Omega Point

Jack Bauer wouldn’t have stood for that!

I thought this was kind of inter­est­ing: “RCMP Spied on Tommy Dou­glas”. I don’t just mean the cul­ture of J. Edgar Hoover-esque agency creepi­ness that would ulti­mately lead to the down­fall of the RCMP Secu­rity Ser­vice and the sub­se­quent cre­ation of CSIS, Canada’s mod­ern intel­li­gence agency. (For those of you out­side Canada, CSIS is known for such classy oper­a­tions as help­ing to form the white nation­al­ist Her­itage Front and par­tic­i­pat­ing in the USAUK ECHELON pro­gram. Nicely done, guys.)

No, what I actu­ally found inter­est­ing was that I’d never made the con­nec­tion that Don­ald Suther­land was Tommy Dou­glas’ son-in-law. I knew who they both were indi­vid­u­ally, and I knew Don­ald was father of Kiefer, but I never actu­ally asso­ci­ated the two.

When I men­tioned this bit of trivia to a friend, he didn’t seem to under­stand why I was telling him this. Why was this fact impor­tant? At first, I couldn’t tell whether he meant its impor­tance in the arti­cle or in our con­ver­sa­tion, but that got me think­ing — did it actu­ally mat­ter which he actu­ally meant? Why would some­one con­sider that sort of trivia impor­tant? More­over, if it’s not, why did the CBC see fit to include it?

Upon a lit­tle con­sid­er­a­tion, this is easy. To be fair, nobody knows who Tommy Dou­glas was. How­ever, sev­eral mil­lion peo­ple watch 24. By asso­ci­at­ing “Tommy Dou­glas”, a rel­a­tively unpop­u­lar brand, how­ever impor­tant a fig­ure he may have been, with a highly pop­u­lar, well-known brand like “Kiefer Suther­land”, the article’s details are reframed for a broader audience.

The audi­ence, see­ing the man’s grand­son hack­saw off ter­ror­ists’ heads every week, have formed an emo­tional famil­iar­ity with him. See­ing the vast num­ber of peo­ple: A) who try to kill him, B) who he kills, and C) who he chooses not to kill — in a sin­gle day — causes us to become inter­ested in his day. For those of us who choose let him into our homes, he’s very much a part of our lives.

So, when we see this story — police pur­sue pop­u­lar pop­ulist — placed in pop-cultural con­text for us, what do we come away with? “Hey, the Moun­ties spied on Jack Bauer’s grandpa! What the hell?”

Pre­dictably, Ze Frank already spent time think­ing about this stuff… pre­sum­ably so I didn’t have to.

(Orig­i­nal link via Rob Cot­ting­ham)

One Laptop Per Child UI

This is really fas­ci­nat­ing. Design stu­dio Pen­ta­gram has devel­oped the look and feel of the UI for the One Lap­top Per Child project. (“Pfft, poor peo­ple… right?”)

They’ve aban­doned the “desk­top” metaphor, in favour of the “zoom metaphor”. This echoes OLPC’s over­all design goals in stick­ing to the basic Chil­dren can quickly switch between dif­fer­ent views to con­nect with other users, or col­lab­o­rate on a sin­gle task.

Other cool fea­tures include the com­plete lack of text labels for icons and UI ele­ments, mean­ing there’s no need for them to be trans­lated for each local­ized ver­sion. Only truly nec­es­sary text must be trans­lated to pro­duce a local­ized ver­sion for a given lan­guage. This com­pletely avoids prob­lems phrases like “la home­page” may pose for non-English speakers.

(Via kottke.org)

Interactivity != better

This may be the least effec­tive use of an inter­ac­tive map info­graphic ever. It attempts to present infor­ma­tion on an impor­tant sub­ject, but it’s very dif­fi­cult to take in due to poor UI and inef­fec­tive use of the map itself.

Why on earth does this tool use the same icon for iden­ti­fy­ing a tar­get coun­try as the but­ton you click on to deter­mine infor­ma­tion about the top 10 coun­tries with female polit­i­cal lead­er­ship and so on?

