I haven't read this book, but from the review it's clearly one to track down and throw on the (growing) pile. [Link]

Two network phenomena are of special interest to researchers: synchronization and connectedness. Synchronization refers to the way in which networked elements, due to their dynamics, communicate and exhibit collective behavior. Connectedness describes the architecture of networks. For example, are there just a few highly connected "hubs" (think airline route maps) from which lots of short hops are made? Or is everything connected to everything else in a way that has no recognizable, simple structure? Connectedness is an important aspect of networks that determines, among other things, their efficiency and their vulnerability. We now know that many real networks are not random collections of nodes and links. Real networks are connected in special ways that have functional significance. Perhaps no one has been closer to the epicenter of the recent progress than Steven Strogatz, the author of the smart, carefully written, and fascinating account that is Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order.

To my surprise, only at the end of the book does Strogatz devote a slightly short chapter to what is perhaps his most widely recognized work: the field of small−world networks. The prime example is known as "six degrees of separation," which refers to the parlor game in which one tries to link a given actor to a target (historically actor Kevin Bacon) through the smallest chain of movies sharing common costars. Strogatz describes how small−world networks are intermediate between regular and random networks. A few shortcuts that link random points in a regular network have a drastic effect on the connectivity: The average path length goes down significantly, while the local order in the network is hardly affected. Small−world networks have been found in numerous situations, such as in the nervous system of the worm C. elegans, the US power grid, and the Internet. But their influence is not always benign: Viruses and epidemics, for example, can easily spread globally.

Dianne's murdere was in 76, on the night of my first important gig. I stumbled thru 2 years with drugs and booze and rock n roll and girls, met Lois, hooked up, started the Skunks and the Violators, and got through the next few years on pure adrenaline and new love. But I pushed the murder down in my consciousness as far as it would go. It popped up again big time in 1998, after I was diagnosed with cancer and had surgery and was undergoing chemo and radiation. While doing that, I started keeping a journal, which was the starting point of the book.

And I knew I would examine the murder and my feelings and the story of it, and find out more details about what actually happened, but didn't actually sit down and start writing about it until 1999. And that opened a vein, big time. I wrote about 40--50 pages and couldn't look at it all for months. So the book was written in many stages, with fits and starts. I didn't actually finally look up the newspapers and crime files until the fall of 2002. So I was having lots of problems with this mentally even as I was getting stronger physically from the cancer thing.

Cracks in the Pavement is an art project subtitled "gifts in the urban landscape." Art objects are placed at various urban sites in Austin and London. You can locate the object through the web site (which shows pictures of landmarks near the art, but no pictures of the art), or you might just stumble onto a piece somewhere. Thanks to pdl for the pointer. [Link]

Jonas Luster, ever the social entrepreneur, is brokering Gmail invites in exchange for good works. Says Jonas, "So far, we have $600 in charity donations, someone who'll adopt a child, three volunteers in bad areas, and someone who'll work a free week in a hospital in Sao Paulo." Jonas encourages other folks to give away their invites with similar exchanges. Karmically better than selling 'em on ebay, no? [Link]

Marc Savlov interviewed Rich MacKinnon and I for the Austin Chronicle and came up with a fine cover story (okay, I'm biased) about AWC's (and Less Networks') success in putting Austin on the WiFi map, thanks in large part to Rich's decision to commit every waking hour to a project that generates no revenue. The result is an increasing number of free wireless hotspots in Austin, more than anywhere else, in fact, and more coming on every week. This vision doesn't fit the traditional corporate top-down command and control way of doing business, but WiFi has always been a grassroots phenomenon. WiFi is cool precisely because it disrupts the corporate business paradigm that attempts to shape and control the consumer... with wireless, as with open source, the consumer and the supplier are peers. [Link]

"We believe the world is ready for a new way of doing business and living life. It's not about more money and more stuff. It's about knowing the difference between a life well-lived and a life that's purchased. It's about how much you can do with what you have. The founders and employees of LESS Networks have created a company based on the Philosophy of Less."

