Vacuum

Pocket Twitter - a suitable replacement for the Internet when offline

I haven't had a working smart phone in months, and so the times when I find myself needing to write down short messages to the world don't always coincide with the times that I'm on the net. Hence this version of "pocket twitter", writing down things that you want to share (or to remember) on paper, and saving that paper away until the next time it's possible to share a photograph.

This is from a few weeks ago, back when gas was $3.339 per gallon, and during and after a snowstorm and rain event that had people watching for localized flooding. You can read the rest, but for some reason I was thinking about the Jupiter Ace, a Forth-based machine from the early 1980s. What the mind will do when it has some paper to work with for storage.

 

Related articles

social networks: the mobile phone experience, via Blackberry

on the virtue of cheap paper

My setup: Reading, Writing, Bookmarking

Why I'm glad my iPhone broke

new phone to test out for a while.

I am going to be able to see if I can get the intended recipient please do you have any questions. Automatic arrangement of the intended recipient please notify us to the sender immediately and then you have to be able to see the resulting directly with a lot of this message. It does not quite as well as I have to be able to be but it is still working with some reservations. Written with the same automatic arrangement of the keyboard that makes typing easier if not exactly easy to read.

[When a keyboard suggests the next word to type, and you take the suggestions, you get some weird results.]

Great weird ideas vs. slow accretion of interesting things

From time to time I have great weird ideas, but those don't happen every day. So instead of using this weblog just to catch the brainstorms I have to be also prepared to have it slowly collect the ordinary things that catch my eye long enough to be worth saving.

Walking Around, a new urban walking game

I'm inventing a new urban game called Walking Around. I'm sure that someone else has invented it already, but reinvention is part of the process of creativity. Here's how it's played.

First, you play with a pedometer, which tells you how far you've walked during the day. There are a number of systems already for tracking your pedometer usage, including Walker Tracker, Steps, and a bunch of others. Use whatever system that gives you, or just a spreadsheet, to take care of the basic structure of making certain that you count steps daily.

Second - and here is what is novel, at least to me - is that there's a bonus structure in the game designed to award bonuses for when you have accomplished tasks. The first bonus award that I'm awarding myself looks at constructing a walk so that you make an orbit around the biggest possible chunk of territory; that is to say, repeated walks along the same path will get you zero bonus, but going out of your way on a detour will add to your score, and trekking through unfamiliar territory in a big loop is the best.

So far this is a pen and paper game and I haven't fully worked out the point structure. I have a notion that you capture territory every time you orbit it, so that you might win a park by going all the way around it, and you might win a political ward or precinct by capturing a loop around it. To simplify greatly, since I am trying to keep record of this in a small book, I'm just drawing a graph with destinations rather than tracking every street.

Some idea sources:

Riverwalks Ann Arbor is a book of walking loops along the Huron River, written by Brenda E. Bentley.

Lake Trek is the weblog for  Loreen Niewenhuis who wrote A 1000-Mile Walk on the Beach about her circumnavigation on foot of Lake Michigan. I don't think I'm going to beat that top score.

Tom Graham wrote about Walking The World, and his quest to walk every street in San Francisco, in 2005 for SF Gate; his web site is SF Walking Man.

The AADL Summer Reading Game has points for reading books and badges for doing various other tasks, and the gamers there know how to make a game that will make you read. There should therefore be points in my Walking Around game every time you complete part of a circuit that connects to a library.

All City New York is the work of Moses Gates, whose game board includes the challenge of visiting all of the census tracts of New York City. Thanks to Ruth Kraut for the link. 

In Tacoma, Brian Kerr is getting bonus points in his version of the game for elevation.

Now pardon me while I connect some dots in my game map.

 

Top of mind vs. top of page vs Top Of The Park

At what point did "top of mind" get replaced by "top of page" ? For people like me who spend a lot of time online, it's easy for social network systems like Twitter and Facebook to be a steady stream of distractions, especially when the usual clues for what is important get replaced simply by cues for what is new.

