José Silva's Scrapbook

in the pictures above, the models are not wearing the Google Glass Protoype; the Google Glass Prototype is wearing the models.

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—	Warning: Objects May Be Dorkier Than They Appear in Photo – Whatever

neil-gaiman:

Arthur C Clarke in 1974. Getting it right.

TED talk: Vijay Kumar: Robots that fly… and cooperate.

I, for one, welcome our flying robot overlords.

The Internet isn’t just a network of wires and switches, it’s also a sort of reactive social organism composed of the people who keep those wires humming and those switches clicking.

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—	Sometimes Eric S Raymond knocks one out of the park: An Open Letter to Chris Dodd. I may not agree with everything he says here — and he conveniently cherry-picks some examples — but it’s certainly worth reading in its entirety.

Now that I’m transferring “ownership” of my iPods to the new-ish (2010) laptop, it’s time to prune the “always on iPod lists.” There’s one for Jazz, one for Baroque, one for Renaissance and Sacred, and one for Classical, Romantic and Modern. To that I add this random one (and a similar one for Jazz, I think). After all, most of the time I’m on the move I listen to audiobooks and podcasts anyway.

(Edited: changed the rule; by a terrible oversight I hadn’t excluded Opera from the automatic playlist. That could have been ugly!)

Sorry, I have a little trouble taking you seriously when you say things like “good old days” and measure inequality in nominal $ terms only.

Cheap laptop + free Kindle App + free Kindle books + WiFi from public library = a wealth of knowledge and entertainment. A free kindle library much larger than the average library of the wealthy of the gilded age — with search, annotations, and social media sharing.

Library computer + free educational content online = a wealth of free training and education. With plenty of forums to pose questions, free and open software to work with, and social media to get in touch with others who share interests.

Some time ago I read somewhere about how technology only benefited the rich. IDIOCY UNBOUNDED!

Oh, by the way, Oscar Wilde is free as well:

And it’s full of quotable goodness (from The Importance Of Being Earnest):

And, since it’s a digital file, I can make the type huge and use a presentation remote control to read it on my laptop screen while lying on the sofa:

LIVING A DIGITAL LIFE — And life before digital content.

I was decommissioning an old computer and found a packing list for summer teaching in 2000. Clothing was essentially the same as in my packing list for the upcoming summer session but everything else (which means content and equipment) is completely different. Well, I still take a computer, of course.

I used to take several paper books, including a full size textbook for the class, notebooks and a binder with class notes, a ZIP drive for backups, ZIP disks, paper photos for the family, a magazine or two to read at the airport, a Discman and CDs (being at the forefront of packing technology, I used a CD pouch instead of the jewel boxes), and a few DVDs.

(The following year I got my first MP3 player and my first digital camera. And a ginormous 5GB firewire external drive!)

Now: all content is digital and travels in my laptop, backed up on a 1TB portable hard drive, several 16GB flash drives, and the cloud. I might still take a [disposable] magazine, but otherwise my music, audiobooks, eBooks, research papers, teaching materials, photos, movies and TV shows, and computer code all travel as files.

A new cultural meme has arisen where people ask casual acquaintances what is on their content consumption devices, so in that spirit, here’s what I’d put on my iPod Touch and iPad if the trip was tomorrow (engagement takes about four weeks):

Music: Vivaldi, Handel, Bach, Purcell, Chopin, Liszt, and Fauré playlists, a playlist of 216 “classical” albums, my standard Jazz playlist, an auto-generated 1024-track playlist of “classical” music that I haven’t heard in at least three months, a nostalgia playlistlist of 70s-80s-90s music, and a few new jazz albums I bought from Ted Gioia’s “Best of 2011” list. (Except for the last ones, all of these reside permanently in my iPod Touch and iPad.)

Podcasts: Back To Work, MacBreak Weekly, TED talks (video), SALT from the Long Now foundation.

Audiobooks: Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen and Hot Water by P.G. Wodehouse, On China by Henry Kissinger, Quantum Man by Lawrence Krauss, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinford by Evelyn Waugh, and Worm by Mark Bowden. That should be enough for the flights and the various train rides, plus elliptical exercising (for oxygenation) in the hotel gym.

Movies: Since ripping DVDs with Handbrake to watch the movies on the iPad is a violation of the DMCA, I can’t have any movies on the iPad, can I? In an alternate universe I’d load the second season of V (2011), the first season of Sherlock, the first season of Hawaii Five-O (2011), the latest season of House, Cowboys and Aliens, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Despicable Me (a feel-good movie for all occasions), The Incredibles (ibidem), Margin Call, Moneyball, and Wall St: Money Never Sleeps.