Doc Searls posts thoughtfully about what RSS might bring to email, and he gets back to Andre Durand's three tiers of identity, where Andre talks about the "identity marketplace," a taxonomy of identity: T1 is a personal identity, owned and controlled by an individual. (You have to be careful here not to confuse identity with person – Andre's speaking in the abstract here. T2 is a corporate identity, or an identity that is assigned to us for some reason, and is conditional and temporary... Andre's examples being job title, cellphone, membership in United Mileage Plus, etc. T3 is a marketing or abstracted identity, like a marketing segment - 'frequent buyer' or 'one time customer,' etc. Doc's idea: maybe we can use principles from RSS to make email something he calls re-mail – relationship mail – using relationship to solve the email problem (by making our T3 email, i.e. spam, go away). Interesting thought - seems to me that's a lot like whitelisting?

Doc links to his 2003 slides for his keynote at Digital Identity World that attempt to redefine marketing in network environments as customer-driven. Paco Nathan and I were talking about this in 1992 when we formed FringeWare, which I called a "street market in cyberspace." Our idea later popped up in Doc's thinking, when he says markets are conversations, kind of the same idea. Early markets were face to face, localized, and set in the context of community relationships. As mass markets evolved, sellers and buyers were disconnected and marketing evolved as an abstract layer between the two. Buyers saw calculated marketing messages, but not people. Sellers saw abstract marketing segments, but not people. Mass media enabled this disconnect and the gap just got wider.

Paco and I saw a potential for the Internet to bring buyer and seller back to a more personal relationship in a community context, so we focused on community first. The business (mail order books and gadgets, what Paco used to call "a Sharper Image for freaks and geeks) ran in the back pages of our magazine, as a catalog or "magalog," and much of the energy channeled through our email list, the FringeWare News Network, which carried content a lot like the stuff posted on the boing boing blog (Paco and I had both been associate editors of bOING bOING, the zine. We caught on globally and locally, and FringeWare had a run of something like seven years, which ain't bad for an ecommerce company that can't do ecommerece (we formed pre-web, when the acceptable use policy of NSF wouldn't allow commercial activity across the backbone; when web technology appeared and the backbone was privatized we were set to do ecommerce, but the credit card companies weren't going for it because there was no standard way yet to secure the transactions).

After I left FringeWare, Whole Foods Market hired me as "Internet guy," their first employee dedicated to the Internet, and we tried a couple of ecommerce experiments. Recognizing that an important aspect of the store experience at Whole Foods was about community, that the store forms relationships with its customers, I pushed for a strong online community presence which we eventually built as part of an ecommerce site that was also information rich (as are the store environments). The experiment seemed to be working pretty well, too, though for various reasons it wasn't sustained.

It's hard to get away from the mass marketing paradigm because effective mass marketing can be so lucrative, and because mass market thinking is drilled so deeply into our world-view, which was shaped and conditioned by mass marketing messages over mass media. Whole masses of people forgot how to do the personal, having spent their evenings, not in conversations with others, but as passive recipients of commercial messages via television. Those messages are interspersed with programming much of which is calculated to feel like relationship.

The Internet is somewhat disruptive of consumer culture in that it's interactive and can be truly personal. The best attempts at marketing over the Internet leverage relationships (consider the community aspects of ebay and Amazon).

We still have a marketers to don't get it, though: the clueless spammers attempt to fill our inboxes with impersonal commercial messages that have nothing to do with who we are. I've always wondered how they could possibly be successful; no one I know actually reads the spam they receive; most filter it and toss it. Apparently they send so many messages that a tiny fraction of responses is lucrative enough to justify the ongoing deluge.

It's time to change our thinking about marketing, and Doc (along with David Weinberger and Chris Locke) authored an important prescription for change when they wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto. (I'm rereading the theses now...)

Just caught the episode 4 – the Austin episode – of Gina Gerson's Rocked on IFC. Rocked is kind of a picaresque, a chronicle of Gershon's travels in support of the independent film Prey for Rock and Roll. In the course of the tour, she came to Austin for the Austin Film Festival and played the legendary Austin blues club Antone's. She's fighting a losing battle trying to support the film when its distributors aren't lifting a finger, but she sho does know how to rock and roll. (I found myself wondering why she hasn't moved to Austin, where rock and roll still has a pulse.)

