we had another week or two, perhaps. We were starting to work very well together as a whole. I adjusted that final score (170) in all course audits (many anticipate perfection!) and this might affect some grades on the borderline.

For individuals in all my classes, I had some minor discrepancies and disagreements with your conclusions in the course audits. If you feel I have reached your grade in error, I will happily amend the grades with the Registrar. We can meet in the spring at your earliest convenience and look at your audit and work. If you received in 'I' for incomplete, we are converting 'I' into 'F' grades with the Registrar at a given point in the Spring. In most cases, I am willing to work with you to make sure you complete any outstanding work prior to the conversion.

Let me say that this was an exceptional Fall for the Saints, probably the best academic work I have seen in my time at the college. If I could, there were several A+ grades I would send to the records. Hannah and Sean come to mind immediately.

I will keep your work indefinitely. I am either an archivist or a hoarder. If you ever need copies, look me up.

I hope to see you in the new year.

a real planetary prison

2014-02-07T15:47:00.000-06:00

James Barrat opens his book Our Final Invention with a description of 'The Busy Child'. This is his description of artificial superintelligence, ASI, emerging out of scientific attempts to build artificial general intelligence, AGI. The Busy Child is the final invention, quickly, irreversibly, exponentially more intelligent than the humans who sought to build it. And from there, the forum is open for all of us to imagine, now in the position of holding a greater intelligence captive as mice may hold...well...a busy child.

Last night as I tried to drift away to sleep, I read Ray Kurzweil's review of Her by Spike Jonze. Now this may seem a bit rude of me, but I think of Kurzweil as the grandfather of singularity speculation. He is the big-head-whatever of Google's cutting edge engineering whatever thing, and so obviously more qualified by the world to be the rude one. The authority figure. And he is authority to me, yes, like a grandpa. As a 34-year-old man who also spends a good deal of time contemplating the Singularity, I see a lot of personal bias in his life journey, his contributions, his inventions, his drives. I have read a lot of his work, watched his films, watched films about his ideas, studied with his students coming out of his University, and I think I like him, as a kind person can like another from afar.

I think the fun part of this time, early 2014, is witnessing the Singularity become more and more of a thing that is beginning to pervade the mainstream. There was Philip K. Dick, and, I'm oversimplifying for the sake of time, then The Matrix, and pretty soon we had a cadre of philosophers talking about technology in mainstream books and documentaries on cable TV... and Kurzweil getting his school going and now we've got Her and I enjoyed reading the screenplay for the upcoming Johnny Depp movie about nanotechnology and all this great fun stuff.

I finished my own little contribution to the conversation, ἀρχή, my dissertation flowing out of the four years I spent immersed in the European Graduate School system...I am happy to report that the school is real and amazing and you have to travel to the Swiss Alps to get there but it's worth it, especially in this age of online education--it's nice to have a truly 'nonline' zag to all the new zigs. And though my little book has been renamed Principle, probably by an Amazon.com Bot (which is delightfully ironic to me), I am not concerned about whatever hole of obscurity I am pushed into. I prefer it, I think. The thinking from the hole is the first archivable substance--not the resulting pages or the listing price. I am glad we are learning to forego the vanity presses in favor of a re-emerging...principle.

In the weeks ahead, along with the bitcoins and the nanotech, expect more about Johnny Depp and The Busy Child as merely the beginning steps of a crazy adventure into...1994, perhaps? I have been on this 1994 kick recently as a way of exploring Singularity as an event of the past. Many seem to place it into the safety of the future, but we know that if it is ever to be real, it will pass. The issue becomes radically different as it passes, and even the Busy Child would tell you that if she weren't so busy setting your mousetrap...

A bit about coins...part one

2014-02-03T14:52:00.003-06:00

I have become interested in some things that until recently seemed very boring. For instance, a friend of mine regularly reads The Economist. I have always thought that economists must lead boring professional lives...maybe they somehow leverage what they know for their own sound economic decisions. Maybe they can soundly advise their constituents in order to prevent unnecessary loss in the world of markets. Maybe 'the' market is a great thing to know about. I looked into it, and it seemed to be a pen of intellectuals and politicians vying for some kind of intel in a field that ought not be too intelligible.

Ahhh! - even beginning to write about it is setting me up for a boring stint at the keyboard.

All I want to write about is the Bitcoin. But I can't just write about the Bitcoin, because who knows anything about it? Whatever we know, we caught from piecemeal articles here and there, which really have provided nothing substantial. I am willing to speculate here about our knowledge of Bitcoin, since I have studied it closely over the past few months, and have a sense of the way others write about it. I have an idea of what my friends know about it, which is very little. And if you are reading this and you know much about it, please enlighten me (@roblarson1979). Please?

The Bitcoin is this digital world currency that showed up a few years ago, programmed out of 1s and 0s by a virtually anonymous entity, and wasn't worth much of anything until less than a year ago. When each Bitcoin was worth less an ounce of silver, again, less than a year ago, I had been exploring small vendor sites that printed the Bitcoin 'codes' on physical silver coins. I thought they were neat. You could get an ounce of silver and it had a code on it that was also worth money somehow. It was the perfect amalgamation of a real physical precious metal and a purely digital notion of currency. And at the time, less than a year ago, you could get these coins for less than fifty American Dollars:

Before the end of last year, those same coins were worth well over a thousand dollars. For a bit.