Kindle books: Civilization by Niall Ferguson, Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens, The Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker, Notes from the Hard Shoulder by James May (of TopGear), The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco, The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie, and Holidays in Heck by PJ O’Rourke.

iBooks: Walter Bagehot’s Lombard Street (shown above), Émile Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris, and Voltaire’s Candide. (I downloaded several public domain iBooks.)

PDF: All my class readings, many additional research papers and reference materials, and the O’Reilly books Beautiful Visualization and R in a Nutshell.

Games: I usually don’t play computer games, but my iPad has Solitaire, Mahjong, and a few crossword puzzles.

Rands In Repose: How Can I Help You?

Yep, that’s what being tech support for one’s friends and family looks like to me too.

[S]ymphony orchestras inviting audiences to wile away an hour with Tchaikovsky by tapping on their smartphones and iPads. I was heartened that reader comments about the desirability of these digital devices in the concert hall have been almost exclusively negative, pointing out that light is a disruption and that tweeting is an engagement in tweeting, not music. That’s hardly surprising. People who care about music are the ones who are truly engaged, and they are going to take the trouble to respond.

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Classical music and technology.

Yet another step in the descent of mankind.

Pop-ification of erudite entertainment is always a bad idea: it alienates the core audience while doing nothing to really capture the pop audience (who might at first come to the symphony hall because it’s a new experience, then depart to the next new experience).

Doesn’t affect me, though. I’ve given up on these large organizations (symphonies, operas, theaters — the companies, not the works) since they are social gatherings used for status signaling rather than art events used for personal aesthetic experiences.

Technology can be great (musical instruments, music notation, and symphony halls are all technology, after all); it can also be immensely disruptive in the hands of individuals who should not be in symphony halls.

What’s more galling is that it’s the actual Symphony that is fostering this behavior. Bring in the proles and their low-brow behavior, that worked out really well for Broadway shows.

Playing old music on old instruments, he said, “reminds us of who we are. Our modern environment is so based on technology that I think people look for some kind of outside reference to remind them of what it means to be human.

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Old music on old instruments never gets old to piper Dick Hensold

Erm… those old instruments are technology as well.

I think it’s a good idea to play old music on old instruments to hear what the composers had in mind when they wrote it for those instruments. In some cases of Altemusik, the same piece played on modern instruments with modern tuning and modern dynamics and played on period instruments with period tuning and period dynamics — let alone conducted or performed in the style and emphasis of the period — will sound very different.

As for our environment being based on technology, that’s been going on since Ooog the Homo Habilis figured out that he could use a stick to dislodge a piece of fruit beyond his reach. This habit of considering only technologies that one has not grown up with “technology” is a mark of mental laziness.

A tip o’ the Bowler to Harmonia Early Music via Facebook.

I wasn’t on Facebook in its very, very early days. But I would be willing to bet the conversation was not primarily about tech companies and the lives of tech executives. It was more likely about hot people on campus, Cambridge bars and restaurants, terrible professors, crappy weather, the success of the crew team and who hooked up with whom.

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Solving The Scoble Problem In Social Networks

Read the whole thing! Here’s another important bit:

This is an ongoing problem with new social networks. Silicon Valley celebrities dominate the conversation. A close friend is on the Google+ top 100 list; I can’t comment on one of his posts without keeping my notification indicator lit for days at a time as his large following continually responds to the post.

While this may create a great experience for popular people in Silicon Valley and even for readers in Silicon Valley, it’s not the way to build a mass-market social network.

There are some results on the topology of networks that may apply to this analysis (meaning that Rakesh Lobster — Rocky Agrawal — may simply be in a a sub-network more prone to this type of happening), but that would be a post for the work blog.

Sexual Activity Tracked By Fitbit Shows Up In Google Search Results

Well, you put Open Data and Quantified Self together and you get nerd sex lives online. Too Much Information.

Google’s frame is the browser window. Apple’s frame is the screen. That’s what we’ll remember about today’s keynote ten years from now.

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—	Daring Fireball: Demoted Simple, accurate description of the fundamental difference in perspectives — caused by these companies’ different revenue models, advertising vs. selling, and by diametrically opposed cultures of operations-driven vs experience-driven development.