Web tech politics

One of the reasons I try to avoid political discussions is because, I feel, many of the national policy issues being discussed are unsolvable problems. I'm pragmatic. If a question doesn't have an answer, I move on to the next question. Am I concerned how the candidates in the upcoming 2008 Election (less than a month away as of this post) will react to the serious problems facing this country? Of course I am. I just don't know which of the policy-sets being discussed are better. They both have their benefits and drawbacks. I'm well informed on the issues and the proposed solutions, but I haven't really taken a stand. To me, neither stands out as better, they're just different.


Plus, most of the things being discussed don't directly effect the things I'm concerned about, right now, at this moment. For example, my tech interests. I'm extremely skeptical that the governing bodies and talking heads are even qualified to examine the deeply complex issues involved in making web related technology policy; I'm not even sure the role US government plays considering it's a worldwide issue. How do you even define "jurisdiction" in a global system? In any case, it seems to me that politicians can only pass laws in the abstract, applying old ideas that involve the telephone, television, radio, and print industries rather than addressing specific issues involved in something entirely new. The web, while tied to all that old stuff, has qualities that are unprecidented. I just don't think those guys in Congress entirely get it. I don't trust them not to screw it up.

Web technology doesn't get much airplay on the campaign trail. It's far too arcane for the masses to grasp, and, well, the candidates are looking to get elected by those masses. Still, the issue is of vital importance and it really should be addressed more indepth.

I try to stay out of politics because the issues I'm directly interested in are those covered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (and sadly few others). It is my overriding political philosophy that if you keep electronic discourse open and running smoothly, all the other political issues have a better chance of actually being solved. EFF helps facilitate that as an advocacy group for digital freedoms.

As an example of how web tech plays into politics, take the domestic politics issue that does get airplay: The financial bailout of Wall Street. Here, transparency came to the forefront. Anyone with a desire to do so could pour through the actual bill that was passed and read exactly what was put into the bailout. In fact, for the first time in its history, the House of Representative's website was slowed to a crawl as millions of people logged on to read its contents. House.gov was forced to implement a digital traffic cop to handle all the requests. Massive access to unfiltered information like this was simply not available in old-school political discourse. Examining the bill right away just wasn't something any individual could do.

Web technology policies, I feel, aren't just fundamental, they're overriding in today's political landscape. We really need to put more focus on how congressional leaders are handling this.

Now, I was pleased to see that the presidential candidates did manage to take a stand on the issue of Net Neutrality. Popular Mechanics had a great article on this, and I give them props for echoing that these important issues are being overlooked in the race to the White House. Obama and McCain's stance on Net Neutrality are vastly different, and I'm not going to tell you which one to support. I will tell you that you should familiarize yourself with the issue and the candidate's positions, because however issues like Net Neutrality are finally resolved, it effects each and every one of us.

NASA, please pimp your Martian Lander

I'm a little disappointed in NASA. When Pioneers 10 and 11 were launched, both carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin, a time capsule of sorts for extraterrestrials and terrestrial space travellers of the way, way distant future. Pioneer 10 is still out there somewhere between our solar system and its destination of Aldebaran, a star in the constellation Taurus. When NASA launched Voyager, they upped the ante considerably. Included this time was a gold-plated copper disc (above) containing phonograph recordings and images meant to convey the diversity of life on Earth, along with a message from President Jimmy Carter that reads:

This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.

Its destination is the Alpha Centauri system, a distance that will take 40,000 years to cover. The symbols pictured above are intended to instruct one on how to build a playback device for the recordings. A full explanation of the diagram can be found here.

Basically, we went all out on creating this monument of civilization, at least as far as the technology of the 1970s would allow. The "Golden Record" has even seeped into pop culture, appearing in numerous movies and television shows, weighing in as the "first contact" with extraterrestrial civilization in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Starman (among others).

So what's up with the picture below?



Do you see the little disc next to the American flag in this picture of the Phoenix Mars Lander? It's a mini-DVD from the Planetary Society. A mini DVD. Kinda looks like a CD you burned on your home computer, eh? Not gold etchings. No fancy cover graphics. Sure, it's a DVD and is said to be filled with messages in the form of sci-fi stories and art inspired by Mars, and for some reason it contains the names of more than a quarter million earthlings, but where's the bling? Where's the glory? Where's the I Am Earth, Welcome! It's a little disappointing. The whole friggin' lander should be coated in hieroglyphics. It should be graffitied from antenna to foot. We need to pimp our landers, NASA, get with the program!

