I’ve long been impressed by Jaron Lanier. He’s blessed with an enormous self-confidence and a high IQ. He seems to be able to drive a stake in the ground anywhere and then argue convincingly that the stake marks the center of all things true and good. He came to my attention years ago as a virtual reality geek. Eight years ago he presented the eighth annual J. Barkley Rosser Memorial Lecture at the University of Wisconsin on “Tele-Immersion, a new communications paradigm.” It’s only in the last year or two that we’ve seen a pop culture contextualization of Lanier’s vision in the emerging World of Gamecraft communities. Lanier is an advisor to Linden Labs, the Second Lifers.

Like many of the middle-class brighter lights in the binary signals industry, Lanier isn’t shy about sharing his insights and opinions. This week he popped off about “the hive mind.” I think that’s us, the people who’ve been empowered by this technology to share our own insights and opinions more widely than ever before, people who enjoy amateur collaborations almost as much as Lanier enjoys his non-tenure-track quasi-academic life-of-the-mind.

In one telling passage Lanier laments:

Reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure. In my particular case, it appears that the goblins are probably members or descendants of the rather sweet old Mondo 2024 culture linking psychedelic experimentation with computers. They seem to place great importance on relating my ideas to those of the psychedelic luminaries of old (and in ways that I happen to find sloppy and incorrect.) Edits deviating from this set of odd ideas that are important to this one particular small subculture are immediately removed. This makes sense. Who else would volunteer to pay that much attention and do all that work?

There are many roads to follow away from that steaming pile of rotting entrails smack dab in the path to or from enlightenment, but let me first observe that unlike Jaron, God doesn’t read her reviews, so perhaps the bible analogy is not apt. Whoa. WTF do I know? Maybe God does read her reviews? How about it big G? (Nope, I caught a little whisper there and she agreed that the wikipedia and the bible are similar but quite different as regards big G’s interest in the content of the pages with her name on them).

Lanier and Will Wright were supposed to debate at the 2024 Accelerating Change conference, but if a debate bespeaks the clash of ideas, then no debate occurred. It was a relaxed session really and I had a feeling that Lanier and Wright, while in the same room, were talking on two different planets.

Like me, Lanier does better solo extempore and - like me - he’s often full of shit. For example, the current Edge essay is nothing more than a straw man exercise in slapping down a collectivism that he is unable, for one reason or another - and again, it might just be a malfunction in the med mix - he’s unable to establish that this “hive-mind” “most-meta” overarching cult-like wikipedianism even exists, much less that it represents a challenge of sufficient magnitude to drown with ink from his essayist’s pen.

There is a lot of food for thought in Lanier’s essay, but ironically - of course there would be ironic freight - there isn’t a lot of meaning. Lanier struggles to put out a coherent signal, and pretty much fails… but I liked the prettier passages anyway, like these:

One service performed by representative democracy is low-pass filtering. Imagine the jittery shifts that would take place if a wiki were put in charge of writing laws. It’s a terrifying thing to consider. Super-energized people would be struggling to shift the wording of the tax-code on a frantic, never-ending basis. The Internet would be swamped.

Such chaos can be avoided in the same way it already is, albeit imperfectly, by the slower processes of elections and court proceedings. The calming effect of orderly democracy achieves more than just the smoothing out of peripatetic struggles for consensus. It also reduces the potential for the collective to suddenly jump into an over-excited state when too many rapid changes to answers coincide in such a way that they don’t cancel each other out. (Technical readers will recognize familiar principles in signal processing.)

Baffled by the Beauty Bush in the backyard, Beth keyed it out via Google. We’ve only been wondering what that beautiful shrub is for the last fifteen years or so! Here’s a close-up of our Beauty…

Kolkwitzia or just another Daphne of some sort? My local plant expert raised the question. You be the judge.

Audio Berkman - David Isenberg and Colin Rhinesmith have co-produced “Four Voices,” an intercut recording including Michael Powell and Reed Hundt speaking separately (but as if in conversation) at this year’s Freedom 2 Connect conference in Silver Spring. Sixty minutes of content including musical interludes by Joe Craven.

The bizarre US diplomatic practice of backing oddball losers and megalomaniac lunatics has again paid off. We got a boy in Iran who is spoiling for a fight just when we need one.