Andrew Leonard of Salon has written "You Are Who You Know," the first of a series of articles on web software that enables social networks (or it might be better to say enables identification, tracking, and visibility of social networks). Social network web sites like LinkedIn, Orkut, Tribe, and Friendster attract a lot of users and have value that many folks don't seem to get. I've heard complaints that the only real value of these sites if that they make you feel good about all the connections you have, and that there's the down side of making you feel like a schmuck if you can't make a lot of connections or figure out what the connections are good for. I was also in a meeting specifically focused on LinkedIn where the question seemed to be, not whether the sites have personal value, but whether they can monetize the connections they enable and build a "real" business model... you know, the kind where you get rounds of financing, build from round to round, have an IPO, then exit the company with a bundle of money. That's the way entrepreneurs build wealth, one down side being that it's become dang near the only way businesses are built, and it's very a very focused and practical way to operate, doesn't leave a lot of room for experimentation. It could be that we really need experimentation to get our heads around the real value of social network software.

But I digress. Back to Leonard's piece – as usual, he's got his head around his subject and does a good job describing how social networks can be effective:

... the not-so-secret secret of social networking is that flimsy is good! Flimsy is where the action is. Seek out flimsy, and you shall be rewarded. As Mark Granovetter explained, for what must have been the thousandth time this year, the counterintuitive key to social networking is that its value doesn't inhere in linking up to your best friends and soul mates. You are far more likely, argued Granovetter, to find leads on a good job or a prospective date from the networks of people you don't know very well.

You are already probably familiar with the friends of your best friend, or spouse, or close office colleague. There's no fresh territory to plunder there. It's those people with whom you have "weak ties" -- the vague acquaintances, that guy or gal you once kind of knew, a little bit -- who offer a path into possibility that you didn't know was there. The essence of social software networks is that they are a clever way to organize access to the networks of people you aren't actually friends with.

People, especially in the business world, especially salespeople, have been trying to figure out how to do this forever. But it's a tough problem, because once you start dealing with a network that consists of the friends of the friends of your friends, you are confronting big numbers and big complexity. I have 50 "friends" on Orkut -- my resulting network has 410,000 members, and is growing by 20,000 every week!

If I was completely together I'd be celebrating Bloomsday in Dublin, and before going I would've re-read Joyce's Ulysses. I bought my first copy of the book when I was 14 years old, but it wasn't til I was in a class on epic literature at the University of Texas that I got serious... convinced the instructor to let me do a special study of Joyce's modern epic while the others were doing one of Homer's books (can't remember which). I remember writing the intense little paper that would summarize my Ulysses experience... ultimately something life 5-7 pages long, but sooo condensed. Not sure how I did it, and my Prof Rebhorn couldn't figure it out, either... normally, he said, I would expect twice this many pages, but you seem to've nailed it. Must've had something to do with the mouse in the walls of the house where we lived, who had a distinct rhythm as he pounded – something, I'm not sure what, certainly not snare drums – inside the walls. This while I typed and slashed and typed again, and Marsha slept. That was over 30 years ago, and the original Bloomsday was – so much longer, but it seems close. [Link]

According to this description of Al-Qaida members' self-perception in Slate, members of this worldwide disorganization see themselves as action heroes.

Although al-Qaida adherents are commonly described as having a medieval worldview, their rhetoric and self-image owe as much to blockbuster movies and Mortal Kombat as to epic tales of seventh-century Islam. Al-Nashmi's narrative reads like a straight-to-video shoot-'em-up script, with James Bond car chases and people's heads exploding. "I shot him in the head, and his head exploded," al-Nashmi writes in describing killing an American in an oil company office. Later, when they battle security forces, al-Nashmi says, "I saw the skull of the soldier behind the machine-gun explode before me." As they make their escape, the group runs six roadblocks with Nimr hanging out of the passenger-side car window to squeeze off round after round, eventually taking a bullet in the chest. Al-Nashmi sums up the cinematic mayhem with a quote from Abu Bakr, who led the early Muslim community after the prophet's death in 632: "Strive for death, and you will be granted life."

