From the New York Times blog And the Pursuit of Happiness, Maira Kalman explores the relationship between agrarian societies, fast food culture, and how “the fabric of our lives is bound in the food we eat.”
Back to the Land – Do the affluent have access to the really healthy food while the less affluent do not?
Nothing earth-shattering in what she’s saying – it’s the way she’s assembling her ideas that I love – the unusual, homespun visual presentation supports the spirit of what she’s communicating.
A labor-intensive way to way to blog, but that’s exactly perfect when what you’re writing about is the importance of slowing down the cultural experience, and the significance of real work by real people.
So it finally happened. Wanton destruction on an unprecedented scale. Entire civilizations wiped out with the flick of a wrist. Totally innocent sentient beings running for their lives, with no hope of cover from the firepower of a much more advanced species.
Until tonight, Spore had been a beautiful educational game Miles and I played together some evenings. An exploration of evolution, from cells swimming in primordial soup to inchoate creatures finding their legs and their appetites, to tribes discovering one another through song and charm, through civilization building, the strangeness of religious wars, and finally into the technological sophistication and problem solving of the space stage.
Through it, Miles was discovering how the world as we know it came to be. The importance of adaptation, the consequences of evolving without eyesight, or with a too-small mouth, the importance of keeping factories, homes and entertainment in balance, the trade-offs between having slow-moving crab claws or jet propulsion.
There had been difficult points in the game, when we had been forced into Hobbsian choices between eliminating a few diseased members of a species and letting illness take over an entire world, or between killing and being killed by malevolent species from other continents or distant star systems. But suddenly our 7-year-old was interacting differently. He had evolved into the space stage, piloting a sophisticated craft through the galaxy, trading blue spice for yellow, learning the finer points of terra-forming new worlds. Having discovered a new planet populated by a people still in the tribal stage, hovering above their world in a craft they couldn’t begin to understand, he had opened fire with everything he had, decimating one village after another.
“Why are you killing these people?,” I asked, assuming (hoping) there was a good reason, that he had been asked by the Habafropzipulops to eliminate some new form of growing evil. But the response was simple, and grim:
“They’re only in the tribal stage.”
Of course, our son had been working his own way through the tribal stage just a few weeks earlier. Had he forgotten already that everyone goes through the tribal stage? That ignorance of the future does not make you deservant of death?
We had a long and involved conversation about good and evil, about the difficult trade-offs and judgment calls we’ve sometimes had to make on our way to the current world. But none of it sank in.
“They’re not real. Why does it matter?”
All these months of playing a game I had hoped would help him to understand human history and to sharpen his moral compass had failed, because at seven he was already too good at distinguishing between meatspace and gamespace. On one hand, he had us. People worry that kids will absorb too much from games, will be unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality. But the problem here was that he was too able to make that distinction, and thus able to pick off entire civilizations since they were “only pixels.” How do you answer something like that?
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not worried that he’s unable to distinguish between good and evil. He’s got a heart of gold and is generous and wise beyond compare. But still, it was rattling to see him doing this. We told him that if he was going to play like that, he couldn’t play.
What we were having trouble communicating was that the game was a teaching tool for both his mind and his heart, and that it was important to us that lives were not trivialized.
That was the part that was difficult for him to distinguish. Children can be more wise than you give them credit for, and can also be more literal than you expect. He sees Spore as a game, not a metaphor. And he knows that the game is just a game, that pixels are just pixels. Meanwhile, we want him to see the game as an experiment through which his instincts play out, and that his instincts and morality will guide him away from the wrong courses of action.
At the same time, what young boy doesn’t want to play shoot-em-up, to draw pictures of tanks and aircraft carriers, play with green plastic army men?
In the end, we told him that he would have to play Spore with a good heart or not play at all. The look on his face was intense — one part perplexed, one part fascinated, one part incredulous, one part mad. We don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. We’ll see what part of the message sticks.
This blog has been chugging along at around 300 visitors per day for the past few months (it was much better back before Twitter nearly keeled my urge to blog at all). But the recent Drupal or Django article went a little viral, and things have been nutty over the past 48 hours:
WP-SuperCache has held up admirably, scarcely a performance blip felt on the Birdhouse VPS.
There’s a large body of technical information out there about content management systems and frameworks, but not much written specifically for decision-makers. Programmers will always have preferences, but it’s the product managers and supervisors of the world who often make the final decision about what platform on which to deploy a sophisticated site. That’s tricky, because web platform decisions are more-or-less final — it’s very, very hard to change out the platform once the wheels are in motion. Meanwhile, the decision will ultimately be based on highly technical factors, while managers are often not highly technical people.
This document aims to lay out what I see as being the pros and cons of two popular web publishing platforms: The PHP-based Drupal content management system (CMS) and the Python-based Django framework. It’s impossible to discuss systems like these in a non-technical way. However, I’ve tried to lay out the main points in straightforward language, with an eye toward helping supervisors make an informed choice.