Right now... there are newly emerging coins just like last year's physical Bitcoins. We might call these new coins the little brothers and sisters of the Bitcoin. Digital currency speculators are coming out in mass to do this year what the Bitcoin vendors did last year. Who wouldn't want to turn ordinary silver (even copper!) coins into thousands of dollars in a matter of weeks? In fact, last week 14,000 interested world citizens tuned into digital media streams of a meeting held by US Currency Regulators over the future of digital currency regulation. The Bitcoin and other emerging digital world currencies are drawing the attention of many parties, and one central issue seems to be the anonymity of buying and selling with these currencies as well as the wholesale bypass of established central banking authorities and regulations.

Let's put this into laypeople's terms. We are all able to learn a bit about Bitcoin from Wikipedia, and I won't go into those details, but the bottom line is there is a purely digital currency that translates into all other world currencies and commodities. In other words, you can trade your gold, real property, dollar bills and yen for Bitcoin. And if you want to cash in your Bitcoin for any of these aforementioned items, you can do that, too. You can do this, so they say, completely anonymously and without involving any central banking authority or regulating agency. For now. And this all seems to be a closing portal into some Wild West economy. There are many reasons for the closing portal, but perhaps the easiest way to see the trouble is by looking into the recent cases of Bitcoin-accepted online trading posts like Silk Road and Sheep Marketplace.

These 'bandit outposts' as portrayed by the mainstream media are apparently havens for the anonymous buying and selling of drugs and weapons, even human trafficking. The transactions happen on an international, borderless, mysterious, anonymous, unregulated scale. I first found out about these kinds of storefronts when I saw eBay-style vendors online who were A) accepting Bitcoin, and B) selling name brand cigarettes at about (a Bitcoin equivalent of) ten dollars per carton, shipped discreetly worldwide. And that was when the Bitcoins themselves were worth less than twenty dollars each. When the intrinsic value of the Bitcoin shot up to a thousand dollars each a few months later, the people buying cigarettes with Bitcoins were kicking themselves. They went from smoking dollar-a-pack cigarettes and laughing to smoking fifty dollar a pack cigarettes (if they would have just held onto those precious Bitcoins!) -- and that was about the time many, many more people than a few free radicals and computer nerds got interested in the old XBT.

The plot only thickens at this point. The Feds in the United States caught on to these digital Wild West schemes, and took a few of them down. Silk Road is the one most commonly referred to in the media. The Silk Road Bitcoins were seized, which, interestingly enough, made the US government suddenly one of the largest holders of the digital currency at a time when the currency itself was rapidly increasing in value. Later (as in six days ago), it would come out that people involved in the very inception of Bitcoin were implicated as stakeholders in Silk Road. Note that these details are all suddenly being revealed to the masses by the largest, most reputable media outlets in the US. Meanwhile, regulating agencies are dashing to somehow get a grip on the currency, though some of these potential regulators are the exact people with large vested interests in the currency itself.

I must admit, I love studying the development of the Bitcoin. The people involved are amazing. Take Barry Silbert, whose report is linked to in the last paragraph. He brazenly wears two hats: Hat 1 is Founder and CEO of SecondMarket, a site that both invests in and facilitates Bitcoin-related commerce. Through SecondMarket, a consumer can invest in the BIT, or Bitcoin Investment Trust. The BIT is like Bitcoin stock, in that investors can buy and sell BIT without getting involved with the Bitcoin itself. Silbert also created the Bitcoin Oppotunity Fund, which is a 'package of Bitcoin-related companies'. Consumers can invest in the BOF much like they would a mutual fund. This is all well and good; Silbert has the appropriate licenses and is probably very, very happy with the way the Bitcoin story (climb) has gone so far.

Silbert's other hat is the somewhat self-appointed watchdog of a future regulatory system for the Bitcoin. He recently participated in the New York State Department of Financial Services hearing on possible Bitcoin regulation. This is simply amazing to me. We have a new generation of currency. So new, in fact, that nobody really seems to know how to perceive it. It is the sheer unpredictability and lack of regulation that seems to generate its recent interest. There is a sense that it must be regulated somehow by someone. And, get this: the people beginning to step up and weigh in about its regulation are the people who have already got the most invested in it.

As I write this, it is difficult to articulate what exactly makes me so invested in the Bitcoin story. But I think to a certain degree it is my simple, unmitigated confusion. I am currently too intrigued by the investigation to keep writing today, but I will leave you with a visual representation and summary of what we see below:

The image above is a graphic representation of the Bitcoin's dollar value over the past week. Because it is somewhere between a commodity and a currency, I track its chart like it is gold or silver or oil. This kind of chart is simply not seen in any of the other commodities or currencies. If this activity were found on any other chart, we would all hear about it in the financial or even mainstream news. Why? Well, that is what I am working on now. These momentary dips and recoveries in Bitcoin's value represent large sell-offs followed by near instant buy-ups. It looks quite frankly like the orchestrated, anonymous transfer of extremely large sums of money from one entity to another. And you are hearing nothing about it. If this happened to any stock price, any currency exchange, or any commodity, you would hear about it. But with the Bitcoin, where do we even begin???

HERE.

To Be Continued...

- @roblarson1979
forgetibefore.blogspot.com

you read it to yourself the next day...what is left?

2014-01-30T15:47:00.002-06:00

When I was a boy, I used to draw with colored pencils. I wasn't good at shading. I wasn't really a good artist, not a natural...nothing spectacular. I don't mean to be self-deprocating. I was just an ordinary child drawing faces, dogs, cars.

I was much better at rhyming.

