Bradley P. Allen

Warholicity

This morning, after dropping my daughter off at her school, I exchange nods with a mom of one of the kids in her class. I later see on Wikipedia that the mom’s 1993 album, one of Rolling Stone’s top 500 of all time, is about to be reissued in digital format on June 28th.

I come home after work to find my wife Becky with our friend Kate discussing Kate’s friend the actor, whose memoir I gave Becky for Mother’s Day. I read last week that some fans of Sex In The City were distressed that he got so little screen time in the recent movie.

I watch the end of the Lakers game on TV, and I catch a glimpse of my next-door neighbor, who’s suited up and standing behind Phil Jackson as he and his teammates listen intently during their last timeout.

Then ABC cuts to a commercial for a new reality show, which appears to involve one of the dads from my daughter’s school thrusting his way into someone’s home and then constructing a game show set in their front yard.

This month marks the fortieth anniversary of the shooting of Andy Warhol. On recalling that moment, Warhol once said: “Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there. I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life.”

Indeed.

It never rains in Southern California

In his 1998 book “Ecology of Fear,”  Mike Davis describes in a chapter titled “Our Secret Kansas” the century-long reluctance by Los Angeles newspapers to call a meteorological spade a spade:

Although tornadoes are ordinary citizens of Southern California’s “normal” climate regime, they have been persistently construed as aberrations, like mountain lions in a suburban yard. “Freak winds” is the euphemism that has most often appeared in newspaper accounts.

Sure enough, the following picture, displayed above the fold in today’s LA Times, carries the caption “Southland Weather Takes A Freakish Turn.” 

To be fair, the article on the cover of Section B is titled “Tornadoes, hail and snow deliver a May surprise,” but inside the editors revert to pattern on page B8 with “Freak storm descends on Southland.”

I love it when it rains in Southern California. It’s raining right now.

Anyone who wants to understand this place could do far worse than to read the works of Mike Davis. 

Good night bicycle man

When historians of the future come to enumerate the seminal technological innovations of the twentieth century, they could do worse than the following list: the airplane, the digital computer, the atomic bomb and LSD.

Today the discoverer of LSD, Albert Hofmann, passed away at the age of 102 at his home in Basel, Switzerland. I remember seeing him when he came to Los Angeles in 1988. He spoke at an event called “Albert Hofmann in America,” marking the 50th anniversary of the initial synthesis of the drug. It was an event attended by virtually everyone of note in the psychedelic movement from the sixties forward, save Tim Leary, who was, I guess, persona non grata. Hofmann spoke briefly that evening, a humble, eloquent man still wrestling with the impact of what he had done. I have the privilege of owning a signed copy of his book “LSD: My Problem Child.”

It’s interesting that of these four technologies, his is the one to have been considered so dangerous that, after a brief period, further formal research into the area was aggressively and effectively suppressed on a global basis.

Scarier than nukes. Think about it.

Siderean contributes to the DCMI/RDA Task Group

The last four months have involved a lot of effort at work, much to the detriment of this blog. Renewed clarity of purpose and some loose-ends cleanup have given me a fresh reason to get back to blogging, so here’s a start.

I’d like to announce that Siderean has contributed funding for the DCMI/RDA Task Group. In doing so we join the British Library, and hopefully others to come, in supporting the Group’s work to ensure a solid foundation for the next generation of standards for library metadata.

Our reason for contributing is our belief that the issues that the Task Group are addressing have import beyond the traditional library community, and that the Task Group’s work will lead to insights for and innovations by the Web developer community at large as we all enter an era where, as David Weinberger so aptly puts it, “everything is metadata.”

So we’re looking forward to what Diane, Gordon, Karen and the rest of the team come up with, and are glad we could help out in some small way. 

The death (and resurrection) of the e-book

The internets are buzzing about the launch of Amazon’s Kindle, and David Weinberger leads the charge against biblioluddism, declaring that “our hearts will break a little” but the e-book will replace the paper book within the next century.