This document could have covered any of the 600+ systems listed at cmsmatrix.org. We cover only Drupal and Django in this document because those systems are highest on the radar at our organization. It simply would not be possible to cover every system out there. In a sense, this document is as much about making a decision between using a framework or using a content management system as it is between specific platforms. In a sense, the discussion about Drupal and Django below can be seen as a stand-in for that larger discussion.
Disclosure: The author is a Django developer, not a Drupal developer. I’ve tried to provide as even-handed an assessment as possible, though bias may show through. I will update this document with additional information from the Drupal community as it becomes available.
In September 2004, I posted a brief story about a honkin’ pile of mulch that had recently landed in our driveway, along with a couple of quick snapshots.
Five years later (i.e. last week) I was contacted by a nice woman at a film production company who were making a film for Microsoft about a Boy Scout tracking mulch sales with an Excel spreadsheet. They wanted to use my image in the film and were prepared to pay me $250 for the rights to use the photo. While flattered, I have serious ethical issues with both the Boy Scouts (of today) and Microsoft, so my first inclination was to go ahead and take the money. But I have another ethical issue that outweighs those – the idea that I deserve to be paid for a snapshot I took four years ago.
I am not a professional photographer, and I did not take the photo with artistic or resale value in mind. The photo was only taken to support that brief blog entry. Its small amount of value was used up in that post, and I was paid for my small efforts with the equally small amount of attention it received (yes, we live in an attention economy now).
In my work, I benefit tremendously from the efforts of people who give away their work. My career would simply not be possible without the thousands of hours that have gone into Apache, MySQL, Firefox, PHP, Python, Django, etc. Likewise, I am studious about giving away the source code to the projects I put time into. I benefit from blog posts by people who are solving problems, and I try to repay that debt in some small way. In other spheres, all of this would be considered “intellectual property” with a monetary value. In the open source software world, it’s called “the free exchange of ideas,” and it makes the modern world go ’round.
I believe that we all stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us, and our peers. Our culture is built on quotations – an endless re-use and re-mix of ideas exchanged between people. While I support an artist’s right to earn a living, I have serious problems with the idea that a 3-second snapshot is somehow worth more than dozens hours of time put into code. I believe an artist has a right to be paid for their initial work, but not to be paid again and again in perpetuity for that work. If an artist wants to keep making money, they should have to keep doing new work, like the rest of us laborers do. The idea that a person can put work into something once and then feel entitled to keep making money from it forever feels unfair. It smacks of a world that values money over ideas. That’s a problem I don’t want to be a part of.
I feel that copyright should exist for a very brief period of time — just long enough for the artist to recoup their efforts before moving on to the next thing — not the 70+ years Disney has pushed it out to. How long should that period be? I don’t know – I suppose just long enough so that consumers don’t say “I’m not going to buy that record – I’ll just wait until it enters the public domain.” So… five years? Maybe. Why are we still battling over the hugely valuable Beatles catalog? The band isn’t even together anymore – that music should have entered the public domain decades ago.
To accept money for this snapshot would have felt hypocritical. A couple of friends worked on me last night, trying to convince me that the marketplace, not the creator, should set the value for the work. Their arguments almost worked. And of course the money would be nice. But in the end, I decided to stick to my guns and publish the piece on Flickr with the attached Creative Commons Attribution license, which requires nothing but credit to the artist, even for commercial use.
I’m sorry to learn that the photo is being used by Microsoft and the Boy Scouts, but confident in my decision that to accept money for it would make me part of the larger copyright over-extension problem. If I believe that ideas should be free, and that a photograph is an idea, then I need to back up that belief by NOT accepting money I don’t deserve for for an old snapshot that took close to zero time, effort, or inspiration to create.
At bottom, I don’t feel that Microsoft or the Boy Scouts should have to ask for my permission to use the photo to begin with. They should be able to proceed on a cultural understanding that that photo is nothing but a speck of dust in our cultural landscape, and know that they can use it as freely as we use the English language in our daily speech. The fact that they “have” to ask permission is exactly what’s meant by the term chilling effects.
So, Julie, please use the image in your film however you like. A line of credit is all that’s required. As it should be.
Miles (7) has started his own newspaper, The Patrick’s Army Chronicle. Well, “started” may be too strong a word. He created issue #1 sometime between 5:45 and 6:45 one morning, before we got up. Nice ratio of copy to ads. And just in time to beat the SF Chronicle’s move to full-color printing by one day! Way better photos, too. A bit of concern on this end re: his interest in advertising, but with conversation keeping undue influence at bay, it’s all good. Gotta admire his industriousness. My fave: “New code pen. It doesn’t rite Inglish, it rite’s codes!” Though the sheer terror of “Beehive hangs from catsle wall” is nothing to sneeze at. Also includes a one million dollar reward for the unconditional capture of Squid Man.
Recently I was invited to participate in the California Data Camp and DataSF App Contest hosted by California Watch and spot.us. The unconference would feature lots of discussion about making use of publicly available data sets to improve quality of life. The App Contest challenged developers to choose one of the many data sets available at DataSF.org and build something cool with it in a relatively short period of time.