Texas textbook controversy rears its gnarly head once again... I often find myself in conversations with my friends from other parts of the world where I defend Texas as a state far more progressive and enlightened than they imagine, a great place to live and work, a state that should thrive economically because of our great natural and human resources etc. It's depressing, then, to find our textbook review panelists approving textbooks that are inadequate, as noted in the press release below, from Heather Alden of Texas Freedom Network:

Books Fail to Meet State Curriculum Requirements on Sex and Health; State Board of Education to Hold Adoption Hearings in July, September

Teens in Texas – the state with the nation’s highest teen birth rate – were the big losers this week when state review panels gave passing grades to inadequate health textbooks submitted for sale in Texas next year.

The textbooks failed to include state-mandated information on barrier protection and other contraceptive methods for preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including HIV/AIDS, said Samantha Smoot, president of the Texas Freedom Network. Smoot said the process for reviewing and approving responsible textbooks in Texas has clearly broken down.

"Publishers have been irresponsible in failing to meet curriculum requirements on barrier protection and other forms of contraception," Smoot said. "But Texas teens and their parents rely on the state’s review panelists to rise above political pressure and ensure that the books meet all curriculum requirements. By not insisting that the books give kids common sense, practical information on sex and health that deals with the real-life situations we face every day, the panels have let the kids of Texas down."

The State Board of Education will hold public hearings on the textbooks on July 14 and September 8. Board members will vote on November 5 to adopt or reject the books.

State review panelists – appointed by the Texas Education Agency – met in Austin this week and rated high school health textbooks from Ohio-based Glencoe/McGraw-Hill and Texas-based Holt, Rinehart and Winston as conforming to state curriculum standards. Those curriculum standards are called the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS. Panelists must certify that conforming textbooks meet all of the TEKS standards.

One TEKS standard (number 7I) requires that textbooks "analyze the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of barrier protection and other contraceptive methods," including the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). The standard also requires that textbooks discuss the effectiveness of remaining abstinent until marriage.

Textbooks from Glencoe and Holt noted that abstinence is the only completely effective way to avoid pregnancy and STDs. The books, however, included no information about barrier protection and other contraceptive methods.

The textbooks’ lack of medically accurate, complete information recklessly endangers Texas kids, Smoot said.

"Abstinence is the best policy for teens," Smooth said. "But teens also need reliable information to protect themselves from life-long consequences like unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV."

Smoot pointed to a January 2004 poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation showing that 93 percent of parents with high school children believe teens should be taught about birth control.

"Parents know that making sure our kids have the most accurate and reliable information is the best protection we have for raising safe, healthy, responsible adults," Smoot said.

In an initial report, panelists rated one textbook, from New York publisher Delmar Learning, as nonconforming apparently because they thought the book’s discussion of abstinence was not strong enough. The Delmar textbook states that "sexual abstinence is the only way of preventing any sexually transmitted infection." In addition, Delmar’s textbook includes a brief discussion of the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of latex condoms. Discussions of latex condoms are missing from the Glencoe and Holt textbooks.

Smoot called this lack of information in the textbooks alarming. Noting the state’s high teen birth rate, Smoot also pointed to statistics showing that nearly half of all new cases of STDs and HIV occur among youth ages 15-24.

"It’s too dangerous to give our young people anything short of information that is scientifically and medically accurate,” Smoot said. “That’s why it’s vital that health textbooks equip teens with sexuality information that is reliable, complete and age-appropriate."

Texas is one of 22 states with a centralized process for adopting public school textbooks. Religious and social conservatives have organized to influence this process for decades, pressuring publishers to exclude from textbooks information they don’t like. In 2003, for example, would-be censors on the far right attempted to water down discussions of evolution in new Texas biology textbooks.

In addition, because the Texas market is so big, the adoption of health textbooks here has a national impact. Publishers often develop textbooks for Texas and sell the same books across the country.

The Texas Freedom Network has been monitoring textbook censorship efforts in Texas since the mid-1990s.

