From Maysville, Episode 4

'Nother episode of "From Maysville". In this episode we connect the city of Maysville through six degrees of separation to old classic horror films, Billy the Kid, and... of course... Kevin Bacon! Guinness good and the Irish rock!

Bowie Fest, go there now

If you're in the Greater Cincinnati Area right now, stop what you are doing and head over to Top Cats, 2820 Vine Street, for the Bowie Fest. Do it like now already. 15 bands playing Bowie covers, David Bowie look-a-like contest and more. Da Muttss, Buckra, Todd Murray, Chick Pimp, Ramsey, Moped Mafia, Chris Lee, The Shitkickers, Okeanas, Jake Leg, The Seedy Seeds, Joe Hedges, Swarthy, The Mud Pies, The Times, Straw Boss and more. The proceeds benefit the Drew Campbell Memorial Fund. Tell Tracy that Jeremy sent you!

www.myspace.com/cincybowiefest

Utopian work environment

Dude, I want to work in that office!

They filmed this video one night after work. The company is called Connected Ventures. They do work for Vimeo, CollegeHumor, Busted Tees, and Defunker.

Untitled

Related to a project I'm working on:

In the process of understanding and interpretation, part and whole are related in a circular way: in order to understand the whole, it is necessary to understand the parts, while to understand the parts it is necessary to have some comprehension of the whole.

—David Couzens Hoy

Thus the movement of understanding is constantly from the whole to the part and back to the whole. Our task is to extend in concentric circles the unity of the understood meaning. The harmony of all the details with the whole is the criterion of correct understanding. The failure to achive this harmony means that understanding has failed.

—Hans-Georg Gadamer

Is this blog hot or not?

Subtitle: A Limitation in Value Judgments

A computer system can only evaluate objective facts. They are currently unable to form a subjective opinion. However, a human/computer value ranking system is also limited in the types of value judgments it can make, despite the values of the human being involved.

All open value ranking systems on the web, whether they are purely algorithm controlled ranking systems, like Google's page ranking system, or human based ranking systems like Digg.com, etc. end up only ranking the popularity value. Other subjective human value judgments are lost in the shuffle. The reason is because informed opinion is overshadowed by uninformed opinion in an open system. Experts, by definition, are always the minority.

Take, for example, a system that ranks art. Typically what you may find in an online art ranking system is a thumbs up or thumbs down button. Like it, or don't like it? Unfortunately this only reflects the aesthetic appeal, and not the majority of values incorporated into art theory. Composition, context, meaning, all those values are overshadowed by the popularity value. If a lot of people really like the way a crappy piece of art looks, it has more value, despite this being a shallow judgment.

When you rank videos the stupid dog tricks videos will alway be more popular than a video with a social message.

What do we do ten years down the road when all knowledge is defined in terms of popularity? News is going that way, with even major networks latching on to the Digg.com model. Wikipedia, the encyclopedia of the Internet, is solely a popular treatment of a topic. Search engines rank by popularity. It feels a lot like high school : )

It's hard to say which model is better. In politics, this is the debate over representative democracy versus direct democracy. I don't personally trust the "wisdom of the crowds" because the crowd is an uninformed majority (not to say it's all bad). Philosophically I mistrust authority as well, but I think it's safe to say that something is lost in turning value ranking over to the crowds. The only real value that can be ranked that way is popularity. How bad that loss is, or the ramifications, won't be known for a few decades.

In search of a spiritual consensus

I've been editing some fringe science articles on Wikipedia lately and it's been an interesting experience. Fringe sciences get a bit of a hard time on Wikipedia. I would say it's an appropriate hard time because as a mainstream encyclopedia, Wikipedia gives more weight to prevailing scientific models. Often fringe science hypotheses are contradictory to accepted models. The sliding scale goes something like this: mainstream science, fringe science, pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is a term introduced by philosopher Karl Popper to describe ideas that appear to be scientific, but actually aren't. They often use scientific jargon, but aren't backed by science. Think diet pill commercials.