Long story short — my contest entry, which explores San Francisco’s database of publicly maintained trees and plants, won the competition! Full details, and downloadable source code, available at my Scripts and Utilities site.
Thanks so much to David Cohn of Spot.us and all of the conference organizers and supporters. Thanks also to J-School webmaster for Chuck Harris for his contributions to the project. It was a great day, and winning the competition was a total surprise. Now I just need a city to take the source code and run with it.
Blog look different? At first glance, not by much, but I’ve just completed a massive cleanup of the back-end, replacing the old HTML/CSS with the 960 Grid System, starting with the 960bc (blank canvas) WordPress theme. While I was at it, took the opportunity to search/replace out a bunch of old non-semantic code buried in the posts, updated or replaced a lot of plugins, and killed off a few old features that had out-lived their usefulness.
The biggest news: After years of preaching the HTML validation gospel to students, I still hadn’t gotten around to trying to make my own platform validate… but the Foobar Blog finally does! Well, almost. There will always be 3rd party code outside your control that can’t be hammered into shape. The biggest offenders here are embedded Flickr slideshows and WordPress’ own embedded Gallery feature. Ugh. But aside from that, we’re pretty darn close to clean. Everything I can control validates at least.
The old design had accreted slowly over the years, from a patchwork of parts built and gathered. Original intention was to go for a clean break and adopt a modern 3rd-party theme, but the more I searched, the more I felt like I loved the “Cheap Thrills” design that’s evolved here (not available for download, sorry). So I decided to port Cheap Thrills to 960. It wasn’t all roses, since the divs in this theme hug each other so tightly, while 960 assumes margins everywhere. A lot of fiddling with negative margins, and I haven’t solved the equal height divs problem quite yet. Will do soon.
New in this pimplementation:
Much wider content area. Goal is to be able to show full-width video and slideshows, plus code samples that don’t fold to the next line or stretch out of the content space.
Tag cloud (see sidebar) – I’ve been tagging random articles for a long time but didn’t want to display a cloud until there were enough of them to warrant it. Still haven’t gone through and tagged the entire site history, but the cloud is picking up steam.
General cleanup. Cruft removal. So. Much. Cruft.
Somewhat wider sidebar – more room for Image from Nowhere and Recent Comments. Some of the old Images from Nowhere look a bit stretched but future ones will be generated larger.
Replaced my old handmade RSS-based Twitter integration with Twitter for WordPress. Super clean – much better for DIY theme builders than the usual TwitterTools.
The old Democracy plugin for polling appears to have been abandoned. Replaced it with the much cleaner WP-Polls, which also meant manually copying all of the old Poll data into the new system (ugh!). See the Pollster section.
Process took way longer than expected of course – everything does – but these things had been gnawing away at me for a long time now. Feels great to have it all done. Haven’t done any cross-browser testing yet – let me know if something doesn’t look right for you.
Can’t say enough good things about 960 Grid. We’ve standardized on it at work, and it really does make life easier. Not without its warts, but much more pleasant than the YUI grid it replaces.
I’m very taken by the mission statement of the East Bay School for Boys:
By the time he graduates, each boy will:
Examine and acknowledge his own learning strengths and weaknesses and set personal learning goals; collaborate in a community-oriented, project-based internship experience; conduct a conversation in a foreign language about something that he reads in that language; disassemble, diagram, rebuild, and write instructions for something electrical or mechanical; write a cogent persuasive piece on a matter of personal importance; analyze a meaningful passage of another’s writing and declaim it with passion and from memory; sow, grow, harvest, cook and eat his own vegetable; solve a challenging problem in a team; take a leadership role in a project, event or activity of significance; By performing the appropriate research, determine whether a statement by a public official is true; assess media coverage of an issue or event from various perspectives; hold and care for a newborn baby; demonstrate by something measurable a commitment to creating a more sustainable future; conduct a scientific experiment, collect and record empirical data, and produce a written summary of the results with sound scientific conclusions; participate in a physical team competition; mentor another boy in something in which he feels confident; and produce or perform a work of art.
Imagine what the world would look like if every boy and girl in the United States (or world?) could graduate saying he could do all of these things. How would things be different than they are today?
There’s a large body of technical information out there about content management systems and frameworks, but not much written specifically for decision-makers. Programmers will always have preferences, but it’s the product managers and supervisors of the world who often make the final decision about what platform on which to deploy a sophisticated site. That’s tricky, because web platform decisions are more-or-less final — it’s very, very hard to change out the platform once the wheels are in motion. Meanwhile, the decision will ultimately be based on highly technical factors, while managers are often not highly technical people. 
This document aims to lay out what I see as being the pros and cons of two popular web publishing platforms: The PHP-based 
To accept money for this snapshot would have felt hypocritical. A couple of friends worked on me last night, trying to convince me that the marketplace, not the creator, should set the value for the work. Their arguments almost worked. And of course the money would be nice. But in the end, I decided to stick to my guns and publish the piece on Flickr with the attached 
Recently I was invited to participate in the
Blog look different? At first glance, not by much, but I’ve just completed a massive cleanup of the back-end, replacing the old HTML/CSS with the