Incidentally, what is the deal behind the quater million names? I should be honest and say I didn't go to the Planetary Society web site to learn the back story on that, and I'm guessing it probably has to do with a fund raising scheme of some sort ($10 to get your name on the Martian disc), but off-hand it sounds scarily like an alien abduction list. Here's a quarter million human volunteers for your anal probes, or some junk : ) Hope I'm not on the list. What's the Privacy Policy of space discs anyway?

Earth sends flying saucer to look for life

Hurling an object 12,500 miles per hour at the surface of Mars, and reducing that velocity to zero in seven minutes for a soft landing, is an amazing feat that hardly seems possible. And yet, that's exactly what scientists at NASA did tonight -- successfully. Here's the backstory of how that works:



Looking for extraterrestrial life is the primary objective of this mission. In fact, this is the first time in the history of the human race that we have ever tried to directly reach out to another world and cup unearthly life in the palm of our hands -- albeit robotic hands. How absolutely perfect it is, then, that we sent something resembling a UFO, a flying saucer straight out of The Day The Earth Stood Still. No matter what, technology always oddly ends up immitating science fiction.

Prepare for the Long Now

A Christian was posting to a message board I frequent about the End Times, about how all the woes of the world indicate that society is going downhill fast and look to the skies the end is nigh. I don't know about all of that, but I prefer to remain optimistic (disclaimer: I'm not a religious person).

My friend: I see your "End Times" and raise you one "Clock of the Long Now".

The Clock of the Long Now is a proposed mechanical clock designed to keep time for 10,000 years, to get people thinking about the future, the l-o-n-g future, the long now. It's a problem-solving think-project with time as the enemy -- how do you make a clock that runs 10,000 years? how do you protect it from the environment, wars, etc.? The more one thinks about these questions, the more they imagine civilization lasting for millenia to come. It's a "counterpoint to today's 'faster/cheaper' mind set and [serves to] promote 'slower/better' thinking." From one of the founders of the project:

When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 2000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.

- Computer scientist Daniel Hillis

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Preventing IT burnout

I have a lot of friends who work in IT, and I've noticed that more and more of them are wanting to pull the plug and get away from working with computers. I can't blame them. It's a bit of a drab existence staring at the screen all day in a cell, I mean cubicle, and if I had to do that in a traditional eight-hour shift, I'd go nuts myself -- and I love computers! The good news is that those suffering from tech burnout have an out, without shunning the grid. Make tech work for you!

Strategy One: Become a moofer. Mobile technology has dramatically matured to where you really don't need an office anymore. Laptops working off Wi-Fi and 3GG Smartphones allow the would-be tech burnout to go out and get some *shudder to think* sunlight! And I mean real out-door computing, not some office-surrogate like Starbucks. When the weather gets warmer, I'll probably spend just as much time in the courtyard across the street as I do in my actual office. Wired Magazine this month published a map of free municipal wi-fi, not just in large cities, but in small towns across America you've probably never heard of. Check out the interactive online version, pick a city, move there, and moof! The sun burn will eventually go away as you adapt to your new environment.

Strategy Two: Launch a startup. Sure, it's sooo Y2K to launch an tech startup, but today's startups are made smarter because the technology is finally in place to, you know, actually make some money. Maybe you won't become the next dot com billionaire, but that's not really your goal, is it? You're just looking for supplemental income so you can maybe see some sunlight (see Strategy One). If that's your goal all you need is a couple of thousand dedicated users, and the passive income earned through syndicated ads will likely earn you a living. But how do you get those thousands of users you need and still not, like, work and stuff?

Here's my formula:

1) Imitate - Find something that works well on a macro-scale and adapt it to a micro-scale. If you find yourself drooling over the ungodly amount eBay takes in, brainstorm how you can duplicate that on a smaller scale. eBay is a worldwide marketplace for everything you can think of, but there's likely a market in your own little corner of the world for items too large to ship easily. A local site that auctions large items like antique beds and dressers, items best delivered locally, if marketed well locally, may just allow you to escape that 9-5 unhealthy relationship you have with your computer.

2) Innovate - Don't just rip off something someone else did. Find ways of adding your own contribution. Make it your own. If you're adapting a macro-scale model to a micro-scale model, like in the example above, there's likely to be hundreds of features the big guys left out because they just don't work on a macro-scale. eBay couldn't incorporate a local delivery service that picks up items at one location and delivers them to another location -- that's just not going to happen. It could happen for you if you partner with a local delivery company, and take a little off the top. Adding your own novel ideas to the mix will make your micro-site more attractive to users who need features that the macro-models simply can't provide.

