Radical Transparency

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June 27, 2009

In Defense of Aging

Evolution, through the eyes of a metaphorically inclined computer programmer:

Old age is a feature, not a bug. With less turn-over it would be difficult to life as a whole to adapt to changing environment. It has drawbacks as knowledge lost by the dead individual. Advanced life forms overcome that with culture. Earlier simpler life forms probably lacked the aging feature, and were superseded by others who had it.

Thank you, Wiley, for passing that along. Your ability to stay current with the Slashdot comments is both a mystery and an inspiration.

Filed under  //   aging   comments   evolution   geeks   inspiration   metaphors   mystery   slashdot   wiley  

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November 11, 2008

The Cowboys

A bit of a silly conversation started on Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog the other day when he mentioned the fact that he's a Dallas Cowboys fan.

I commented, asking for an explanation, and, today, he responded, sparking a beauty of a comment thread.

After trying to imagine growing up without lovable home teams and reading TNC's explanation, I respect his love for the Cowboys.  I don't like it.  But I'm ok with it.  I think it's real, and I think real love for a team is something to celebrate.

Which reminds me of something one of my cousins said as we wandered around the ballpark before going in for Game 4 of the World Series.

Everyone was wearing red and chanting and singing for the Phils, and one of us noted the fact that it couldn't possibly be like it was in Philly in Tampa Bay.  Fans were probably way into it, but some of those fans were Phils fans, and that makes for a totally different dynamic.  There's tension there.  Home vs. Away.  Red vs. Blue.

In Philly there wasn't tension.  We were all Home, all Red, all Good Guys.  No Bad Guys would have come close to that pregame party.

And then came the observation.

We shouldn't be celebrating our exclusivity.  We should love the fact that there's no anger in the pregame crowd, but we should welcome Tampa Bay fans.  We should be excited to have rival fans in the house.  We should party together before the game.  We should make fun of each other during the game.  And we should party together again after the game.

We should be able to celebrate our losses as wins for other fans.

And that's a pretty powerful thought.  Mature.  Idealistic.  Symbolic of way more than professional sports.  And powerful.

Not an easy one to put into practice, however.  Certainly not in Philadelphia.  And certainly not when it pertains to the Dallas Cowboys.  But worth keeping in mind regardless.

Filed under  //   baseball   comments   competition   dallas cowboys   exclusivity   fans   football   good and evil   home teams   ta-nehisi coates  

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October 28, 2008

Like Internet Dating, Only Better

Jenny the Bloggess is hilarious and probably totally ridiculously gorgeous in real life, so my plan is sweep her off her feet with love comments and convince her to marry me.

I made my first attempt last Thursday when she posted a transcribed conversation in which her husband called her the world's greatest grampa (with an m) and refused to buy her a new curly straw...

Please dump Victor and marry me. I'll give you hats and straws and burritos AND zebra stripe gum. If you're not sick of zebra stripe gum, of course, which I guess you would be if you smell it all day long. But that would imply that you smell your feet all day long, which I don't mean to imply, because I'm pretty sure you'd never do anything weird like that. Though it isn't weird if you do it, because I can imagine that if my feet smelled as good as yours, I might strategically slip out of my shoes and let the zebra smells waft more often. But I wouldn't really know how these things work because my feet smell like feet (I think), and I don't even know what zebra stripe gum is. Which I should never have admitted because if my friend Danny is right that he'll never marry a girl that's never heard of A Tribe Called Quest, then there's no way you'll marry a guy that's never heard of what's probably the best gum ever invented. Man. Bummer. Tell Victor he wins for today. But I'll try again…

No response.  Yet.  Which is ok.  I don't expect one.  Yet. 

I will continue commenting.  And hoping and dreaming.

Her most recent post is about ground squirrels and spelling mistakes, however.  Not the most romantic subject.  Which makes it tough to comment effectively. Which is a worry.  But I realize that these things take patience.  So I'm going to go to sleep and think about it and see how I feel in the morning.

Filed under  //   capitalization   comments   danny   gum   internet dating   patience   romance   squirrels   the bloggess   titles   zebras  

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October 13, 2008

Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

Don't think I've ever used a pop-country song as a title or as a metaphor before, so this is kind of a big moment I guess...

No Impact Man seems to want to give up his journaling and replace it with a multi-voiced editorial page, and that bums me out. 

I like journals better.  I've said (written) it before.  And I said (wrote) it again today, in a comment on No Impact Man's post:

Keep yourself at the center of it. Don't let it drift from your experience and your ideas. The best blogs, in my opinion, are personal. And broad. And a little bit unfocused. They're real windows into real minds.

I fear that if you go multi-voiced and post 8 times a day, you'll lose the thought narrative that the one man show produces.

Write about the work you do, whatever it is. Write about the craziest thoughts you have. And let the rest of the community provide the diversity of perspective.

