sj's Longest Now [v.1]

I just had the most beautiful technological experience. After giving away my old Elph because I never used it and felt it was wasteful to just have it sitting around, I needed a camera a few months later, and got one. I promptly lost its battery charger, and a cable whose purpose I can no longer remember. (I thought it was needed for the charging — maybe it was, to cope with the different power supply there? — but having gotten a replacement since which plugs straight into the wall, I am having doubts.) In any case, I was hemming and hawing about getting replacement parts from Canon for a good chunk of what the camera itself cost, when I remembered that we have a wide open market out there on the Intarweb.

Beautiful experience part 1: Ebay turned up a new battery for $10, and a local camera shop had an original Canon charger for $30 or so. Within three days, packages arrived and the camera was functional again… mass production somehow winning out over efforts to make incompatible hardware and corner the market.

So I brought the newly-working camera with me on my current trip to DC, to stretch its legs. This morning I can’t sleep, and wander the city a bit looking for a place to sit and work outside. Here’s
where it gets good…

2) Your view of a city really changes when you start sitting on random front steps and public platforms, when noone is around and it’s just you and the city skeleton.

3) I had been annoyed that I couldn’t go wake up my hosts and ask for various things like toothpaste and new insoles and a replacement screw for my glasses. Even if it weren’t 4am, I wouldn’t have done that. So wandering around, I find two different 24-hr pharmacies. Fantastic. I joyfully drop a sawbuck; walk outside and find a protected alcove with a nice breeze; and replace, polish up, and improve my flagging toolchain. # of people woken up or vaguely bothered by the noise: 0.

4) I figure I should go find somewhere to sit and write. There’s what looks like an all-night bar nearby, but it’s a bit noisy, and sitting outside I get nothing. So I wander side-streets… aha! A restaurant that’s left its chairs and tables out. I walk up to its front door to look in, and a motion detector clicks on, then starts blinking a large red light. Bzz. Bzz. Bzz. Bzz. Bzz. I back out onto the street and look around. It was such a nice spot, too…

4.5) The light stops blinking. Tentatively, I come back. I sit very quietly at a table and slip out my computer. No troubles with the motion detector this time. Could there be? There is! Second time’s the charm; there’s an open access point with a strong signal.

5) I log on and start to write. I wish I could just pipe the fine view from here into my blog. Well, I /do/ have a camera. And it works now. But I didn’t bring my multi-format flash reader with me. I’m not even sure where that gizmo is. And then– My spider-sense tingles. “What?” I think to myself. “Stop tingling. You’re just chilly.” But despite myself, I scan the sides of my laptop. There’s a suspiciously small flat port next to the headphone jack… I pop out my photo card and slide it in. There are my photos, piped as neatly as you please to my desktop.

And here you are:

It’s now half an hour later, noone’s come by save a drunken trio and a hurried biker, and I’m still laughing about this process of finding a hotspot. If I actually lived in DC, I don’t think I could bear to wander the streets looking for a place to get online; I would just buckle and get a broadband connection in my apartment, and miss out on these great open-air sunrises!

Tweaks, bugs, and fun.

Very sexy. Is there some way to report a poorly-OCR’ed page?

Don’t let my last rant obscure the more important bit: that you should come out on Tuesday and talk to Jimmy Wales in person.

Larry Sanger recently had a friend post two very long sections of an upcoming memoir to Slashdot, providing a well-linked and verbose look at the history of Wikipedia. He also tooted his own horn a bit more than was absolutely necessary, but so it is with memoirs.

The links interested me a great deal, in part because Anthere and I have been gathering a similar retrospective — focused on the community’s recollections, not on those of any single person, and with less of a narrative arc or agenda. I would like to reproduce what I think is a seminal quote (3/4 of the way down the page) from the colourful history of Nu/Wikipedia :

Our concept of Wikipedia is not as a little fun project that amuses a few people on the Internet. For that, employees certainly would not necessary. Instead, we envision Wikipedia as–eventually–a serious competitor for all proprietary encyclopedias. We think that the concepts behind Wikipedia and Nupedia are so robust that, with proper guidance, within ten or twenty years, we might have the greatest encyclopedia in history. We believe that we will be able to produce cheap, reliable copies of the encyclopedia, sold for the cost of printing (or copying) or supported by donations, that can be used for educational purposes around the world, particularly in places that have few books or other educational materials available. It is, frankly, silly to think that this sort of large-scale project could be properly managed without paid employees. The notion that nonprofit projects should lack paid employees is just irrational and unjustified, and threatens to shoot the very success of this project in the foot.

