Seriously, though, does anyone have a good mnemonic to remember the mapping between ~& and ~% and fresh-line and terpri. I don’t.

From Harper’s Index

eleven slaughterhouse employees in Austin, Minnesota, were diagnosed with chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, a rare neurological disorder that they appear to have contracted as part of their work airblasting brain tissue from pig heads in order to get at the meat.

Disturbing

iTunes University is so cool. Here’s one reason why!

NY Times

Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace.

If you have 15-minutes, please stop and see Amy Smith’s TED talk about finding cleaner burning cooking fuel and reaching out to meet the problems of the developing world. She is amazing. I’m so glad that people do this stuff. It’s work and a life full of hope and passion!

In the video podcasts category, I’ve been enjoying Mahalo Daily and GeekBrief TV. After all, who wouldn’t enjoy “Shiny Happy Tech News”?

The “blasts from the past” winner is from Mesh Forum 2005 where Jamais Cascio spoke about the Participatory Panopticon (great title, just try saying it 10-times fast (it it it it it it it it it it. ha.). To summarize: personal digital recorders (cell phones, etc) are becoming ubiquitous to the point where everything we do will be recorded by the crowd and by ourselves. This will mean that surveillance will be overwhelmed by sousveillance (seeing from below) with both good and bad effect. PIMs will be replaced by PMAs (Personal Memory Assistants). Memory will change.

Cascio covers many of the obvious and some of the more subtle effects this may all have. What concerns me is that memory has evolved to be flakey and malleable for a reason — perhaps those reasons no longer hold… — and it’s not at all clear how we’re going to adapt as individuals or a species to permanent records (cf. the wonderful Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) by Carole Tavris and Eliot Aronson.)

Johanna Rothman gives Andy Hunt a nice interview over at Pragmatic Programmers. Rothman wrote Manage It a “reality-based guide for modern projects. You’ll learn how to recognize your project’s potholes and ruts, and determine the best way to fix problems—without causing more problems.” I tend to be a bit skeptical of books about Management (or anything else!) but she sounds like someone who has both been there and learned something from what she experienced. Once I finish a few of the other books I’ve got on my desk, I think I’ll buy it.

Finally, some interesting bits and pieces

• Jamais Cascio and Howard Greenstein - Breaking Old Networks

  Mostly about the good and not so good about Mashups. Nothing too profound here, move along.

• Manuel Lima (from VisualComplexity.com) - Mapping Complex Networks

  Manuel gives a talk that would be profoundly better if the podcast included the visuals (I’m sure that they are out [there somewhere][there]!). He discusses lots of visualization techniques and interaction ideas and says “I don’t know if you’ve seen this” too many times (seriously, it gets irritating and then it gets funny). Worth skimming (if you could).

• Finally, there’s an Salon.com interview with Alice Waters (of Chez Panisse fame). Waters is advocating for a return to the simple, the local, and the slow when it comes to food. To value richness and diversity over speed and commodity. I think she’s right but I’m not sure I’m willing to make the changes in my own life and habits so ultimately I’m not sure how hopeful I am by her inspired example.

Keep on listening.

I think I touched another Lisp community nerve with my post about Libraries. I received a bunch of additional comments pointing out other software, use cases I hadn’t thought of and ideas for moving forward. It’s great!

I’m going to be traveling on business (with an emphasis, I think, on the “busy”) for the rest of this week. I hope I have more time to mull on what I’m hearing and maybe synthesize these pieces into concrescence.

Keep posting and don’t ignore the comments.

I heard this from someone over the weekend. I can’t remember who but it’s a wicked good quote. Way visceral. (Yes, I do sound like a valley-boy. go figure.)

You (know) what bugs me? I’ll tell you. The choose template dialogs in PowerPoint, Pages, Keynote, et. al. They let you choose a template for a new file or open an existing file. What they don’t do is make it easy to pick a recently used file. My most common action is to close this dialog and then select a file from the Recently Opened menu. Why don’t they add a drop down list of recently used files to the main template? Their is plenty of room and it would make the dialog ever so much more useful.

People and organizations can make a difference! Yeah!!