In any case, this post isn't about science. It's about spirituality. I'm only mentioning the above because I want to steal the terms and replace the word science in them with spirituality. I want to explain the difference between mainstream spirituality, fringe spirituality, and pseudospirituality. Also, just as the prevailing scientific model is based on a consensus in the scientific community, I wanted to show that there may be a prevailing spiritual model, based on a consensus of the spiritual community.

Let's look at the terms I've introduced. To do that, we need a working definition of spirituality. Broadly speaking, spirituality is concerned with one's ultimate nature, typically marked by a connection to something greater than oneself. Note that this is very different from religiosity which also includes specific practices. Spirituality is a broader term and could include religion, but religion doesn't necessarily include spirituality. Religious fanatics showing complete disconnect (9/11) is not an example of spirituality.

In fact, it brings us to our first term: pseudospirituality. Pseudospirituality is something that poses as spirituality but actually isn't. It may use spiritual jargon, claim to have spiritual goals, or incorporate spiritual practices. It is not spirituality, however, if its defining characteristic is a profound disconnect. The example of religious fanatics above is an example of this, but also cults which disconnect from the world or serve some non-spiritual agenda, religious intolerance of other religions or lifestyles, religious notions of dominion over anything else, anything that severely disconnects for supposedly spiritual reasons. Some of these examples are actually properly labeled as religious, but they're not spiritual.

The next term is fringe spirituality. These are actual spiritual models, but I would characterize them as immature ones. By immature I don't mean "look I made a doody in my pants", or immature on a timeline (some of these philosophies go back thousands of years), but rather they don't comprehensively or universally answer the questions spirituality sets out to answer. These are reductive spiritual models that define spirituality in terms of a small set of universal truths and leave everything else up to subjective interpretation. Existentialism, for example, is a spiritual model that reduces everything to the universal truth that we do obviously exist, everything else is largely subjective. Atheism is a spiritual model as well. It starts with the assumption that there is no God, and often that there is no afterlife, and asks how do we remain connected to each other in spite of this? Each of these models are mature unto themselves, but immature in forming something resembling what they have over in science, a comprehensive model that answers most basic questions that someone might ask.

So is there a mainstream spirituality, something that isn't just subjective and has the consensus of the spiritual community as a whole? It's hard to say. The nature of spirituality is that it's hard to confirm. A spiritual idea is largely opinion and it's hard to pin down any real facts. Nevertheless, comparative religion researchers and philosophers have noticed some cross-culture overlaps between the various religious traditions. If, they argue, you jettison the specific mythologies (Moses parting the Red Sea, Buddha beneath the tree) and examine the actual spiritual values, an almost universal blueprint does seem to emerge. Aldous Huxley described this blueprint as The Perennial Philosophy (a term coined by Leibniz) because it shows up time and again regardless of the age or culture examined.

According to Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy is:

the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being; the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the perennial philosophy may be found among the traditional lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions (The Perennial Philosophy, p. vii).

Confirmation may be a stretch, but if various cultures arrived at the same spiritual conclusions, based on their own observations, independently of one another, that certainly sounds like consensus.

What's different about blogs

[Note: Fellow bloggers will find the following to be obvious. I'm posting it here for people I've encountered who don't know anything at all about blogs. Those who do can skip this post.]

There appears to have been some confusion in the past on what a "blog" is. I've seen the term used incorrectly to describe any user-submitted content on the web, and that's not technically correct. "Blog" has a very unique format and is different from things like forums, article driven sites, message boards, or comments sections. I thought I'd clear the air and post something about blogging as I'm a big fan of it and encourage people to write blogs about their interests.