Some background for context.

The earliest use of the phrase "top of mind" that I can find in a modern context is Alin Gruber's Top of Mind Awareness and Share of Families (1969), a discussion in the Journal of Marketing Research on how closely the snap judgments that consumers make about brand recogition map to market share.

"Top of page" shows up in the news and design business as "above the fold"; see this Boxes and Arrows design article, Blasting the Myth of the Fold (2007).

Facebook's Top News page comes from their Edgerank algorithm, the details of which change as quickly as and are kept as proprietary as Google's Pagerank algorithm. EdgeRank: The Secret Sauce That Makes Facebook’s News Feed Tick (Techcrunch, 2010) gives a simplified explanation of it.

"Top of the park" is the music and movies part of the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, held on Ingalls Mall. It used to be hosted at the top of the parking structure next to the Power Center, hence the name.

Thanks to Rod Johnson ("Top of Park").

Dial by name, using the Twitter name space?

I find myself wanting to call people once in a while, and I also find that I know people's twitter names pretty well.

What is disappointing is that none of the tools I have let me "dial by twitter name" in the sense that there's no command line prompt that has a "call" verb which takes the twitter username as an object.

% call @vielmetti

Actually, I'm at even a worse spot; I don't even have a "call" command to start from at the shell script prompt. However, Twitter is in a good spot to do this - it knows the cell phone number of a lot of its users.

Perhaps then this is too good of an idea - does following someone mean that you are expecting to get calls from them? Some measure of opt-in seems appropriate, lest that eggbot spammer direct dial you to sell you air duct cleaning.

Unknowledge management

From The Unknowledge Pattern Language, on Nooron:

Unknowledge Patterns describe ways of talking about that which is unknown. For example, the discovery of the periodic table of the elements created a pattern of information about what we didn't know about the elements, until we "filled in the blanks." These "named voids" in our knowledge were powerful attractors, and shaped the discourse of science. Are there other ways of naming voids which shape our discovery? The discovery of zero, a "missing nothing," was one of the turning points in Western thought. Are there other missing nothings lurking about, waiting to be discovered? If so, how do we name these voids, and to what end? This is the stuff of unknowledge management.

Giving a name to something is a powerful act of creation. The ability to describe the unknown and nonexistent with words that are suggestive of its qualities creates a new universe of the plausible alternatives to the way that things are right now, and gives a way forward either to discover the absent or to rename existing concepts as though they were brand new.

My first hand experience in this world is in the world of wiki, where any name can be the target of commentary. Your wiki link to Price of a cup of coffee is real, even if the page that answers that query is currently blank. At a later time you can bind the name to its commentary, and use the statistics you get from watching people explore the unknowledge of the world to decide which of it to bring to reality.

A counterpoint to this line of reasoning is the periodic need to unname things which have names, so that they can grow new names that are newly reflective of the current observation. We didn't know that we had land-line phones and terrestrial radios until cell phones and satellite radios forced the use of distinctive nomenclature.  

Credit to Pete Kaminski, who has used the word "incipient links" to describe the deliberate use of wiki pointers to nowhere, and to Tom Munnecke for Nooron and the phrase "unknowledge management". Pete also gave me "great weird ideas", where this clearly fits.

My great weird ideas don't fit in 140 characters

I have a brainstorm and want to capture it in a bottle before it dissipates. It's impossible to fit it into a box that allows too few words. A suitably complex thought asks for at least a couple of paragraphs to stretch out its feelers and see if it grabs ahold of anything. 

The Twitter input box doesn't give the thought enough room to spark. It too quickly fizzles out, bumping into traffic and weather reports that ground it or pop culture that doesn't pop for it. 

When a great weird idea hits, you want it to hit a dry jack pine tree on a hot day and make it smoulder. It might take a day for the jack to catch fire, long after the first flash is gone. Use Twitter to fan the flames, not to light the fire.