I’d like to suggest that it’s a Republican practice. The elephant crowd were the bunch who supported Hitler in the 30’s. Pinochet certainly owed his ascendance and survival to the mad power-mongers of the corporate right (and fuck you Dita Beard). Noriega couldn’t have done it without the Torrijos plane crash, a Republican political technique both offshore and on, those plane crashes, and I know this because the BAD GUYS DO NOT DIE IN PLANE CRASHES, ONLY THE GOOD GUYS DO. Hussein must have been baffled when the US Republicans who empowered him turned on him. The guys who had him killing Kurds like Miz Muffet putting away a jug of whey turned on him like jackals and invaded, and tore down the very statues of him they had paid to erect. There are dozens of these globally powerful goons, enabled by the corporate right, supported by the full faith and credit of the US, then torn from power when it becomes expedient.

Consider the Ayatollah Khomeini. Making the best of a bad situation, it seems likely that Ronald Reagan’s corporate cronies intiated their twelve years of uninterrupted rape of the world’s economies with treasonous sabotage of the helicopters Jimmy Carter deployed to rescue the Americans held hostage in Iraq, thus assuring the election of the hideously incompetent old movie actor.

Only somebody who could suspect foul play by the right in the matters of Torrijos, Carnahan, Wellstone, the Kennedy scion, the Kennedy elders, and Martin Luther King could suspect that the Reagan/Bush regime began with high treason. It has of course been proven in the matter of the Iran-contra scandals that the regime - after the 1980 elections - certainly continued to operate from a moral, ethical, and legal swamp… that their actions ultimately constituted treason and without pardons many would still be in jail. These are facts.

With my consciousness wounded by events long past and cauterized by the day-to-day experience of reading a newspaper during these parlous times I may be desensitized to whatever strange street theater is emerging with the under-currents of discontent around the Persian restrictions on free speech. Memer sent me a link.

It’s about more than the Persian restrictions of course. We’re talking about the bad Burmese, and the easy to criticize Chinoisie. I recommend that everyone sign on. I’ve long been an Amnesty International supporter, much as they, the AI folks are probably embarassed by my calling top US leaders names like “treasonous scumbag Rumsfeld” and so on.

But I’ve been focusing on the voices raised against Persia, voices that seem to include their own. How the virtually unspellable Mahmoud Ahmadinejad thinks he can get away with holocaust denial in the Spiegel interview is beyond me. This has all the earmarks of somebody being played by an excellent espionage service. This reminds me of the time when Hussein drove deep into Kuwait. Oops. Papa George liked that! Kicked up the global warming a degree or two and got Meg Thatcher all wet. Like slant drilling the oil out wasn’t fast enough for Hussein. These guys only step on their own dicks like that when somebody is playing them. I think it’s Dan Brown. I think he ran across a couple of gnostic Koran scrolls and he’s threatened to write a novel about the prophet, a belly dancer and her Meccan floor show if they all don’t go out into the streets and dance the hootchie kootchie with Adolph.

Anyway, this guy Ahmudinyoureye is in office only because George Junior is in office and Ahmudinyoureye is only as weirdly twisted in his politically motivated jingoistic chauvinistic sick religious fundamentalism as his arch rival George Junior, and between them they have a pretty good sense of what goes on in the pitiful minds of the nauseatingly faithful of there own particular cults, but the problem is this…

George Junior has huge fucking bombs that will kill us all and poison the planet forever and the sad little fuck is stupid enough to use them. Ahmadinejad’s days are numbered because we need a good turn-out on the right for the aught-six elections, and only the religious faithful will be venturing out of the fallout shelters to vote, them being protected by Jesus and all. Does anybody see what’s wrong with this picture????

The Head Lemur makes an astounding discovery…

It was ninety degrees (F) and very humid ten minutes ago.  A cold front raced through.  Buckets of rain fell.  Now the sun shines and it’s 74 degrees.

Lucky me! I have a month of Peter’s posts to catch up on! And it’s free!

Update… finished a wonderful read.  Included appearances by my many of my favorite bloggers.  I’m glad I saved up reading about Peter’s vacation so I could follow it all at once, from LA to London, to France and back.  Only sorry he missed hooking up with EuroYank.  On the other hand, he has a good muddy dog story from the Levy homestead.