If I click on a coun­try name, shouldn’t I be able to see it high­lighted? Doesn’t it make sense to see how regions are ranked? I real­ize this isn’t a uni­ver­sity map­ping text­book, but hon­estly now.

When com­par­ing regions, sta­tic maps can be far, far more com­pelling and con­tain much more rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion. Cases in point. Bad CBC!

If kids don’t learn about making tasers in school, they’ll just learn it on the streets.

The CBC is run­ning a story on enter­pris­ing young hooli­gans mak­ing good enter­tain­ing use of readily-available giant capac­i­tors. Oh no, home­made tasers! Well, no, not exactly. They sure hurt and make you pee your­self though!

This actu­ally reminded me of things I did in high school, so maybe this is some­thing we want to encour­age! (“Hi, Cather­ine? About din­ner next week? Yeah, I’m not sure we’re totally com­fort­able with you hav­ing any oppor­tu­nity to tell our kids any­thing at all, actually…”)

Look, part of liv­ing in a tech­no­log­i­cally sophis­ti­cated soci­ety is under­stand­ing that there are things peo­ple will do with tech­nol­ogy that doesn’t mesh up with what its design­ers intended. Fur­ther, we can’t stop that from hap­pen­ing, except through fur­ther edu­ca­tion. (“…and that’s why we don’t lick elec­tri­cal sock­ets, class.” “Ohhhhh!”)

The prob­lem is that peo­ple all too often want a quick fix for run­away knowl­edge, and that usu­ally takes the form of leg­is­la­tion, or of ceas­ing the dis­tri­b­u­tion of doc­u­ments con­tain­ing Iraqi nuclear “secrets”.

So in this case, what’s the leg­is­la­tion we’re sup­posed to sup­port? Inter­net hack­ers must be stopped from threat­en­ing chil­dren? Cam­eras must be licensed to pro­hibit the extrac­tion of their inter­nal com­po­nents? Cam­eras should not con­tain flashes? No energy weapons at school? Oh wait. That last one is actu­ally pretty smart.

Upon read­ing the CBC arti­cle, one notes that there’s def­i­nitely a “oh no, inter­net!” vibe to it, but nobody quoted in it is actu­ally sug­gest­ing that the cur­rent “leave your knives and things at home, please” laws and school poli­cies aren’t enough. Truly a refresh­ing change.

Second Life: The Official Guide ships!

So I guess it’s prob­a­bly about time I updated the look of this blog. It’s come to my atten­tion that I may be the only pub­lished blog­ger not to have plugged their book on their site in every pos­si­ble way. Maybe I should do some­thing about that…

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Matt Haughey on collaborative search-and-rescue

This is fas­ci­nat­ing. Matt Haughey writes about his thoughts on the dis­ap­pear­ance of CNet edi­tor James Kim and his family:

If each record­ing is say 30 min­utes long for a road, split it into 10 equal parts, 3 min­utes long, and upload all of them to youtube. Ask view­ers to leave com­ments point­ing out when they see any­thing strange. The Kims were in a sil­ver Saab wagon, so it’s prob­a­bly some­thing that can be seen from above. In total, there’d be 50 or 60 short clips and in a mat­ter of hours you could have mil­lions of peo­ple closely scan then and start point­ing out the things worth look­ing into on the ground.

In his incred­i­bly good (yet incom­plete!) web­comic Spi­ders, Patrick Far­ley describes a world in which Pres­i­dent Gore enacts a sim­i­lar project in the after­math of the 9/12 attacks on the World Trade Cen­ter and US Capi­tol Build­ing. A mil­lion tiny robot spi­ders are deployed to Afghanistan in the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In one chap­ter, an unseen fig­ure describes how surely this is some sort of psy-ops gim­mick; the Amer­i­cans would need a mil­lion oper­a­tors to mon­i­tor the video of every spi­der. A sec­ond fig­ure agrees, and is sud­denly revealed to be Osama bin Laden him­self, as seen through the cam­era eye of a tiny robot.

Mean­while, thou­sands of kilo­me­tres away, a small girl is sit­ting at her com­puter. “Mommy? Daddy?” she says. “I think my spi­der just found that bad man.”

(Via kottke.org)