Rather than explaining all the things a blog is not, let's focus on what a blog is. A blog (short for web log) is a chronological, typically reverse chronological, log of content. That's purposely ambiguous because once you have that basic idea down the varieties start. Back in the day, blogs were simple link logs that people put up linking to favorite web pages with a short commentary about them. In recent years that has expanded to longer journal-like posts of text and pictures, or just pictures, or just some other media content. Spin-off names have been created as well, like "vlog" for video logs, but they're all basically the same format. Chronological logs of content. That's different from other formats on the web because it is strictly linear by definition.

So what's a blog good for? Many people keep them as online journals, logging their life. Some still keep link logs, but they're typically longer posts than before. Some blogs are short utterances. Twitter, for example, is a service that forces 128 character descriptions of what you're doing at any given moment. It's more for the kids. There's a huge variety in blogging. If there's any way to apply a chronological log to something on the web, you'll find a blog for it. Is blogging some new fangled hippy term just for the kids? Heck no, older folks use blogs all the time. They use them for political rants, religious discussions, family photos, and so on. Remember, if there's a reason to log it, there's a reason to blog it.

From Maysville, Episode 3

'Nother episode of "From Maysville". In this episode we have special guest host Ernie Parnell, a historian who specializes in the Civil War. Learn what role Maysville played in this chapter of American history. Side note: Rebel Yell is harsh! -- but good ; )

Pyramids and giant pink bunnies

One of the coolest programs out there to download is Google Earth. It's sort of like Google Maps, but a lot more interactive and with community supported features like sharing places of interest. I like it because the CIA keeps booting me off their satellite feed and my spaceship is in the shop. In any case, when you first fire up the program up you'll want to look for your house, cruise around town, that sort of thing, but when you're done with all of that you should really go exploring. I've always wanted to visit the Egyptian pyramids (totally pissed they got booted from the new Seven Wonders of the World list) and the interesting thing is that even if I did show up in person, I wouldn't get the spectacular aerial views shown here. But if you're really looking for some interesting sights to see, check out PC World's In Pictures: The Strangest Sights in Google Earth. My favorite is the giant pink bunny in Prata Nevoso, Italy. It was built by a group of artists from Vienna and measures 200 feet long.

Interview with Meagan McKay, Miss Kentucky Contestant

She deserves to win just for putting up with us!

From Maysville, Episode 2

'Nother episode of "From Maysville". Talking about Kentucky's burgeoning tech initiatives and the upcoming Idea Festival (www.ideafestival.com). This one's disturbing because Sean shows us his true identity -- the lost member of the Village People.

If you wanna make movies, join the crowd

When I was nine years old, I made a stop action movie with my dad's camcorder and couple of G.I. Joe action figures. Is nine too old to play with toys? Nevermind. Anyway, I made this movie and it totally rocked. My mom said so. I created a storyline where the Joes had to bust this guy out of a South American prison because he had key information on a cocaine drug lord or something. I even made this styrofoam prison with kabob stick bars and a breakaway wall (for when they busted him out). I carved the wall into tiny bricks of styrofoam and rigged it with thread so that when I pulled the string the whole wall came down. A puff of baby powder sealed the effect of C-4 demolitions.

I'd love to make a movie today, but unfortunately I'm lacking in time, money, and I also sort of don't have any talent for it : ) Maybe I could pull off a Clerks, but unfortunately as an adult you have to impress more people than your mom. Sounds like a broken dream, eh? Fear not my friends. Now I, you, or anyone with the mere desire can participate in a full-length feature film that will one day appear in actual theaters.

It's called A Swarm of Angels, and it is the first (that I'm aware of) open source movie project. Participants not only fund the movie collectively, but also participate in the creative process of writing it, filming it, and releasing it. It's the entire process of making a Hollywood film, but the tasks are crowd sourced to a global community of members. Right now A Swarm of Angels is moving into phase 3 of 5, producing the trailer for the movie and completing the development. Even if you don't get in on this one, I'm sure there's more to come.

Fulfill your childhood dream of making a movie. Check out A Swarm of Angels