Over by the lake there’s a neighborhood, a socially if not racially mixed neighborhood. Our lake is downstream from the city. It’s the third lake in a chain of four. The “better” two lakes bound downtown Madison’s isthmus. There’s a lot of fertilizer from the lawns and fields surrounding these lakes that assures a bloom of scummy, scungy algae earlier and earlier each year. The farther downstream you go, the dirtier the water. Still, water frontage is desirable real estate, so most of the fishing shacks, the modest homes of working people, and the weekend cottages that used to dot the shore here are gone now, taxed too high for any but the upper-middles to afford the luxury of walking out on a summer morning drinking coffee on their own pier. And most of the “substandard housing” has given way to lavish remodeling or reconstruction on the lake side of the road. Across the road, the houses with no frontage are older, shabbier, and still sport plenty of pick-ups and old Fords up on blocks on the lawn.

I called some acquaintances over there, people who happen to live on the lake shore, a couple who have been neighborhood activists who I hoped would be able to help in our work to find alternatives to the huge power line that’s planned for construction across the wetlands to the south. These people are neighbors by proximity — they live about a country mile from our house and not that many people live in between. In this case, the country mile is a mile north, plus another east, plus a half mile or so north again along the shore, but whatever… we all live in the same township and that’s the bond.

These people are no longer a couple. They’ve been separated for almost a year. Yesterday’s phone call was the first I heard about it. The husband was almost apologetic that his wife no longer lived with him. I meant to write about his distancing this morning, about the isolation he chose, we choose, and the isolation that comes to us with inertia, about the need to reach out to help, and the need to reach out to ask for help. There are people thousands of miles away that I am closer to than I am to these neighbors and some of them are troubled too, and I feel powerless to help beyond telling them how much I value their friendship and how I hope things get better for them.

And there is nothing in the telling that eases any of the pain I feel about my powerlessness, but maybe there is something in the telling that can bolster the feelings of my friends. But we are each bound by a sensitivity to the need for privacy, for isolation, a code of silence. Does reaching out require us to be able to walk through walls?

The circle of bloggers expands and some of us withdraw to other pursuits, the Worlds of Gamecraft or the resumption of activities interrupted, neglected perhaps, during a passionate period of blogging. The community online is refreshed like the township… some people move away, others move in, a general expansion takes place because there are more and more of us on the planet, and here online, there are more and more of us empowered with the tools to communicate.

The mediated nature of our communication shifts as new tools are developed, and the structures of our online communities change as people learn to apply the tools to their own circumstances and professions. Podcasting and Vlogging have emerged as powerful tools and they have brought back the performer/audience model in a big way. Virtual reality meeting spaces are emerging and creating a status distinction again between those of us who have the gear to participate and those of us who remain behind, constrained by our obsolete connections, status victims of Moore’s law.

A while ago Michelle Goodrich, a systems pro and a fabulous designer, published an article by Chris Locke about what it took to create the brilliant presentation he regularly delivers to blogs and web publications all over the net. At that point his toolset was sort of minimalist. He didn’t need a big pipe or a fancy PC to maintain interactivity. If you can believe him, and I do, he was accomplishing daily miracles on a dial-up connection. This may have changed.

Earlier this month Locke pointed to Tom Wolfe’s 2006 Jefferson Lecture. For over forty years, from The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby to I am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe has shared his keen sense of status and community through essays and novels. He’s a peerless master of participatory journalism. His work on campus researching Charlotte Simmons led, I think to this observation about “political correctness”:

It does have one rather positive effect: it has become extremely bad manners almost everywhere in college to use racist slurs and to speak intolerantly about almost anybody.

Now, that’s a good thing: just simply increasing respect for all sorts of people. Of course, it has down sides, too. No longer does the premise of racial-ethnic harmony hold at all. Diversity means something else. Diversity really means dispersion, which you can see in any university dining hall. There is far from being any integration.

I’ve observed that when conservative people want to label something as egregiously “liberal,” they often trot out the phrase “politically correct.” For them, “politically correct” is a code phrase signifying an unwanted boundary condition on behavior. For Wolfe the phrase is more descriptive, more value free. These codes are all around us. Liz, at Granny Gets a Vibrator, recently wrote about breaking The Code of nuanced segregationism in the south. She says,

One of the trickiest things I had to do when I moved here from Berkeley six years ago was relearn how to decipher The Code. The Code is what “polite” white people–the kind who would never go around using the “N word”– use when they talk about nonwhite people in the south. I grew up in a different part of the south, in the 1950s and 60s, so I was raised to understand The Code, but I guess I’d managed to repress the memory during my 30 years living in Berkeley. As a result, when I first moved back down here, I ended up having some of the most bizarre and surreal conversations with the local white people, because I never could manage to understand what the hell they were really saying.