–Larry Sanger, responding to a fork of the Spanish Wikipedia, [27 feb, 2002, 16:56 EST]

This was during the month after Sanger stopped being paid to be the project’s editor-in-chief, and before he left the project altogether, while he still clearly felt strong ownership of it and attachment to it. One could go through this quote, sentence by sentence, and expose a dozen assumptions that do not scale efficiently (sense of “we” and ownership, glorification of concepts and individual guidance, sense of competition with other information providers, confused view of “fun” as non-productive). However, I would just like to highlight one sentence:

It is, frankly, silly to think that this sort of large-scale project could be properly managed without paid employees.

To the contrary, Wikipedia is a modern reminder that we have no idea how far one can scale the “management” of a complicated and nuanced project without the notion of paid “employees” as managers. This form of management may well scale better than one involving explicit chains of command and pay grades.

In fact, let me suggest that most of the largest ‘projects’ undertaken by civilization have involved entire societies, and have not been financed by any individual, or through any rigid organization or heirarchy. (One particular exception recently elected a new leader.)

There have recently been suggestions from various quarters, repeating Larry’s sentiments above — not in the context of editing, but in the context of publishing, or publicity, or grant-writing, or translation. I hope that those suggestions will be backed up very carefully, and not presented casually as common sense.

So, Ratzinger has been elected the new Pope. Which prophecy is it that says the next pope will be Peter II the Last?

Most of you know this by now; I’ve been too busy to update my blog much recently or you might have heard it here first. 😉 Yahoo! Search is providing support for Wikipedia.

Wikimedia content will be feature more prominently in Yahoo searches, beginning in French, and be mirrored via Yahoo’s massive Korean datacenter. Once redundant clusters of this sort are set up around the world, there is some question of how to use the resulting off-peak spare cycles… ideas?

We have gained and lost many things as a ‘civilization’, that name we give to peer-to-peer systems of organisms that satisfy a certain combination of longevity, information dissemination and preservation, discovery, and aesthetics beyond the thrill of battle. That last clause is perhaps the most recent addition to the mix; and perhaps the most contentions. (Although as far as I’m concerned each of those clauses should be contentious.)

It is interesting that, although we prize aesthetics as one of the cornerstones of civilization (when we think of that abstraction at all), among the discoveries and advances we have lost are certain aspects of aesthetics. It is not that they have been lost to individuals, but to society as a whole, and to our notion of common sense. And this is a notion that is socially-developed and passed on; these are again key properties of civilization, so please don’t nag me about how difficult it is to coordinate passing on mores and sensibilities.

In among the lost aesthetics is a universal sense of perspective, and the beauty thereof. Excessive precision is ugly (but we see it everywhere; it is the default nowadays). So is near-infinite longevity; things should naturally fade and disappear, and this should be understood from the beginning, relished, and planned for — yet we as a civilization spend much of our time building things, letting them languish, and epxressing surprise and dismay when they start to fall apart (often compounding the problem with ineffectual patches).

Comments on how we have never had such an aesthetic, how awful this conception of ‘civilization’ is, how we have never actually known civilization on Earth, and other rebuttals, are most welcome.

On a bright note, I saw a fuzzy clock for the first time today, on a KDE installation. It gave the time in words, not numbers, rounded to the nearest five. “quarter to nine“, it would read, “twenty past nine“, “five till ten“. It was beautiful.

Bruno‘s SMSI-blog offers another take at what PrepCom2 accomplished, what PrepCom3 could achieve, and what WGIG is doing, care of McGill‘s vaunted ethics professor.  In French, and well worth the read.

The Language Log
is a brilliant collection of tidbits about language around the
world.  It’s what makes the world go ’round, after all… I love this little piece
about the UN’s official languages, and the element of pure symbolism
involved.  I wonder how the world would be different if diplomacy
were opened up to a broader spectrum of people and educational
backgrounds…