-Ask readers to submit articles from which you can choose a weekly guest post (and take all submissions and post them on another blog somewhere, for the community and posterity).

-Pull your favorite comments out of threads and turn them into posts (with a little commentary from you, of course).

-Don't hire writers, but rather use the money you raise to seed other would-be bloggers whose ideas and styles and angles you love.

But don't lose your personal voice. That's what I come here to read.

Reading that again now, I feel like I sound a little not nice.  Or like I think I know exactly what I'm talking about.  Not the intention.  But oh well.

Filed under  //   blogging   comments   metaphors   no impact man  

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September 30, 2008

Barnyard Animals, Social Commentary, and DVD Exclusives

No Impact Man lamented today that his daughter is acquiring a taste for shopping.  He reckons little kids ought to be playing with barnyard animals instead. 

Or something.  Anything.  As long as it's not TV or the mall.  No binge consumption for little kids.  It's a bad cultural habit.

Step Brothers leapt to mind, and I commented:

I think one reason we like watching TV and going to the mall is that, when we hit a certain age, those things become what we're culturally expected to like.

At a certain point in childhood, it becomes less cool to say your favorite thing to do when you go home from school is draw or build with legos or wrestle with the dog or put on a silly hat and pretend to be Robin Hood. At a certain point, it becomes less cool to be creative in your spare time, less cool to let your imagination entertain you.

Unless, of course, you're the main characters of Step Brothers. And, maybe I'm crazy, but I think that movie was brilliant social commentary, intentional or not.

(Also tangentially relevant here might be Clay Shirky's thoughts on our cognitive surplus and the future of media: we grew up consuming, but the barriers preventing us from producing and sharing are crumbling, so the days of TV as we know it might be over.)

A little off topic with the Clay Shirky there, but I'm glad to have at least tried to spread some Step Brothers love.

My only complaint about that movie is that they didn't show us any Talladega Nights style outtakes during the credits.  I suspect they're saving them for the DVD, which, while certainly a good way to sell DVDs, makes me love the movie a little less.  It makes me love it a little more again, however, to know that there are some deleted scenes on Funny or Die.

Filed under  //   animals   comments   consumers   cultural expectations   funny or die   no impact man   outtakes   step brothers  

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August 8, 2008

Trapeze Wisdom, Balkanization, and Wikipedia

I got some great comments on my post the other day about Clay Shirky, Wikipedia, and the Cognitive Surplus.

One asked about niche communities and whether there'll ever be another Wikipedia-scale open source research project.

I responded once last night, but it was late, and I didn't have full brain function, so I just responded again.  It's too long and ridiculous a comment for me to leave sitting lonely deep in a thread, and the metaphorical element gets silly, so I'll pull it out and throw it up here...

One more thought about the Balkanization of online communities.

I think there's a key difference between what Wal-Mart and CNN (and Yahoo!) offer and what online communities offer.

Wal-Mart, CNN, and Yahoo! offer (primarily anyway) goods or info for us to CONSUME. 

Online communities offer consumables as well, but, compared to superstores and big box media, they offer huge opportunity for their users to PRODUCE.

Wikipedia is an unusual case.  It's consumed at the 500lb gorilla level, but it's produced by consumers.

I think it achieves its high consumption levels in large part due to the breadth of its offerings, but I think it's important to remember that there aren't that many people that contribute heaps to Wikipedia. Its long tail of contributions is unusually long and thus hugely valuable, but its core contribution community isn't so big to make it unreplicable.

And I think it's also important to remember that no niche contribution community will need to be nearly as big as Wikipedia's.

And important to remember that having very specific barrels into which we can drop our knowledge might be a very good thing for knowledge quality:

Maybe I'm a trapeze genius. I know everything there is to know about trapezes. I hope there exists a small but totally passionate trapeze community that can stimulate and challenge me as I open source my trapeze wisdom. If you throw me in with a bunch of clowns and lion tamers, I might get discouraged by their inability to speak my language, and my trapeze knowledge might never find heirs.

But maybe this rant is irrelevant. Maybe what you really want to know is how we might weave lots of small communities into big, broad info sources for consumption? How we might harness the niche communities to create another Wikipedia or five?

I think we take the trapeze wisdom and dump it into Wikipedia, for one.

And I think we also set up some well designed info aggregators, info organizers, and info synthesizers.

Collect knowledge in the niche barrels, let the people that care most and understand best turn the knowledge to wisdom, and feed the wisdom into broad reaching, cross-referenced enlightenment disseminators.

Maybe?

Filed under  //   clay shirky   comments   consumers   exhaustion   metaphors   online community   trapezes   wikipedia   wisdom  

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July 29, 2008

Turning Poop into Fire

My friends at Wokai are thinking about putting together a 2 min promotional video.  They watched what The Girl Effect produced, and they're inspired.