Supermemo, spaced repetition and time-structured randomness

I've written about Supermemo before, a system for focusing your attention on things that you have previously learned in such a way that you reinforce long term memory. Given a set of items which you were confident in at a stage in the past, identify a way to re-test yourself on that confidence. Space out those retest intervals so that you keep the learning from decaying into nothingness. Repetition is the very soul of the net, and if you are careful you can repeat at intervals that don't overwhelm.

New to me this week is a similar spaced repetition training tool focused on short term memory. Referred to as "N-back" (Wikipedia), it looks at turning the process of matching repetitive items in a sequence into a game, with higher scores if you can recall that e.g. 3 letters ago there was also an 'x' in the string. The application Brain Workshop was created by Paul Hoskinson and lets you play with your current skills; I haven't seen anyone render this into hardware a la the old game of Simon.

To turn the random noise of the world into patterns that you understand and can manipulate and recognize, you need to find the useful connections and build upon them somehow. You can't just learn by remembering things out of context - it always helps to learn by doing. People love to make things into patterns, and an organized exploration of an otherwise random world can help you make connections which are key to understanding the world.

The space I keep trying to explore is remembering the names of people, some of whom I know rather well by face, others who I know only by their work. The index into this space that lends itself to randomness is the birthday, which you can be pretty sure to capture less than 1% of the set of people every day. Alas, Facebook has cheapened the opportunity for remembering someone's birthday as a distinguishing mark, so the challenge is to use this somehow else; if I happen to remember your half birthday, it's because I'm trying to remember and plan both forward and back 6 months. Even better if I send you a half-birthday postcard (to combine two unusual abilities). Wish me luck.

Things I wish I had written: May 2011 edition, A-G

May is almost over, and as always there is more I wish I would have done than was actually done. Some notes on things not written, in the hopes next year will bring another May (chances are good) and that I'll have some of these May stories written before then.

a2b3. I would have loved to have written meeting non-summaries for every lunch meeting, capturing at least who was there, what the question was, how long it took to introduce everyone, how many people where there, and who the new people were. Some of this should be ritualizable, with a clipboard and a form?  (Noted: printable sign in sheets; Crowdjuice, for signups in advance with a social matchmaker function.) 

Ann Arbor City Council. Every month I read the news, and there's always someone referring to some document but not producing it for inspection. The story that needs the document, in this case the map, is the maps for the proposed marijuana ordinance; I tracked them down but haven't published them yet.  (School buffer zones, a2docs)

Arborwiki. Every month deserves at least one wiki posting, and this month I find myself wishing I had written down the simple rule of copy editing with wiki: always link to anything in boldface or caps, and if it doesn't exist, make it exist by fixing the spelling or creating the page.

Blogger's Secret. This section is not sure whether it's a whole weblog or just some random notes, and if it is a weblog it should certainly be written with the thought that there's some non-zero byproduct from the work. The message is simple (write twice a day about one thing), but that's a heck of a lot of work to keep up and do anything else.

Chicago. Why do I have a whole Chicago category, but don't get there more often? One or the other of those should be fixed. (And ask, since Detroit is so much closer, why the Detroit category is not more full; ditto Lansing.)

Community Television Network. I'd love to have told you about the time I spent getting trained to use the equipment there to produce some good old-fashioned public access television shows, but somehow the training hasn't happened yet.

Coworking. There's a very good story about how various coworking spaces are the same and how they differ, but to tell it right I want to visit more of them. I do need to also write more about the Workantile Exchange, the downtown coworking club I am a part of.

Dioxane. Our favorite plume generates slow-moving controversy, when data about how it is being monitored becomes less accessible.

Farmers Market. I'd love to post pictures every week, and I want to get to the Wednesday night market which starts June 1.

Fishing, floods. There were stories of people running into carp on bike paths, people fly fishing for carp, and more hot carp action during the latest Huron River floods. Pictures please!

Great Weird Ideas. No end to them; the question is managing them, or at least corralling them so that you can set them aside and get back to the modest ordinary tasks that you need to for the day. Thus this wish list stops at the end of this section, ignoring H-Z for now.