In either case, drawing or rhyming, I tuned into this sort of magic moment which seemed to occur the morning after I drew or wrote something. It was after I had a chance to sleep on it. To get up the next morning and confront the art from yesterday. That was when I could understand if the effort impressed me. Another trick - holding the drawing up to a mirror. The change in perspective helped me see if I had botched part of the picture.

Today, it is very much the same. It feels more like damage control. My efforts are more often in the public domain. If I do not like my drawing or rhyme the next morning, I have to pull it from the social media streams...quietly undo the business. Over time, I have noticed the old art is often not familiar. The old words are so obviously doctored up. Too many adjectives...sentences too long. Convoluted across the board...how do I catch on to that sooner?

Last night, I wrote a little from my heart, I wrote until my laptop battery died. I still haven't recharged it. I try to remember where I left off, or how far I got. I really can't remember much about it. It was late. I was writing quickly. The words are a roll of undeveloped film. Later, I find these rolls hidden around in the digital junk drawers of my life. A roll here, in a social media platform I forgot I used a year ago; a roll there, on an old blog. A few more rolls in a folder on my desktop. A handful scattered around in e-mail attachments. If I could collect all the undeveloped rolls and have them printed, stuck up on the walls around me...and I looked at them through mirrors and after a good night's sleep, what would I see? What would be left?

A keeper, I hope, here and there.

To all those keepers left undeveloped in the junk drawers of our lives: I have not lost hope in the secret gallery reserved for you...

A Certain Flair

2014-01-29T12:55:00.001-06:00

I teach journalism. I rarely use my social media for Op/Ed.

I used to use my blog and other social media for Op/Ed…primarily so. What are these blogs for, if not to speak from our passion of unique worldview? But I worked to pull out of this habit. The posts, as they collected, felt empty and hollow. I would look back on whatever had me emotional or opinionated, and I would often note that aging puts an expiration date on the validity of self-expression. Age especially distorts the expression of opinion. And when I put this together with the shelf life of news and the mainstream, my old musings and rants just seem so unrepresentative of the current issue of myself.

The realization described herein may be healthy. It currently affects a lot of my self-expression. My art projects do not hold up in time and are therefore rarely exhibited. My writing…forget about it. I dislike reading what I have written. It is at its best when it is simply reporting what was, and (hopefully) with a degree of competence and structure. More often than not, however, it is filled with useless extra words, ‘flair’ (which is repugnant to read later), poetic sentiments, etc. – in order to read sections of my dissertation even just a month after its publication, I must use a put-on British dialect as though the voice in the work is some scholarly foreign entity. Not me. Please don’t let this voice be mine.

What this has done with my art, my writing, my work is force me steadily into a (somewhat) self-imposed obscurity. My wife said recently that ‘I have FaceBooked myself into a corner’. My Twitter stream is syndicated into my Facebook, and apart from that stream, I don’t really post to Facebook. My wife is a Facebook master, regularly posting pictures of our beautiful daughter and kindly ‘liking’ the posts of our beloved friends and family. She also does the Christmas greetings and the thank you cards and she’s got these nice markers and a wonderful calligraphy as penladyship. She just personalizes everything she does socially. What a great help meet! Meanwhile, I am struggling with myself over whether I let ‘help meet’ into my blog. This is too personal. This is too much.

This is me in the corner.

I asked her what that meant, to Facebook myself into the corner. And she had it pegged. “You post the most obscure, off-putting stuff about bizarre technology and 3D printing and blah blah blah…” I am paraphrasing. She is right. I read articles, most often about new technology, computers, media theory…and when I am excited about something, I do my best to pass the articles along without corrupting them with my own self-attaching words. I think it is a bit self-indulgent to pass discoveries off as my own somehow. I found them, and that doesn’t mean I helped them to manifest. Usually I find them because someone I ‘liked’ found them first. So I report it forward in the most basic way I know. On the bright side, this has brought me away from investing in an Op/Ed blog, instead toward a journalistic sensibility. If anything, I cover a ‘beat’. The beat is what I’d rather call it over some word implying credit or even worse, bias. Of course I have a terribly deep sense of bias that is in turn drenched in mediocrity as it festers and masquerades as commentary and even poetry or the dreaded creativity. I try to pass this stuff off as creative? Creative? Tell that to my two years from now self, who is, believe me, a real critic. Today’s red corduroys and pocket square are the pink button down Abercrombie shirts of five years ago. I am left reeling in disgust at my own sense of flair. But I am married and I have a little baby now and so I can’t wear black everyday. And I am lying if I try to pass the red cords and the pink shirts off as though they weren’t in my DNA in their respective days.

So, yeah, I am tweeting and retweeting myself into a corner. Maybe it is the corner of the banal and inane. Or worse, the esoteric and clandestine. I suppose one corner isn’t big enough to be all these things. Can I present or represent the esoteric and clandestine in a legitimately banal and inane manner? If I can, then I will. I want to cover this particular beat, this beat of radical technology and media theory with as little sensationalism as possible. I have seen too many reasonably intelligent and persevering journalists ‘discredited’ willy-nilly as conspiracy theorists when the reports they have generated are very much tomorrow’s mainstream news. They are not prophets or conspiracy theorists, and sure, some of them do sell soap and market gold on the side there in the banner ads. But if that is somehow unfashionable to the mainstream, I think we ought to take a cold, banal look at what is being peddled in between the segments of the evening news. I could do with a little more reporting and a little less flair from my counterparts.