Let’s assume with the enthusiasts that in the next few years, most if not all of the objections to either of the Sony or Amazon readers will be addressed, creating a fashionable consumer object that allows untrammeled and effortless access to content and all of the interactive reader goodness that David talks about in his piece, sufficiently differentiated from and superior to more generic computing devices like notebooks or phones to enable a viable market category.

Another, more hidden, assumption behind the ascendancy of the e-book is the permanence and sustainability of the global supply chains and manufacturing processes necessary to produce computing devices like an e-book reader and the storage and networking services that it depends on. What would happen to e-books when that economic system falters or collapses in the face of a black-swan-style global catastrophe? As currently conceived, it’s safe to say that the e-book would die as well, e-ink interfaces slowly dimming around the world as the intellectual production of the mid-twenty-first century goes dark. On the face of it, committing blithely to the e-book as just another step on the path from the cuneiform through the codex book seems a risky move from a cultural preservation point of view. Instead of physically burning the library, as has happened so often in the past, the new barbarians could simply take it permanently offline.

But before we dismiss the e-book on that basis, let’s ask this question: how can we design an e-book device that is as durable, self-contained and long-lasting as the paper book?

It seems to me that this could be a way to address the general issue of the sustainability of digital information. Most approaches to the ideas of digital preservation deal with the problem at the level of national archives or distributed services out on the cloud. The idea of being able to drive the problem down to one of making the e-book reader a very-long-term storage and display device that could be, for example, buried and exhumed a century later with its content still accessible, might be a better long-term solution than others I’ve seen discussed. It has the advantage of making the securing of knowledge an individual act involving an owned object. In this way, the e-book could advance the survivability of intellectual products, rather than making them more vulnerable.

It’s a problem in computer engineering and materials science that goes well beyond my area of expertise, but it would be interesting to see how this could be accomplished. It might even save our civilization.

Explode into space

Against the inky blackness of space, anything lit up by the Sun can be seen at vast distances. I’ve watched objects in Earth orbit the size of a phone booth become the brightest light in the sky from 1000 miles away.

So on October 23rd, when a distant and obscure comet half way between Mars and Jupiter shed an amount of ice and dust roughly a fifth of the amount of material spewed out by Mount Saint Helens in its 1980 eruption, people noticed very quickly. What had been too dim to see in even large amateur scopes became a naked eye object in a few hours.

I first saw it two days into the outburst; it was the tail end of the week when Southern California was on fire, and I couldn’t even see the surrounding constellations to guide me to where it was. But a few seconds of scanning with binoculars and it popped right out; unlike anything I’d ever seen before, it was an obvious disk against the hazy sky. Day by day, it’s been growing and changing, slowly moving across Perseus. It’s becoming less obvious to the naked eye as it expands to the size of the Sun, but it’s still visible even from urban locations like mine.

Watching the sky is an endeavor that mixes the incredibly predictable with the utterly unexpected. I love it when something like Comet Holmes comes along.

Another observation from Defrag

Enterprise 2.0 as conventional wisdom

Last week’s conference sweep was a great opportunity to see two very different communities talk about Web 2.0 and its impact on the enterprise. At Defrag, it was the Cluetrain cabal and associated communards who have led the charge to create social software; at the InfoToday conferences (ESS/West, KMWorld and Taxonomy Boot Camp) it was IT people trying to make sense of where it goes into their systems portfolios.

Unfortunately I can’t draw direct comparisons using my postings as I wasn’t able to live blog the InfoToday conferences the way I did Defrag (being too busy speaking in sessions and at our tradeshow booth,) but the thing that struck me was the unanimity of the viewpoints of the two groups. Practical advice on where wikis, blogs, social network software and prediction markets fit into the enterprise was remarkably consistent across speakers at all of these conferences and, more importantly, stated in an actionable way. The two highlights in this respect for me were Andrew McAfee’s talk at Defrag and Dave Snowden’s Thursday keynote at KMWorld.

It feels like technology adoption in this case has happened much more suddenly than in past cycles.

Library of Congress: Failure to Launch