Us and them. We have our little status indicators, but the inclusive marker, the boundary condition, is set by the distinctions we create between us and them. When my neighbor retreated behind closed doors following his divorce, I think part of his condition reflected simply sadness, loss. But I strongly suspect his retreat also had to do with a terrible change in status; a prior status had so informed his self awareness that his new conditions put him in a group that he previously disparaged. How do you come to terms with that? “We’re not exactly flying a flag from the chimney with a big red D on it,” he said when I expressed my surprise that I hadn’t heard about the divorce. And I thought maybe we should do that. Maybe we need a code that will let the neighbors know that they should drop in with a pie and sit a while to help ease the loneliness and loss.

I don’t know the answer. I’m not sure I know the question. But ever since I saw Troy Worman’s odd assertion regarding the femmeyness of RB, whom most of us have heretofore considered a manly man indeed, I’ve been afraid that I might somehow shift gender myself. And, as it turns out there is some evidence. I’ve signed up for BlogHer. (Day one is full, so I’ll have to do some creative lurking if I want to get tips and tricks from Heather Champ).

Today came this shocking news from ZA. Golby says, “…this past week, I’ve come over all schoolgirlish.” Perhaps it’s the global warming. I don’t know. Will I see you fellas at BlogHer?

I’ve been obsessed with all kinds of things and the Best o’ Sandhill migration has suffered from neglect.  I will get the interviews moved over here, and I will get the some of the funny stuff from both TypePad and the old Radio site over here.  Sorry not to have any dead elephant poetry or like that, but maybe now that I’m almost finished with Philosophy Made Simple (Robert Hellenga, Little Brown and Company, March, 2024) I will be inspired by Ganesh or baba ganoush or someone.

This stuff is first rate!  I love the Internecks!

Dell contacted me regarding the video card problem I blogged about and Alan helped me with. (Who else is willing to rescind the rule about ending a sentence with a preposition? Raise your hands. It’s almost unanimous then. The Listics Style Guide is hereby revised to permit it.)  I have an appointment for some problem resolution phone support this Wednesday at 7:30am.  I’m impressed that they read the blogs and follow-up on stuff like this, especially since the old P4 is years out of warranty.

Sadly, the situation has gone from bad to ugly.  I’m just hoping that I can get a good back-up before things get much worse.

Appalling… maybe this is why I don’t pay much attention to the news:

Climbing enthusiasts will join Mt. Everest pioneer Sir Edmund Hillary in condemning climbers who left a British mountaineer to die during their own attempts on the world’s tallest peak. In an act of appalling indifference, more than 40 climbers reportedly filed past David Sharp as he lay dying without oxygen on the way down from the summit during a solo climb last week.

MtEverest.net reports…

The latest case is British David Sharp. David vanished on his summit bid last week, and the only reason the world knew was thanks to a blog entry by his team mate Vitor Negrete. Vitor dispatched that David had died, and reported 3 more climbers missing on the mountain. He was distraught by the situation, including the fact that his high camp had been robbed. “All these events have affected me deeply – I even considered calling the attempt off,” he said. The next day, Vitor was dead.

David Sharp, 34, was still alive at 28,000 feet. Double amputee Mark Inglis, told the news source: “He was in a very poor condition, near death. We talked about [what to do for him] for quite a lot at the time and it was a very hard decision. About 40 people passed him that day, and no one else helped him apart from our expedition. Our Sherpas (guides) gave him oxygen. He wasn’t a member of our expedition, he was a member of another, far less professional one.”

Mallory’s famous line, “Because it’s there,” always struck me as a little arch, fake on the face of it. I’ve spent enough time in the Sierras and on other mountain sides to have a different answer: “Because you’re not there.” For me there is no finer get-away than a ramble in the mountains. And I always thought the folks I ran into on the trails up there would help me if I was in a jam, as I would help them. Quasi-technical climbers, these summit tourists, must be a different breed though, a new age breed. The fact that forty could pass a dying man without giving up “their summit” to help him speaks volumes.

(Thanks to Shelley Powers for the reference point.)

Tom Raftery’s complaint…   I wish Shelley was blogging!  She would have an opinion regarding the O’Reilly/CMP Web 2.0 conference trademark!