F8 Fine Art Gallery in Austin has an exhibition starting today that includes photographs by my friend David Verba. The exhibit opens today, with a reception tonight (6-9pm). Other artists: Nathan Jensen, Jennifer Balkan, and Richard D. Griffin. [Link]

For David Verba, photography is often a double-edged sword, documenting the passing or the end of a moment as much as the moment itself. David documents abandoned sites in the American West, finding that the subjects he is attracted to, reflect the same contradictory quality. The locations David chooses to photograph are situated off of rural highways where the scarcity of people leaves the sites and their structures largely unobserved and untouched. Abandoned buildings, forsaken furniture, derelict automobiles, separately and together form tableaus of objects and places whose time has passed. The absence of spectators, however-the existence outside the normal flow of human events-has also lent these scenes a curious quality. Although their time has come and gone, there is a distinct impression of timelessness.

My brother Robert in Oregon sent this link to a Eugene Register-Guard piece about Symbiot Security, Inc., an Austin company where my former FringeWare partner Paco Nathan is Chief Scientist. Symbiot's Intelligent Security Infrastructure Management Systems protects networks against attackers, but what's new is that it can take the offensive, follow the attacker back to his lair and... well, what the product actually does at that point is not quite clear, for obvious reasons. The AP article notes a lot of hand-wringing by skeptics who feel retaliatory technology will just create more hassles, but Paco's smart enough to've assessed and mitigated risks. It'll be interesting to see where this goes... I for one am happy as a clam to see a response to the brain-dead malicious hacks that have become so much a part of cyberspace ecology. Wondering if they've figured out a way to take on spammers... [Link]

I don't want to be the only blogger alive who hasn't pointed at Cory's DRM rant, delivered at Microsoft, but probably to the wrong set of heads. It's a start, though. [Link]
Pardon me, but would you like a wiki with that rant?

The March Across America event in Austin that I announced a few days ago has been cancelled.

I took some time to consider Christopher Hitchens' "Unfahrenheit 911: The Lies of Michael Moore" in Slate. Having just seen Moore's film, I have some thoughts...

It must be evident to anyone, despite the rapid-fire way in which Moore's direction eases the audience hastily past the contradictions, that these discrepant scatter shots do not cohere at any point. Either the Saudis run U.S. policy (through family ties or overwhelming economic interest), or they do not. As allies and patrons of the Taliban regime, they either opposed Bush's removal of it, or they did not. (They opposed the removal, all right: They wouldn't even let Tony Blair land his own plane on their soil at the time of the operation.) Either we sent too many troops, or were wrong to send any at all—the latter was Moore's view as late as 2002—or we sent too few. If we were going to make sure no Taliban or al-Qaida forces survived or escaped, we would have had to be more ruthless than I suspect that Mr. Moore is really recommending.

Hitchens misses Moore's point by a mile here. The film suggests that 9/11 was used as an excuse to take Iraq out, and that the war in Afghanistan was a necessary step given Osama's presence there. The public would never accept a war policy focused exclusively on Iraq at that point.

Moore doesn't suggest that "Saudis run U.S. policy," but that Saudis have powerful influence over the Bush family and their cohorts based on money and business. The conflict of interest is obvious, once you're aware of the relationships and their extent. The Saudis don't "run policy," but they influence the actions of the Bush administration, which has an impact on some policies, especially in the Middle East. This is where I think Moore raises questions so far unanswered, incidentally, and I would like to know more – what was the relationship between Saddam and the Saudis, and how Saddam, formerly "our" friend, become "our" enemy?

... he makes heavy innuendoes about the flights that took members of the Bin Laden family out of the country after Sept. 11. .... the 9/11 commission has found nothing to complain of in the timing or arrangement of the flights. And Richard Clarke, Bush's former chief of counterterrorism, has come forward to say that he, and he alone, took the responsibility for authorizing those Saudi departures. This might not matter so much to the ethos of Fahrenheit 9/11, except that—as you might expect—Clarke is presented throughout as the brow-furrowed ethical hero of the entire post-9/11 moment."