Rightfully so.

But they need a 2 minute story.  Something that explains poverty in China, microfinance as a tool to fight it, and Wokai as a means to grow Chinese MFIs.

In my first comment to the Wokai blog post in which they announced their desire to make a video, I rambled about the two Chinas .  Another one of Wokai's friends replied asking what I thought about a video about a 三为一体, a pig sty that captures methane released from pig manure and pumps it into kitchens to power gas stoves.

I replied:

I think a pig sty story sounds good. Not just a girl. Even better. A girl and her piglets.

And there's something unquestionably memorable about turning poop into fire.

I figure that's a comment worth saving, if for no other reason than that it involves the word poop.

I'm also curious to know if using the word poop in this posterous post title will attract more readers than my more mildly titled raves.  We'll see.

Filed under  //   china   comments   microfinance   pigs   poop   poverty   wokai  

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July 23, 2008

Spicy Roasted Fish Comment

I don't eat much fish anymore.  Unless I kill it myself, with a speargun.  And, yes, I know, that's weird, but I'll get into it another time.  For the moment, all I want to say is that even though I don't eat much fish, I do still have fond memories of fish eating.

For example, the night we had a celebratory Yanjing Browns basketball championship dinner at 独们冲 (not sure, actually, if there was a championship to celebrate, but we did win quite a few tourneys between 2004 and 2007, so it's possible; regardless, the point is that it was a bunch of happy, hungry, rowdy basketball players rolling into 独门冲), a night that rushed back into my mind after reading this chinabites blog post:

http://blog.chinabites.com/2008/07/23/spicy-roasted-fish/

I commented:

I think there's another Du Men Chong on the Dongzhimen side of Gui Jie. I vaguely remember going there once. Vaguely because whoever had arranged the meal explained as we sat down that spicy roasted fish wasn't spicy roasted fish unless everyone was dripping sweat while eating it. We found out moments later that the fish itself would have done the sweatiness job easily, but our host insisted that we get a jump on things by pounding a few rounds of 二锅头. And by "a few" I mean I don't remember how many. I think the spicy fish was pretty tasty, though maybe it wouldn't have been the same if my soaked and dripping head wasn't spinning and swaying in a grain alcohol fog.

I miss Beijing.

Filed under  //   baijiu   basketball   china   chinabites   chinese food   comments   vegetarians   yanjing browns  

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July 18, 2008

Commenting in Chinese

Is it totally ridiculous to use Chinese characters in a comment on a blog whose primary audience will be native English speakers?

I think the obvious answer is yes.

I just used a few, though, in my response to Wiley's latest chinabites blog post:

http://blog.chinabites.com/2008/07/18/back-in-beijing

Dude. Hui restaurant in your "old neighborhood." An ayi that remembers you and a bearded shushu. 水煮风片. 素炒饼. Best green beans in the history of green beans. Wow. They're back in business. That is truly great news. They are my favorite restauranteurs in Beijing. I don't think we would have ever moved out of Dong Wang Zhuang had they not closed up shop. Please send my love.

Hmmm.

I think the biggest reason I felt compelled to include the characters is that I think pinyin is so damn unelegant looking.  I think I might need to suck it up and deal with it, though.  Alienating people that might participate in an English-only comment thread but won't feel comfortable participating in an elitist bilingual thread is not a cool thing to do.

Filed under  //   china   chinabites   comments   dongwangzhuang   language   pinyin   wiley  

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July 18, 2008

Echoes of Burritos

Just responded to a comment Danny left on A More Perfect Market. 
 
He's annoyed at chinabites for making him hungry for food he can't have.  I told him he might want to use chinabites as an artificial hunger creator next time he challenges a superior eater to burrito crushing. 

But I didn't mention the burritos.  I just alluded to competitive eating, figuring that'd be sufficient to conjure nacho cheese images in Danny's sad, nauseous memory.

I thought about providing the whole backstory, but there's something embarrassingly wasteful about competitive eating, and I didn't think it'd fit well into the Prairie Blog comment thread.

Radical transparency is tugging, however, so I think it's important that I post a confession here.

I have participated in and possibly will participate in further eating competitions.  Ridiculous, I know, but sometimes people challenge me, and sometimes I feel the need to show them they shouldn't. 

I will make a resolution, however.  I will do everything I can to make all further eating competitions as socially and environmentally responsible as possible.  I'm thinking watermelons.  Organic, locally grown watermelons.  Supporting farmers that do good things for the world by producing clean, healthy produce and and distributing it locally.

It'll still be a waste of food, but there will be good side effects.

Attached is a picture of my cousin Sophie, a protesting non-spectator of last summer's burrito extravaganza.

Filed under  //   burritos   chinabites   chinese food   comments   competitive eating   danny   more perfect market   organic   responsible consumption   sophie  

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