Denise has a good post at Corante about a New York Times Style article that stylishly engages in a little blogger bashing, an article that fails to use information from Dennis Kennedy that would have made it even more stylish and more informative.

Today Doc Searls sent me a URL for the 35th Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, delivered by author Tom Wolfe last week.

So begins a May 16 post on the Krugle blog by Chris Locke. I’ve admitted shame-facedly that I don’t use an aggregator. Even if I did, how could I possibly read everything of interest? I’m pleased to have run across this gem less than two weeks after Chris posted it, less than three weeks after the incomparable Tom Wolfe made his speech (even though it shows that I have been absent from the world live web and out of the conversation and so forth. Life ain’t no ice scream stand so don’t ’spect no scoop).

Chris’ post spins a tangent from the Wolfe speech, a tangent that vectors in on the topic of open access to refereed science publications. A few years ago, as a consultant engaged by the president of an East Coast land grant university, I ran across the bizarre electronic serials acquisition expense structure that prevented researchers at the University from sharing journals online through the University library that were acquired for their colleagues at a private lab, and vice versa. My sense of this was that the publishers had a profitable lock on what is essentially a niche market. I was familiar with software licensing schemes that are just as limiting and just as bizarre. The status aspects of library accessions hadn’t occurred to me until I read Wolfe’s piece, but now the importance of the leveling aspect of open access has been made quite clear!

And this clarity came to me through the linkage made by blogger Locke, the linkage to an open access publication, a scientific paper published in a manner that sets the entire status structure of scientific accessions librarians and their patrons on its ear. This may be way short of an epiphany, but it is a pleasant gestalt: the assemblage of Locke’s insights regarding open access publications, Wolfe’s status thing, and my own modest experience with a consummately bureacratic queen bee of a librarian and the scientist drones who fed her ego.

I had hoped my big “take-away’ from Wolfe’s address would be a good book. He touts Born Fighting by James Webb. So I went to Amazon, and after reading a little about the book, I’ve decided a novel about an old man with daughters and an elephant and a grove of ripening lula avocados will be more to my taste.

…and so to bed.

[From Tim Karr]

A critical vote is going down in Congress right now and we need you to get phones ringing off the hook on Capitol Hill.

The House Judiciary Committee is beginning to “mark up” a good Net Neutrality bill at around 11am (EST) this morning. Then they’re going to vote on whether to bring it to the full floor. Many in the Committee are being pressured by AT&T, Verizon and other major telcos to vote down the net neutrality provisions in this bipartisan bill.

Below are the members who need to hear from you and your readers to support this important bill. Urge them to support the Sensenbrenner-Conyers “Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2024″ (HR 5417) in the Judiciary Committee — and to support it without amendment. (Saying without amendment is key as the telcos want to re-write it in a way that guts Internet freedom).

Here are the members who need to hear from you right now:

Marty Meehan (D-Mass. 5th)
Phone: (202) 225-3411
Fax: (202) 226-0771
http://www.house.gov/writerep
martin.meehan@mail.house.gov

Howard Berman (D-Calif. 28th)
Phone: 202-225-4695
Fax: 202-225-3196
http://www.house.gov/writerep/

William Delahunt (D-Mass. 10th)
Phone: (202) 225-3111
Fax: (202) 225-5658
William.Delahunt@mail.house.gov

Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas 18th)
Phone: (202) 225-3816
Fax: (202) 225-3317
http://www.jacksonlee.house.gov/feedback.cfm?campaign=jacksonlee&type=Let%27s%20Talk

Bobby Scott (D-Va. 3rd)
Phone: (202) 225-8351
Fax: (202) 225-8354
http://www.house.gov/writerep/

Chris Van Hollen (D-Md. 8th)
Phone: (202) 225-5341
Fax: (202) 225-0375
http://www.house.gov/writerep/

Maxine Waters (D-Calif. 35th)
Phone: (202) 225-2201
Fax: (202) 225-7854
http://www.house.gov/waters/IMA/issue.htm

Mel Watt (D-N.C. 12th)
Tel. (202) 225-1510
Fax (202) 225-1512
http://www.house.gov/writerep/

Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y. 9th)
Phone: (202) 225-6616
Fax: (202) 226-7253
weiner@mail.house.gov

Robert Wexler (D-Fla. 19th)
phone: (202) 225-3001
fax: (202) 225-5974
http://www.house.gov/writerep/

Howard Coble (R-NC 6th)
phone: (202) 225-3065
fax: (202) 225-8611
howard.coble@mail.house.gov