Signoff by the commission and Clarke's comments notwithstanding, Moore's point in the film is still compelling: why were members of Osama's family allowed to leave without any kind of interrogation, while other Arab Muslims, most of whom had no involvement in terrorist activities, were held indefinitely and questioned? As for Clarke is presented throughout I recall only one or two shots of Clarke, where the point was that Clarke et al had warned of imminent danger, only to be ignored by a president who was involved in other kinds of planning sessions, mostly focused on vacation planning.

But Hitchens does address the vacation thing:

President Bush is accused of taking too many lazy vacations. (What is that about, by the way? Isn't he supposed to be an unceasing planner for future aggressive wars?) But the shot of him "relaxing at Camp David" shows him side by side with Tony Blair. I say "shows," even though this photograph is on-screen so briefly that if you sneeze or blink, you won't recognize the other figure. A meeting with the prime minister of the United Kingdom, or at least with this prime minister, is not a goof-off.

I didn't get that Bush was supposed to be an unceasing planner for future aggressive wars, but that he was willing to sign off on an agenda set by others. And hanging out with Tony Blair doesn't prove to me that Bush is not a goof-off. Many in Britain hold the same opinion of Blair, I think.

More interesting is the moment where Bush is shown frozen on his chair at the infant school in Florida, looking stunned and useless for seven whole minutes after the news of the second plane on 9/11. Many are those who say that he should have leaped from his stool, adopted a Russell Crowe stance, and gone to work. I could even wish that myself. But if he had done any such thing then (as he did with his "Let's roll" and "dead or alive" remarks a month later), half the Michael Moore community would now be calling him a man who went to war on a hectic, crazed impulse.

Straw man. If he had been truly forceful, perhaps Moore et al would have ignored the point, who knows? What we see here is part of a pattern that does not suggest true leadership or competence. The point was that Bush didn't know what to do, exactly, without someone to tell him, and no one there knew what to tell him. It was a revealing moment noted by most reviewers of the film – only Hitchens seems to miss the point.

Regarding Moore's presentation of Iraq, Moore notes:

In this peaceable kingdom, according to Moore's flabbergasting choice of film shots, children are flying little kites, shoppers are smiling in the sunshine, and the gentle rhythms of life are undisturbed. Then—wham! From the night sky come the terror weapons of American imperialism. Watching the clips Moore uses, and recalling them well, I can recognize various Saddam palaces and military and police centers getting the treatment. But these sites are not identified as such. In fact, I don't think Al Jazeera would, on a bad day, have transmitted anything so utterly propagandistic.

But Saddam was not Iraq, an important point, and Saddam's depravity was not Iraq's. It is reasonable and effective to show what life was like in Iraq, especially given that we have been conditioned by the Administration and by media to think of Iraq as Saddam's little hell-hole, when in fact, there was life in Iraq beyond the palace walls. And (as Moore points out elsewhere, in video of a public execution by beheading in Saudi Arabia) our allies can also be ruthless as Saddam, in ways we might see as "depraved." The film goes on to show rather significant instances of "collateral damage" as we try to root out Saddam and his supporters. The juxtaposition of incidental innocent casualties with footage of soldiers and others talking about this "liberation" is shocking.

I could go on, there's so much more to Hitchens' piece. Suffice to say that I find his review of the film misleading, but I realize that this is a first volley. You can find more blogs that agree/disagree with Hitchens via Daypop.

The U.S. and Europe are outsourcing religious masses to to Kerala in India. [Link]

The church hierarchy in Kerala has established a set of rules and regulations for taking up the spiritual outsourcing jobs. Mass intentions that church authorities in the West pass over are routed to the diocesan heads that are the bishops. The bishops then hand over the work to parishes that are relatively less busy and poor, especially in the villages.

Each mass is conducted in front of a public congregation in the Malayalam language. The Holy Mass in the Roman Catholic Church re-enacts the last supper of Jesus Christ. It is considered the spiritual source of grace for whose intention it is offered. Many of these spiritual intentions are offered for thanksgiving, departed souls and other religious causes.