3) Automate - One of my favorite lines from Fox's King of the Hill is in the episode where Kahn shows up at Strickland Propane and asks Hank, "Haven't they replaced you with a coin operated machine yet?" To prevent tech burnout, especially if you're running a tech biz, you want to be replaced by a machine. Put tech to work for you by automating everything you possibly can. That's what software is supposed to do. When the machine just won't do the job because it requires human intervention, still automate. Crowd-source it.

In short: The smarter you use tech, the less time you'll actually have to spend hands-on with tech.

Your Second Life, no really

In the early days of the web, businesses swarmed to adopt private chatrooms and instant messenger programs as effective business tools for dealing with out-of-office communication. That's so 2-D. As 3-D environments like Second Life become more viable, is it possible that one day we may all conduct business in immersive online environments, in a sort of, well, second life? It's a definite possibility. Last year Lawrence Lessig, cyber-law professor and founder of the Creative Commons, began conducting seminars on legal, social and technological issues while on "location" in the Second Life virtual world. This month, Forrester Research released a 24-page report, Getting Real Work Done In Virtual Worlds, telling its clients that virtual worlds are on the brink of becoming valuable work tools; and that within 5 years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for business as the web is today. As Gary Trudeau said, "I've been trying for some time to develop a lifestyle that doesn't require my presence." Maybe someday soon, in the non-local Internet of the near-futre, I may actually succeed.

Batteries jump from 30 minutes to 30 years

Not technically Moore's Law, but along the same lines: In work contracted to the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, scientists recently invented a continuous power battery that lasts for 30 years without a single recharge. Woah! I'm happy when I get 30 minutes out of my current laptop battery, but never having to worry about charging it? That's the idea. They're called betavoltaic power cells and use radioisotopes as the energy source. Though it sounds nuclear, it's not hazardous and is environmentally and (more importantly) crotch friendly. They're small, thin and perfect for laptops, and should be hitting the market in 2 to 3 years. This is a huge deal. I read in Wired a year or two back about a company in California that makes electric sports cars powered completely by dozens of traditional lithium-ion power batteries rigged together -- and the car goes quite far before needing to be recharged. Imagine if they replace the lithium-ion rig with betavoltaic power cells. You'd get a car that wouldn't need refueling for 30 years!

var Kentucky = new Array("Wired", "Hickish", "Amish")

Awhile back I wrote about how Kentucky's long-held hillbilly image was being reconsidered in light of efforts to wire every corner of the state, and to woo tech-heavy businesses to the area (See: When did Kentucky become cool?). Unfortunately whatever steps forward Kentucky made to look like a progressive region, it took leaps back recently when the media latched onto the controversy surrounding the opening of the Creation Museum (technically Northern Kentucky, but might as well be Cincinnati). The media has us looking like hicks again.

I'm not going to comment too much on the Creation Museum myself, except to say that if you're going to invoke science as a religious explanation, it's no longer under the scope of religion. It becomes the realm of science, which automatically makes it subject to peer-review. If you don't want the criticism, don't invoke science.

That's not what I wanted to talk about here, though. What we're talking about is stereotypes. Kentucky is actually pretty diverse. My question: How can any universal statement be made about a region where you routinely encounter the following at the local supermarket?


(photo shot by mobile phone, apologize for the quality)

Obviously the region isn't that homogenous when Amish are shopping at the grocery store, while I'm running around snapping pics with a mobile phone and checking my email on a laptop that's swiping wi-fi from the Super 8 motel down the street : )

Kentucky != "Hick". Kentucky = Array.

When did Kentucky become cool?

What's this? I was reading through MIT's Technology Review and came across this ad. Kentucky seems to really, really want to shed it's hillbilly image, like big time. Forget Silicone Valley in California, or even Silicone Alley in New York, make way for Silicone Holler! The whole damn state is wired and now Kentucky is out to seduce high-tech companies through matching funds. It's not just tech either. Last year, Esquire named Kentucky the most stylish state, based largely on the amount of hipsters it's produced, including the likes of George Clooney, Hunter S. Thompson, Johnny Depp, Muhammad Ali, and others. Last October, Louisville was even tapped to play host to the IdeaFestival. The IdeaFestival is a world-class meet up bringing together the most diverse and leading thinkers from across the nation and around the globe to explore and celebrate innovation and cutting-edge ideas. It's a huge think-tank filled with some of the most brilliant and extraordinary problem solvers on the planet. It's no small thing that it was held in Louisville. Guess where the IdeaFestival is going to be this year... Louisville again! It's all just a little too weird. Kentucky's not supposed to be cool.