Radiohead

2013-04-08T12:13:00.001-05:00

Industry's First Direct Digital Audio

Processor to Transmitter Path Shown at NAB

Nautel and Omnia jointly creates system which digitally transfers the composite output of an audio processor directly to an FM broadcast transmitter.

8 April 2013

----

The long sought after goal of a fully digital transmission chain which doesn't sacrifice loudness has now been realized due to collaboration between two of the industry's leading organizations, Omnia and Nautel. The first result of that collaboration, the Omnia Direct fully digital composite interface, is being demonstrated at NAB 2013 and will be initially available in the Omnia.11 and Nautel NV series transmitters.

"Nautel and Omnia continually strive to maximize the performance of their respective products," said Peter Conlon, Nautel President and CEO. "As a result, both companies are recognized as bold innovators, constantly pushing the boundaries, even during these tough economic times. This exciting cooperation between our companies will benefit our customers by delivering the finest in sound quality to help them dominate the dial".

In the past, stations concerned about maximum modulation needed to use an analog composite signal. This was primarily due to the required high sample rate of A/D converters used to create discrete left/right inputs to the digital exciter. With the Omnia Direct interface, a single AES-EBU cable between the Omnia 11 and the Nautel NV Series transmitter carries the baseband signal in digital form. This 100% digital path eliminates the noise and distortion of A/D converters and reduces potential overshoots, while ensuring full FCC mask compliance.

"With Omnia Direct, we finally have the digital equivalent of the analog BNC-to-BNC composite (mpx) connection, where we can take the output of the audio processor's stereo generator and couple it directly to the modulator of the exciter. This enables the exciter to modulate, with precision, whatever the processor delivers," said Frank Foti, Telos Alliance CEO and Omnia Audio founder.

Initially, the Omnia Direct functionality is available on Nautel NV series transmitters from 3.5kW to 44kW. New transmitters are shipping with the feature as standard, and older NV series transmitters may be upgraded with the NV software release 4.0 which will soon be made available.

About Omnia Audio:

Omnia products represent the state-of-the-art in audio processing for virtually any application.

The top of the line Omnia.11 and the versatile Omnia.9, feature Single Sideband Suppressed Carrier capability for the potential reduction of multipath. Also available is the lower-priced Omnia ONE, which will process FM, AM, Internet, Studio applications or act as a Signal Generator on demand by simply changing software. Omnia 8x features eight, discrete Omnia processors in a single, networked appliance for multiple coded audio applications. On the software side, there is the Omnia A/XE for standalone encoding and processing of live internet streams as well as the Omnia F/XE for file-based encoding and processing. Omnia Audio offers 24/7 technical support.

About Nautel:

Nautel has emerged as one of the world's largest manufacturers of AM and FM radio broadcast transmitters. With more than 12,000 transmitters deployed in over 177 countries since 1970, Nautel continues to lead the way in providing valuable new solutions for digital radio broadcasting and other applications.

For media inquiries contact: Denny Sanders, Omnia Marketing Director at

denny.sanders@telosalliance.com

But is it 6,000 years or 4.X billion?

2012-12-18T16:04:00.001-06:00

From

http://news.discovery.com/space/artificial-universe-spiral-galaxy-120828.html

“New computer simulations can now recreate the kind of galactic communities seen in our universe, starting with the observed afterglow of the Big Bang and evolving forward in time. Harvard's Odyssey supercomputer allowed simulations that compressed nearly 14 billion years into only a few months.”

I wonder if God could rival the Odyssey with his computer…

Publication: "The New Horizon Run Cosmological N-Body Simulations," J. Kim et al, 2011.arXiv:1112.1754v1 [astro-ph.CO] via arXiv blog

a note from Sarah...

2012-03-26T11:59:00.000-05:00

Sounds good to me...

Forwarded Message -

Hi!

I wish it was a foggy, misty Friday night and we were curled up in our lovely living room watching The Sitter & eating exceptionally delicious Domino’s pizza. Or that it was Saturday morning and we were slowly getting ready to take a road trip. Or that it was Sunday afternoon and we were eating delicious lunch while we watched your mom open presents. But it’s Monday. And even worse, tomorrow is Tuesday – lots more early mornings and work to do before that kind of frolic.

But there is this. I can’t stop thinking about going back to Amsterdam! I did a little research during an early lunch break and came up with this check list of various things I read about, complete with hyperlinks & addresses, of wonderful adventures we could pursue this summer together in Holland.

Sounds dreamy…

1. Go see a movie at The Movies. It's a cute small movie theater that plays cult movies.

2. Eat at "Café de Curtis". Small restaurant; very good and very authentic. 2e Anjeliersdwarsstraat 6-HS.

3. Go to the Spui and find the little wooden, insignificant looking door and go through it. (I think it's close to the American Book Center.) The door leads you to the Begijnhof. It's great.

4. If the weather permits, walk around and sit in the Vondelpark on a nice day and look at the pretty people.

5. Go to Pastini Restaurant. Recommended by a vegetarian tourist who says: good vegetarian risotto with fruit & nuts, pasta, appetizers & tiramisu.

Nice romantic location with big windows looking out onto two canals.

6. Have a decent cup of coffee at Café Nassau, De Wittenkade 105a.

7. Take a boat tour with St. Nicholas boats at the Boom Chicago theater on the Leidseplein, for a picknick (that you bring yourself) on the grachten.

