For Your Information
The IT peon has become the shaman of our era. At once reviled and revered, we prostrate our maddened forms before the mercies of mysterious and unseen things, the impossible fey things whose humors power our lanky little machines at some unknown price.
It’s been a very busy day. I made a flowchart to aid incoming customers in this, our time of busy-ness.
And yet, strangely, I maintain my grip on employment. Praise be to the spirits!
Weave the Web
What have you got under the hood of your browser? My baby looks something like this:
-Adblock plus
-Downloadthemall!
-Firegestures
-Foxmarks
-Google Notebook
-Hyperwords
-PDF Downloader
-Retailmenot
-Scribefire
-Shareaholic
-Speed dial
-Stumble upon toolbar
Here are the important bits.
The visceral effect, if you bear with me, is much like switching from navigating the internet along its established highways to teleporting your ass around at breakneck speed. All it needs is a complimentary “bamf”.
Just a heads up, I’ve decided that my rapper name is going to be MC Solilokwize. Oh yeah.
Software Pron Manifesto
Slow on updating today due to an unexpected influx of genuine work assigned to yours truly at my dungeon office. My boss’s boss came to me with the reasonable request that I assemble a kiosk for him, and I, being unaccustomed to such inquiries, leveled my somnambulist’s stare at him, blinked a few times, and very nearly told him that I’d prefer not to. Fortunately for my continued employment, the electronic haze lifted from my eyes and I remembered that my role in these facilities is not, in fact, to browse the internet. A kiosk was promptly put together.
I, much like 80% or so of all internet-faring human beings, was once a dedicated user of Internet Explorer. It made sense, ever since I discovered that using Netscape in the seventh grade made me roughly as cool as the kids who used Macintosh Apple whatevers. This demarcation was of critical importance to someone to whom jockeying for position in the computer lab represented the brightest hopes for popularity. I used to think about these things while I hid behind the portables all day.
Then, one day in mid 2005, I jumped ship to Opera in a fit of intentional obscurity for inadequately explained reasons. My indie rock attitude and flowing chocolate hair demanded it, and I obliged. I swiftly fell in love, and let me tell you why: IE, in all its formats, doesn’t work for you. The Microsoft internet platform is something the average user has to coax and obey as they weave their jaunty, stoic way through the internet of 1998. This works well enough for most people, in the same way that an old Ford Focus works for an ungainly number of motorists. Personally, the internet equivalent of “it gets me from A to B and that’s all I need” stopped appealing some time ago.
I recently made the switch from Opera to the infinitely more popular Firefox after years of expressing venomous malice toward the browser which I once again cannot now adequately explain. The experience was one of the internet opening up in a great vista and simultaneously prostrating itself before my feet, the Great Machine humbled and willing to serve. Kick ass.
The only objections which I’ve heard out of people toward switching from IE to FF or some other similar platform all seem to fall into thinly veiled expressions of xenophobia. The reality is much more nuanced than that: it’s difficult to learn one’s way around new software which is so ubiquitous to daily life of late, and frustrating to perceive any sort of reward for the challenge of becoming accustomed to something that most feel should “just work”. The reward, such as it is, mostly appeals to the kind of power-gaming internet weirdo that gets off on acronyms and fancy plugins.
This is me.
More to come on this later.
Shiny
This is an elegant and beautiful example of the kind of thing Wired was talking about in the article I mentioned earlier. Artist Todd Falkowsky has processed thousands of photographs of all the Canadian capital cities into the three most predominant colours present in each.
It’s interesting, and a sincerely impressive feat of applying technology to art and culture, and there’s not much else to it. If you’re from TO, you might recognize the cherry red of the TTC in its palette: but only if you access a preexisting model of information, boo.
Lots of compelling data, zero meaningful content. I’m being impetuous, I realize, but I’m a politics student. It is extremely cool.
Them’s fightin’ words
I’ve been reading Wired magazine’s Top Stories feed for about six months now, and while it’s always been concerned with the intersection of technology, politics and culture, I’ve never actually sat down with a proper article before. I’m using my powers of intuition to their absolute limits here, but I’m sensing that the editors have a penchant for shit-disturbing. I admire that, I’ve always been attracted to the radical periphery of discussions, particularly as they pertain to such geeky topics as technoutopianism and futurology.
While I’d like to say, in philosophical terms I appreciate the role which radicalism takes in balancing out the Luddite/conservative element I perceive as commonplace and oppressive in my day to day life, and I do, the mundane truth of it is I find the dreamers to be awesome.
Wired published most of their newest issue on the web yesterday. While I’m comfortable with the lads at the mag gleefully flogging the Environmentalist status quo, among other suitably anti-PC stances, something is rotten about their angle on the “Petabyte age”, or at least Chris Anderson’s article The End of Theory and its notion of the end of scientific theory.
I get that journalists are in the business of attempting to be the first one to say “I fucking called it”, a practice, I’m sure, involving scores of cloaked and hooded men whispering over the light of guttering candles, the act of naming the stuff of distant threads of time ushering dark powers to whichever thrall is blessed by being the first. But this is taking things a bit far, somewhere between the reasonable “we are headed toward a paperless society” and the “humans will marry robots by the year 2050”. The article itself is a great read, extremely well written while raising compelling points, but there’s a limit to how well one can stomach an article subtitled “…Scientific Method Obsolete”.
The article itself is a great read, but the thrust of it is this: the ever advancing computational strength available in the modern age has begun to redefine not simply how we collect data – about everything and anything – but also how and what we learn. Scientific models in all fields are always wrong, hence why they’re constantly modified and updated, and thus the why of understanding phenomenon can be discarded in favour of increasingly rich volumes of what is.
The colossal elephant in the room, however, is the idea that we can excise meaning from information and still learn from it. While the author is careful to focus his parlance on the extinction of models from scientific theory, I find it difficult to separate this from the fact of meaning. How do we understand the Theory of Evolution without any underlying model? We may collect volumes of data to perceive that species change over sequential generations, but what do we understand if our inquiry exists wholly within this step?
This amounts to an assertion that interpretation can be replaced by pure mathematics.
The author points to a biologist, one J. Craig Venter, as the “best practical example” of what he’s describing as the future of science. It’s not my place to criticize Venter or his work, but I take issue with dubbing his method the future of scientific inquiry. The article openly admits that where Venter has used cutting edge Petabyte style technology to discover scores of unique and previously unknown microorganisms, he knows precious little about them beyond the statistical fact of their existence. Consequently, that is all his method, in and of itself, has contributed to the body of science. This is a complex matter, but I beg the question: what have we learned from this?
I find that there is palpable and uncomfortable void in answer to that question. In the author’s own words “It’s just data.” Necessary, but not sufficient.
BIT PART 