While many world leaders praised the U.S. killing of Osama bin Laden, the president of Peru went a step further on Monday, calling the development the first miracle of Pope John Paul II since he was beatified last weekend.
“I have said that his first miracle has been to remove from the Earth this demonic incarnation of crime, evil and hatred,” Peruvian president Alan Garcia said, according to CNN affiliate America TV in Peru.
—
CNN via Ed Brayton
Wait a second, I need to facepalm myself a few more times while that sinks in.
Why JP II and not Mother Teresa or Princess Di or Jade Goody, for fuck’s sake? (Now, how could Garcia’s statement be falsified…?)
Possibly the most worrying aspect of all of this is that it’s a great big effort under the banner of delivering cost savings to the Licence Fee Payer, focussed on treating symptoms, rather than the root cause. Somebody (who I shan’t name) remarked recently to me that “the thing I find most insulting is that they think we’ll believe that reducing the number of top-level directories will actually correlate with savings”.
In his book Children at Risk, he [James Dobson] warned that the viewing of obscene material would inevitably lead to ‘sex between women and bulls, stallions or boars’.
— Max Blumenthal, Republican Gomorroah, p.68.
David pointed me to The 10 Laws of Cloudonomics. It’s too good not to repost. You probably didn’t think that Newtonian physics had much to do with cloud computing, did you? Well, you aren’t thinking like a Cloud Computing Guru. The important thing in coming up with these things is that they are unique or - what’s the word - disruptive. Doesn’t matter if they aren’t true or grounded in reality or whatever. As Daniel Dennett put it: Every self-respecting literary theorist had to sport an epistemology that season, it seems, and without one he felt naked, so he had come to me for an epistemology to wear […] It didn’t matter to him that it be sound, or defensible, or (as one might as well say) true; it just had to be new and different and stylish.
Social media douchebag explodes into vapourous cloud of socio-kinetic stupidity
I was reading Twitter while waiting for MacPorts to install Scribus on my machine. I saw a tweet from someone or other pointing to this article on Internet Evolution, a blog sponsored by IBM discussing “the future of the Internet”. On there, I found a perfectly sensible article about the snarky nastiness of Twitter at Web 2.0 Expo - really a marriage made in heaven, apparently. I remember watching some of the tweets from that, and was sad to see that danah boyd was getting heckled for giving a presentation that was “too academic” (translation: based on actual research rather than hunches, intuition and anecdote, and based on the work of other people whose work is based on actual research rather than hunches, intuition and anecdote). Expecting the attendees at Web 2.0 Expo to be able to cope with something “academic” is, of course, grossly misplaced trust. Unless you hammer home the thesis with 17,000 LOLCATS and goofy Flickr pics, the attention of these thought leaders is difficult to maintain.
But in the comments is this utter gem of a comment by “bauerb”, “[a] broad spectrum thinker who does not fear to consider the absurb [sic], the impossible, the incomprehensible, or seemingly random collections of information” according to his profile.
He is rather modest: he does not fear considering the incomprehensible, but he also does not fear producing the utterly incomprehensible. He also claims this is not a joke. Without further ado:
This is precisely why it was necessary to develop the SKBC. Its a non-lethal sentiment dispersement tool that can be deployed to dissolve the impact of rapidly forming Tweet-Clouds. The formula is basic physics, and founded on simple kinetic principals. To understand the concept, you must understand the basic principals. In this case, I use Twitter as the Target:
1. Twitter is a Kinetically Charged System
2. The kinetic energy of a system at any instant in time is the sum of the kinetic energies of the bodies it contains
3. Twitter: A system of bodies known as Tweets
4. Tweet: A body that is defined by its data payload and transference
5. Kinetic Energy = Total Mass moving at the speed of the Centerof Mass
6. Opinion = Entity + Sentiment
7. Twitter Opinion Mass = # of Tweets sharing a common Opinion
8. If we can measure TOM at a Point in Time, (Mass)
9. And we can measure the rate of change in Sentiment(Acceleration) of the TOM
10. I can work out the precise mass and velocity of a “socio-kinetic” projectile that would be required to obliterate the Target Tweet Mass.
This is a simple combination of Bombardment Weaponry and Kinetic Physics. The Good news is that because Popular Sentiment actually does abide by many of the laws of physics, we know that we neutralize the force of a massive system by a counteracting force that may be smaller, but has a much faster rate of acceleration.
There is no good reason why popular Social Media constructs need to be “turned off” for fear that they will divert attention from objective. Efficient neutralization is easier, and more strategic. “digital hecklers” [digiklers?] , just like small children, will soon lose interest in being disruptive when they realize they efforts cannot possible provide any self-validation.
BTW, its sounds funny to talk about Social Media Countermeasures as a “Cannon”, but I think it gets the point across. And oh yean, this is not a joke
Socio-kinetics, you say? That sounds suspiciously like the Time Cube. This guy really is the Gene Ray of social media. I can’t imagine the misery of any developers who work for him.
As for the actual topic: the live backchannel. I’ve seen it used really well - Simon Willison’s talk at BarCampLondon7 really showed how you can use the backchannel for good. But the people there might actually know something since it was about NoSQL databases, triplestores/key-value stores etc. rather than about Web 2.0.