8. Go dance at the Melkweg, behind the Leidseplein.

9. Go to the Prinsen, Realen, and/or Bicker island and take a stroll.

10. Go into an Albert Heijn, a national grocery store chain. (There's a subterranean one by the Museumplein.) Buy some Dutch food: a bread, a package of sliced young cheese ("Jonge Kaas") and/or hagelslag, and vla for dessert. Drink some Spa with it.

11. Go to the Anne Frank house very early in the morning or 45 minutes before they close.

12. Visit the hip Westerpark with gardens, architecture, food, and drinks. (Restaurant "Amsterdam" is nice, very tasty, and not too expensive. It's on Watertorenplein 6, near the Westerpark.)

13. Shop second hand clothing at "Miss Petticoat", Lindengracht 99. ("old crap, but fun")

14. Friday afternoon concert ("lunch concert") in the Westerkerk (Wester church).

15. Go to the Vincent van Gogh museum.

: )

The Taming of the Shrew

2012-03-04T20:15:00.003-06:00

It was great to watch these players. You can watch by going to see them downtown, and check out this link for a nice picture show set to some good songs.

http://albums.phanfare.com/slideshow.aspx?i=1&db=1&pw=pZEdvLxd&a_id=5488196

"The Taming of the Shrew" - Wise Fool Shakespeare - Duluth, MN - March 2012

What if there are “Facebook Truman”s?

2012-02-29T00:12:00.001-06:00

The largest online social network is an enormous database of information about actual living human beings.

I use Facebook to manage my own online social identity. Recently, I discovered that my Facebook account, the same one I’ve used since 2005, has been disabled from all forms of advertising. I am not allowed to make Facebook ads. I have never tried to make a Facebook ad, but even if I wanted to, I can’t. I don’t know why, and no one will tell me why. No one will re-enable it for me, and that’s just all there is to it.

The other thing that I don’t like about Facebook is that they keep me completely in the dark about all web traffic details about my own Facebook page. THEY know exactly how many people visit my Facebook page. THEY even know most of the visitors as well as they know me (because THEY run Facebook). THEY even know how many times and for what purposes each unique visitor engages with my Facebook page.

They just don’t let me in on it.

This bothers me much more than randomly pulling my rights to advertise on my own Facebook page. If I were a gold and soap salesman, and I did this work in my life, I would be rather furious about being denied my ability to sell gold and soap on my Facebook page. I wonder if they would read my gold and soap loving profile and insert their own gold and soap contextual ads into my Facebook page, so that in the long run Facebook would have me selling someone else’s gold and soap instead of my own.

I should not be surprised if I am never able to advertise on my own Facebook page. I am not even able to see the monthly pageviews. How many people have visited my page? How many people have looked at my pictures? Who has defriended me? When did they do that? Do I get to know when my friends are writing me out? If I can’t know, how come Facebook gets to?

If the Facebook was my utility, I could use it to do incredibly powerful things. If I were, say, a secret agent…and I had an important government assignment, and I had been given the administrative privileges of the Facebook…I could ask it very dynamic questions in the process of an investigation. Facebook knows the private exchanges between adulterous lovers. It knows the number of times each person visits another person’s page, even (and dare I say especially) when the visitor does not comment or tag or like the host’s content.

That’s the real problem here. Facebook, for as active as it is, is mostly, quite MOSTLY passive. For every status update, like, tag, and upload there are many times more quiet, thoughtful meanderings through the endless archives. For every one ‘like’, there may be 50, 100, 200 views. It depends how many visitors I have, and how many people actually like my pictures…stuff I am never told. Data I am never allowed to access.

If I were using some other site—my own private site, a premium photo sharing site…I would have a statistics package. I could see my web traffic. And Facebook can see it all. When we start pages for college recruitment or soft drinks or rock bands, we can access those pages as administrators, and collect nifty graphs and impressions data and explore social impact from the perspective of an administrator.

So who administrates me? I WANT TO. I don’t want to start a Fan page for myself so I can pretend I am a brand and do self-branding. I am not a stand up comedian or an activist or a rap artist. I already feel as though I do enough self conscious self promotion on my regular old identity page. But somebody somewhere acting as an administrator can see my page , and quite certainly their perspective is even more robust than most of our own management privileges as admins of community theatre productions and fan clubs.

So. this is all a problem for me. I used to have a problem with YouTube, when I couldn’t easily rip the videos as MP4s, when they lacked HD capability, and when they did not offer any sort of user monetization system. But they addressed those issues. It’s still a big old giant abyss of enormous power and shortsightedness, but I am periodically and mildly appeased by their progression. But Facebook is a bit more than a website, as far as I can tell. It is a registry of unprecedented proportions. And over the years, my friends and I have told it so, so much. We keep talking, too. We keep liking it and tagging it and authorizing it to talk behind the curtain to Twitter and Klout and Apple and AT&T and maybe to Homeland Security and Google and maybe even who knows…secret agents and high level Facebook employees arranged in special projects and taskforces to study and leverage the unimaginable power of the database itself. Maybe.

Probably. If it were mine to control, to harness, to explore…if I had the skeleton key, I would walk through its walls, no question. It would affect my IQ and the very way I perceived people. It would be a look into souls, into the privacy settings of the social undercurrent. It’s all kitty cat and baby pictures and wedding photos and party invites up top, but underneath it you would see the unfriends and ‘it’s complicateds’ and the activity leading directly to some of those. The privacy settings….the blockings….the account disablings and inevitable returns. And who can see what, and who isn’t allowed, and on and on into the delicate fabric of the social net.