But these masses are not for free. Each mass that is outsourced to a local church in Kerala also carries a fair amount of money. For instance, a mass that is outsourced from the US generally is charged $40. Fee for a mass intention made in Germany is 50 euros. For a local church, $40 and 50 euros for a mass is a significant amount. The church generally gets only Rs 50 for a similar special mass that is conducted by the local people.

Gunner Palace is Michael Tucker's documentary about a troop of U.S. soldiers staying in one of Uday Hussein's palaces. The film's web site is mostly Tucker's journal of the making of the film.

For the average soldier, any sympathy they had for the Iraqis was waning and the mood on the streets was very different than before. Fewer waves. The kids stayed their distance. I sometimes felt that the new Iraq was a shotgun wedding of two impossibly different cultures. While you could see positive changes and people did express hope, the violence was taking a toll.

I tried to maintain an objective stance. Then one night, a young Iraqi interpreter who I filmed the first time, was arrested after it was discovered that he possibly had passed intelligence on to the insurgents. If true, he was responsible for four deaths. My whole picture changed as I watched them bring him in. He went from being a positive example of The New Iraq—and a guy I had shared Marlboros with--to a glaring example of how confused everything had become. Could you trust anyone?

Nancy White has posted several links from this year's Supernova conference at her great onfacblog. She's included a link to danah boyd's "Autistic Social Software". danah's got a great pithy manifesto:

Let's stop trying to dumb down people through technology. Let's step back and build technology that will make sense in the everyday lives of those who use it, that will empower them to use their evolved brain in a meaningful way.

My friend, the mad genius David Nuñez is sponsoring a robot show in San Antonio, during the First Annual Cam Carnival this Saturday, July 3. The Robot Group from Austin will be there. Lots o' music, too! [Link]

Ruthless Reviews has a great
rant by Amanda Egge slamming Friendster: "My dog could build a better website than Friendster, granted my dog has an IQ of 130, but still he’s a fucking dog for crying out loud." Much of her complaints are about Friendster's persistent technical problems, but she also mentions Friendster's heavy-handed social controls:

Apparently Jonathan Abrams, the creator of Friendster, couldn’t handle the fact that people were having a little fun on his site so he sent in the Friendster black shirts to start deleting people’s pictures and profiles. Friendster was apparently not a place for "Fakesters" (fake profiles that pretended to be celebrities, schools, pets, presidents and the like.) For example, my friend Jody (who happens to be diabetic,) made a profile for Diabetes Bear (her childhood teddy bear,) that featured the small stuffed bear with a diabetic needle sticking out of its arm. The photo was deleted just days after she uploaded it. Other Fakester profiles have been deleted altogether, "suspended" for having a sense of humor.

For those of you in Los Angeles, John Shirley will be appearing tomorrow, July 1 at Bodhi Tree Bookstore to discuss and sign his excellent book Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas. John was a progenitor of the cyberpunk literary genre; the days he's known even more for his horror fiction. I first learned of his interest in Gurdjieff in '95, when he agreed to write a piece about the enigmatic teacher for an issue of FringeWare Review that I was editing. I blogged more about the Gurdjieff book here. [Link to the Bodhi Tree Bookstore Calendar]

Kudos to Waldo Wilcox, a Utah rancher, and his family for preserving and protecting "a string of ancient settlements thousand of years old and in near perfect condition." Having acquire the land as part of a ranch they bought in 1951, Wilcox' family recognized the historical and scientific value of the site and ensured that it wasn't discovered, commercialized, overrun, and ruined, like so many other historic sites. Wilcox just sold the site to federal and state governments for $2.5 million. [Link]

The sites were occupied for at least 3,000 years until they were abandoned more than 1,000 years ago, when the Fremont people mysteriously vanished. The Fremont, a collection of hunter-gatherers and farmers, preceded more modern American Indian tribes on the Colorado Plateau.

What sets this ancient site apart from other, better-known ones in Utah, Arizona or Colorado is that it's been left virtually untouched, with arrowheads and pottery shards still covering the ground in places.

"I didn't let people go in there to destroy it," said Wilcox, 74, whose parents bought the ranch in 1951 and threw up a gate to the rugged canyon. "The less people know about this, the better."