Listics

Can’t say enough about this experience, and can’t express deeply enough my gratitude to David Isenberg for pulling it together.

I met many interesting, remarkable there… Russ Nelson, Heath Row, Skip Malette, Tom Mandel, Bill Bennett, Judith Meskill, Isabel Walcott, Bob Frankston, Martin Geddes, and David Isenberg to name just a handful. I’m shy — really, so it’s not that easy for me to bust through it and establish credibility and form a new relationship over coffee between sessions. But these people, like most of the people from the online community that I’ve been fortunate enough to meet in (ugh) meat space, these people were open and welcoming and generally if I had spinach in my front teeth they were kind enough not to make fun of me. Even Bob Frankston.

I think it was Dave Winer who said, “Being kind to each other doesn’t have to interfere with being true to ourselves.”

I took a few bloggy notes, but couldn’t keep up with the depth of the material while blogging so I left the blog journalism to our professional: Heath Row. Heath did his usual stellar job of conference blogging here. Martin Geddes also did a fine job of capturing the content. Read these two blogs and you’ll have a good handle on the WTF!?!

My contribution will be a few dozen photos, most of which I hope to have photoshopped and available this week. You can see some of them here already.

Reading Stu Savory today I was reminded of the three dimensional topological phenomenon of Klein bottles. There’s something unsatisfying about the three dimensional representation since manifestly there is an inside and an outside to these puppies. You could pour water in the mouth and store it in the bell. The topological wonderment of a mobius strip is far more powerful for me because I can see that any portion has two sides but the whole thing has only one. Abstracting from that experience with the mobius strip, I expect to be unable to contain things within a Klein bottle and so I am oddly disappointed by the three-space representation.

Ray Davis, recently of the Bellona Times, and now of time immemorial, continues to dazzle. For example, he dazzled me with this excerpt:

Evolution poses a metanarrative, a story of history, that seems plausible to modern people—unlike, say, the old story of the infinite stack of turtles that holds up the earth.

The assumption that it is NOT turtles has yet to be proved and the bold assertion that something called “evolution” exists and the turtles don’t could get a man in trouble in this day of the modern merger of church and state. Watch out Ray! Be careful.