I would be happy, personally, for just a monthly or gee whiz daily count of the visits to my site. One of those little odometer counters at the bottom of the page by the copyright. Like how every mom and pop website ever made from 1995-1999 had at the bottom. 0000019. or 0001008. Facebook, in all of its hackathons, could have somehow managed the old pageview counter there at the bottom for us. You can hide yours, and I can hide mine, but we’d be able to know if we wanted to know.

It’s all because I take pictures. And I want to see how many people see those pictures. They don’t have to comment, they don’t have to like them. But Facebook knows how many times you and I are visited. In fact, they are able to see ‘Who’s Who’, so to speak, in any given population. In my town, for instance, Facebook can see rankings. Our mayor is perhaps a popular profile. His status updates are seen by many. Facebook knows how many, because Facebook populates Facebook.

What if there are “Facebook Truman”s? Truman was adopted by a corporation who let the world watch him on TV. He was the last one to know. On Twitter, there is an account named @sh*tmydadsays…and for some reason it is funny and everyone follows this account and eventually it becomes a show on TV. What if Facebook is able to leverage its network in such a way that begins to observe or even re-engineer society based on the data it gathers about personality? What if in every given population, there are what seem to be pageview anomalies…for some reason, some Facebook users generate very large amounts of passive traffic, almost as if society is somehow wired to gravitate toward certain individuals for unknown reasons?

There are three or four Facebook users who I visit…’stalk’ if you will, and I spend time looking at their pictures, reading comments, clicking through their tabs, somewhat frequently. Just to see them. See what they’re up to. One of these people is me—my own Facebook. Another is my wife. And my brother because he puts up pictures of his baby, my nephew. And another one of them, of these users, I won’t tell you. And there it begins. Just as I like to see Nick Nolte movies and check out his IMDb and wonder about what he is like to have a beer with….I think we all have a few people out there who we liken to and contextualize as a celebrity figure, even though they’re only relatively unknown Facebook users. We perhaps guiltily read their page like a supermarket tabloid or a biographical article in a periodical. It is a phenomenon, if it exists in mass, which is probably the subject of a little known, peculiar clandestine study.

If you are reading this, and you are one in charge of this little study, please turn my advertising privileges back on. I want to sell gold and soap on my Facebook page. And I want a pageview counter at the bottom of my profile, you bunch of jerks.

The Nativity, 2011

2011-12-04T22:08:00.002-06:00

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"2011 Nativity by Sarah and Rob - God Bless Us, Every One."

Instagram

2011-12-04T22:02:00.002-06:00

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"2011 Nativity -- Love, Sarah and Rob"

JDL 4

2011-11-30T23:43:00.001-06:00

@johndoeliberty

Chris Fynsk - Heidegger

2011-11-26T00:13:00.002-06:00

Chris Fynsk - Heidegger

Typing as many phrases as i could as he spoke, EGS evening seminar, August 2011

On language with Blanchot...

About "the infinite conversation" and
"conversations on a country path" - Heidegger

The Hebrew word for desert is the same as the word for speech.

Ereignis

To think from language toward the limits of language.

Rivers
Growing wasteland
City of fear
The step not beyond
Writing the Long path
The infinite conversation.
The event in and of language - to speak.
The instance of accompaniment
Releasement
Bringing a certain language to language
This relation to language is fundamentally disruptive

Conversation on a country path
An infinite conversation
the willful characters of representational thinking
Regions
Truth needs men
The notion of usage
Truth needs not men
The usage of notion
A free and open relation
The guest and the host
The endless hospitality
Weariness

I know I had something to say...

Enigmatic fatigue
Such an arresting theme
Inherent ambiguity
Playful gentleness
Mutual solicitude
Speech interrupted
Fatigue and affliction
Opening beyond passivity
Possible neutrality in the fog
Not to be presumptuous
Suspended, faltering
Strange games

Circle
Absent circle
The line traced is only beginning
His or someone like his
What line is it anyway?
Uninterrupted only by itself
To be continued
In the silent library
It would suffice
It would not suffice
To leave in the evening
Under cover of night
What will we do then
To disappear?

What will happen?
What had to happen?
The host and the guest
How did we get here?
Who are we talking about?
The phrase intervenes!
A meditation on this sentence.
We will return.
The silence has a character.
A challenge issued.
Strange to someone else.
A word has been spoken:
a counterword.
Suffering interlockular
Moving quickly now

A word too many
Il is a word too many.
Deceptively simple formula
Pronominal indicator
The speaking subject
Locates not himself
The conversation breaks
A third comes in
Distress, distress
The common responsibility
The host inasmuch as we speak
Are we listening?
Another relation
Friendship
As it has occurred
Return to neutrality
Return to weariness
The privilege to depart
Attachment to a man
Only by weariness

The spiraling circle of fatigue
There is a form of beginning
Without gathering itself
In a determinative point
The narrating voice
Expresses astonishment
Would you leave this?
The speech of the everyday
Withholding the reserved
No cold interruption
No rupture
The heart beats on!

We will not step into death
Too afraid
Not too afraid
An impetus
Fairly near the end
The cold force of interruption
Asserts itself
The relation to the common space
Disappears
The now infinite conversation
Belongs to itself
A willing not to will.
A higher acting
In being and time
Assertion resolution
Interruption
Born by speech
Writing differently
Discontinuity

Intermittence of itself to speak
The one who has begun to wake
Such is the situation
Lost in the power
To express itself
What has happened now?
Something that does not concern me.
Who possesses this power?
Another answers when he addresses himself
The non concerning
What is of non concern?
If we modified a few terms
We are ourselves changed
Evoked by a simple change of words
What lies in the essence?
Thought has already been called
To approach this usage
Experience is required
Independent of human doing
Relation without relation
The neutral in deed.