Elton Gallegly (R-CA 24th)
phone: (202) 225-5811
fax: (202) 225-1100
http://www.house.gov/writerep/

Bob Goodlatte (R-VA 6th)
phone: (202) 225-5431
fax: (202) 225-9681
http://www.house.gov/goodlatte/emailbob.htm

Steve Chabot (R-OH 5th)
phone: (202) 225-2216
fax: (202) 225-3012 (fax)
http://www.house.gov/chabot/email.html

Dan Lungren (R-CA 3rd)
phone: (202) 225-5716
fax: (202) 226-1298
http://www.house.gov/lungren/feedback.shtml

William Jenkins (R-TN 1st)
phone: (202) 225-6356
fax: (202) 225-5714
http://www.house.gov/writerep/

John Hostettler (R-IN 8th)
phone: (202) 225-4636
fax: (202) 225-3284
john.hostettler@mail.house.gov

Mark Green (R-WI 8th)
phone: (202) 225-5665
fax: (202) 225-5729
mark.green@mail.house.gov

Ric Keller (R-FL 8th)
phone: (202) 225-2176
fax: (202) 225-0999
http://www.house.gov/writerep/

For updates throughout the day, visit www.SavetheInternet.com. Also, you can watch the hearings live at http://judiciary.house.gov/ (scroll down below the calendar to live webcast link).

Beth said, “When we go to Woods Hole this fall, let’s take some time and visit Nantucket.”

“Only if we can have a Limerick writing contest,” said I.

And speaking of Limerick…

Dana Blankenhorn says, “The goal of any regulatory policy should be to encourage economic growth, not to give the government money, not just to make a profit for any particular player.” Maybe some context will make that more accessible… Dana is talking about a proposal by Kleiner Perkins and others to have the FCC turn over some available broadband spectrum to a new company they’ve formed, a wireless internet access provider that proposes to pay the government a cut on a tiered service offering.

After reading a little background I don’t understand how Dana could be so measured and dry in his presentation. This has me jumping up and down screaming, or at least it makes me twitch nervously. What seems to be going on is that a consortium of influential venture capitalists is at once trying to subvert the FCC bandwidth auction process and to implement tiered service offerings over the bandwidth they thus monopolize.

The bandwidth auctions could use a little subverting, but this is exactly in the wrong direction. And these pirates claim they’ll be giving away broadband as part of the offering. Sweet-jeepers-goodness-gracious, oh my, oh my… everybody who thinks 512kbps is broadband raise your hand. (No raised hands visible…)

Okay, I simply disagree with Blankenhorn’s assertion that the goal of regulatory policy should be to assure economic growth. First, the definite article throws me. I think there is perhaps room for multiple goals and one important goal should be to control the rapacious greedballs who can come up with half a billion dollars to invest in that huge sucking apparatus they’ve described.

There are lots of reasonable goals for public service regulations, but the first goal has to be to recognize that these services require government intervention to prevent companies with monopoly power from perverting what should be a commodity market. There’s more to say. I wish everyone wasn’t stretching so far for the brass ring of windfall profits that they’ve lost track of the benefits of government absent the influence of greedballs.

Tom Evslin explores the limitations of freedom inherent in the M2Z proposal, comparing it to the Chinese internet.

Thanks to Doc for the link to Dana.

This holiday almost slipped under the radar. It is a trinary holiday celebrated three times only. The first celebration was on the occasion of Bob Dylan’s thirtieth birthday on May 24th, 1971. After that, who could you trust, really? Only Golby. Today marks Dylan’s 65th. And of course in 2024 we will celebrate his hundredth. Then it’s over. No more Mike Golby Day. We expect the only superstars of that generation to be around to celebrate it with us will be Dylan and Keith Richard.

Happy Mike Golby Day!

(and thanks to Dean Landsman who phoned in the tip…)

If you use a telephone, the internet
or a television, this concerns your future!

Without net neutrality the network providers might decide to degrade our access to content on the Internet. Everyone everywhere should have free access to everything on the Internet. Should the telco have the right to prevent me from reading Wealth Bondage to protect me from whips and chains? Should they have the right to throttle down my use of Google because they prefer to send me to Yahoo where they can increase their own ad revenue streams? I buy bandwidth from the telco. I don’t want them to be in the position to decide how I use the bandwidth.

David Weinberger has a great video on this topic today.