For the sake of Il,
The phrase keeps coming back
Easy to receive
Weighing in a sentence
It does not concern
It invites to interruption
The sentence
Is it a sentence?
To which he invites
Peculiar responsibility
The claims of the law
Interrogation
Illegitimate
There is only one law
Yes, I know
The cold force
The resolute space
The movement evoked
The willing not to will
No crossing at the line
Where are we left?

Space
Fragmentation
Time
Anticipation
Trace and retrace
Go out
A radical hospitality
An infinite conversation
To live what does not concern
Respond
As though it does concern
Living non change
Dwelling
Indifference
Nearing
Resisting
Obscure in becoming
Yearning for peace
A gathering appropriation
A thought of friendship
Community
Subtle and quiet
Who is carrying on?
This conversation
Hospitality
Failure

Decision
Assuming attitudes they imply

Oppositional occupation
Do not assume these traces
Of language
The strangeness of this relationship
With language
So foregrounded
So what is naming?
A holy fear
Flowers in a desert
Before and while
Rapidly concluding
Neither one wrote

So beautiful
Such an expression!

Fynsk, edited through furious note taking by
-Rob Larson
@roblarson1979

Mars Attacks…

2011-11-21T22:44:00.002-06:00

'from deep underground straight over the top...'

2011-11-15T08:02:00.001-06:00

Broadcasting now:
@johndoeliberty

writing a note to the space dr.

2011-11-07T22:11:00.001-06:00

I recently set my blog up to turn e-mails I send to a certain secret email address into blog posts.

the idea is to be able to update the old, tired thing with a quick note.

But it feels like I am writing to someone, since it is email.

And I am not impressed so far with the conversion from email to blog.

We'll see if I can't find a good way to get this blog going again. Somehow.

Rob Larson shared an Instagram photo with you

2011-11-07T13:01:00.001-06:00

Hi there,

Rob Larson just shared an Instagram photo with you:

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"For my friend. It's been a month already!"

Thanks,
The Instagram Team

Technology Initiative Prospectus

2011-10-13T01:36:00.000-05:00

What technology goal are you addressing in your initiative?

A big endeavor for me, and the primary reason I wanted to take these courses is 're-wiring' the Mitchell Auditorium and the television studio at St Scholastica's Duluth campus for HD production. On a smaller scale, I need to really understand the fundamentals of live Internet broadcasting. Our college has taught in the past a broadcasting course which was mostly lecture, but included some broadcast lab activity. All of that seems to be about where my original radio, television, and film curriculum and equipment from UW-Superior is...gone but not forgotten.
I want to make HD live streaming from the classroom a reality, using multiple camera angles, production value, branding, good sound mix. I want my classroom experience, whether it is online or in the actual room to be equally palpable (in spite of my self).
Mainly, I think a quality online college experience is the big American think tank right now. If Jerry Springer can have the production value he had 10 years ago, high quality academic programming should be able to spring up today. Some of it might even be really good, award winning, syndication-potential content. The flip side is that maybe academia should stay out of media production, and stick to books and scholarly articles. Maybe the argument can be made that if the cameras got in, too direct of a comparison might be made between broadcast media and academia.

Briefly describe the focus of your initiative and the participants who will be involved in this initiative.

College students at St. Scholastica.
I have a golden opportunity this fall to implement the things we conceive of in this course. I teach media literacy and intro to broadcasting. I expect to be able to apply so much of this course in the fall.

How do you think think this initiative will promote technology integration for teaching and learning?

This course so far is proving to be extremely timely and valuable. I expect to be technologically ahead of the curve this fall. For instance, I fully intend to use the iPad with an HDMI output to a larger screen and sound system. I plan to use KeyNote, which is fantastic on the iPad. Also, the content we've uncovered in class so far is a treasure trove. And ultimately, the recording and redistribution of the classroom experience is itself a highly self-aware process that seems to create a further sense of discipline for me. Because I teach public speaking and interpersonal communication online, It is really important to me to be able to reproduce my classroom lectures. I rely heavily on my own verbal and non-verbal example, both for what to do and what not to do. So much of that does not translate into BlackBoard (yet). My dress choices are important for example, and I've considered taking cues from my wife, who maintains a style blog. But by taking a picture of my attire each day and making an audio slide about it, I am glossing over the nuance of 'wearing' those clothes for an hour in front of a group.
I realize that not every teacher desires or needs to do what I want to do, but some of them will need this solution. Who in America is effectively teaching online acting classes at the moment?

What questions do you have as you develop this project?

I believe you provide excellent sources for further study. Any direction you can give me toward making the lecture experience more like TED.com, for instance. Not only does it have to be high quality, it has to be cheap. I am working with t2i cameras from Canon, and have adapted to their benefits and shortcomings. And any personal anecdotes you have are always welcome. I am a new teacher, and appreciate good example.

Which of these Web 2.0 tools would you like to integrate into your teaching? How would you use it to support learning?

I am already using YouTube, Facebook, Blogger, LinkedIn, and Twitter. I want to learn how these tools function as apps on the iPad in the classroom. I can see an excitement in the classroom over the use of the iPad alone. It is a clever machine. But to get beyond the glamour of the product and get to the content -- and the content is where all my work is --that is the real test. Silicon Valley is doing its job just fine. The students will get over me checking out my Facebook updates on the iPad pretty quickly if that's all I know how to do. I think the Web 2.0 discussion is really about what constitutes a 'digital end user experience' What is the intrinsic application of a digital entity? How intuitive is your website, and how will you make it both self-contained and able to exist within a larger sphere of other popular digital entities?
I would love to make use of Second Life. I would love to build Tower Hall in second life, and build my courses in that digital space along with other teachers. I would also like Second Life to be an app on my iPhone 6, streaming live from within it my daily lectures in 3D-HD to students in Kenya. But sites like Phanfare and Lulu are good places to begin. I want to get our writing, photography, and video online.

What learner audience, topic, and learning objectives will you target for your Web 2.0 project?

My focus is in teaching the 21st century mass media platform possibilities to college undergraduates, and will rely on the 'App' concept in iOS to accomplish this with some of the most popular Internet media entities.

How do you think the use of this tool will enhance learning for your students?

I think being competitive in the knowledge and understanding of mass media is the key edge in the business world at large.

What questions do you have about completing this project?

Possible ideas for my TED talk…

2011-05-22T00:41:00.001-05:00

I am going to be doing some production work this summer for several different entities. The chief entity is the College of St. Scholastica.

(I love the college of St. Scholastica. It is awesome. It has been very kind and gracious to me. If I could make a difference in this world, it would be that more people were given the opportunity to experience a place like the one I have within St. Scholastica.)

Anyway, this summer I get to work in the Mitchell Auditorium, and among our endeavors, we are working to ‘wire’ the place for HD quality audio/visual live Internet broadcast. We’re starting to test the setup next week, and I am preparing a short series of test lectures for use in updating my distance learning communications courses.

One of the best models I’ve seen for Internet video lecture is TED.com, and it also sets a high standard for the production quality of the media itself. All I have to do now is make an attempt at preventing my lecture material from sounding like mindless drivel, especially compared to the great speakers at TED.

I have expressed my interest in helping to bring a TEDx conference to Duluth. I know I am not the only one around here working to do the same thing. (If you are among those in a planning stage for TEDx Duluth, I hereby volunteer my services in any capacity needed. I also would like to suggest the Mitchell Auditorium as a place to facilitate the event.)

Among the ideas floating around in my head for things to talk about in these upcoming test lectures:

-pleasewriteoffmystudentloans.org – A website similar to LinkedIn for college graduates, with a built-in tax-deductible charity system designed to pay off student loan debt. The graduates post detailed academic study information and progress to their profiles, and rich people who need to be charitable can make instant online contributions to whomever they choose. There would be a great freedom to pick and choose the best and brightest, and make a charitable donation of any size to the student profile. The money goes directly to the Department of Education, relieving student debt.

I am developing this idea, which is subject to all kinds of debate. You read it here first. We need a system like this. Says the debtor.

Other cool lecture topics: worldwide water purification as a higher priority than carbon emission reduction strategy (not a replacement….just a HIGHER, more measurable and more immediately important priority)…

…and practical applications of graphene.

Mean-spirited birthday cards

2011-05-03T15:47:00.003-05:00

This blog-exclusive content brought to you by my quite occasional, dry and twisted sense of humor. It is purely fictitious, implies nothing, and had no one in mind upon its creation.

Well...maybe I had Brett in mind a little bit at the beginning. It was, after all, his birthday when the inspiration came.
Happy birthday, Bert.

Get ready for something utterly amazing:

2011-04-04T14:00:00.003-05:00

Deb Roy from MIT takes some baby steps toward angelic media emulation. Incredible stuff.

And while you're at it, this Adobe Museum just popped up and looks to be the stuff we're looking for...

Adobe Museum of Digital Media

(Hint: Check John Maeda's lecture for coolness.)

And I thought Wall Street was fast paced. Going into Media Studies in the 21st century is trying to capture an information torrent.

Canon T2i for Media Production: a resounding ‘yes’

2011-03-31T09:09:00.001-05:00

I am easily taken, impressed, etc. with new technology. The T2i is having its one year anniversary. After having my hand on it for about 9 months, I am still quite impressed with it. Here are some of my thoughts about it and the overall journey I’ve taken through production cameras on the way to it.

Warning: This is extremely boring and for camera dweebs only. PLAY MP3:

Hamlet Opens

2011-03-06T02:27:00.000-06:00

rob.phanfare.com

No Surprises, Hamlet, Magnets on the Moon

2011-03-04T00:25:00.003-06:00

I have the great privilege of being in another theatrical production on the heels of Frost/Nixon. This production is the first of the Wise Fool Shakespeare company. You can click on the players below to see what it is shaping up to be (or not to be):

I liked these pictures so much that my ambitions stirred and I bought a personal membership to Phanfare.com. I had convinced the marketing team at St. Scholastica to purchase a business membership to the site for our work in Studio 20, and it has proven to be the most useful photo and video sharing sites I have found. I am working on a long-term photo retrospective for my friends and family. You can look for yourself in the pictures. And download them. And print them. And even order up a nice new mouse pad with your face on it. If you and I have been out in the world together having good times, chances are you’ll show up here:
rob.phanfare.com
That brings me to the other thing I can’t get out of my head lately, which is a tribute band project I’ve had in mind to do for quite some time. I’ve been talking with someone I believe to be a highly talented and capable sound engineer. We work together and I’ve been learning a lot about the logistics of music performance recording. It is too early to get specific, but a long standing dream of mine may be on its way to waking me up:

http://twitter.com/nosurprises2011