I have three days worth of notes and observations from the yet-again excellent and inspiring O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, but I won't have time to get to this for a bit.

Mie has arrived from Japan. The photo is one she sent me from her cell phone while taking the train to Narita airport. She had just that moment discovered that her cell phone can superimpose optional frame decorations on the photos (note, she's too shy to smile when taking a photo of herself, ain't that just the cutest?).

So, I'm going to avoid the PC for a couple of days. Actually tomorrow she and I are flying down to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico for a three day mini vacation. This was supposed to be a surprise, but within an hour of landing my housemate Sean says to her "so you're going to Mexico!" ....and before the night was over my friend Manisha says "so you're going to Cabo San Lucas!" I love my friends.

I just attended a BOF called Happening: Emergent Democracy at the Emerging Technology conference. Some quick notes...

I have to admit I have not yet read Joi Ito's Emerging Democracy paper and I'm disappointed because Emergent Democracy appears to be something other than what I thought. I was hoping for something that was proposing a fundamental change to democracy (or at least some serious modifications) because I feel that the current systems have failed us. But from what I could gather it seemed the focus was on allowing people to more effectively operate within the existing political structure.

It seems to me that the current democractic systems (which are rapidly becoming difficult to distinguish from plutocracy) have already become too corrupt to be brought back under control within the existing political structure, or at least none of the proposed technical solutions are immune from the corruption. It doesn't really matter how easy we make it for a citizen to contact his or her representative because the citizens are already controlled by the plutocratic powers that be who have a more fundamental grip on the citizenry at cultural, economic and educational levels.

I have a feeling that Evil is an emergent behavior encouraged by misconceptions and lack of common belief systems and that corrupt anti democratic powers are employing misconception (propaganda/spin/lobbying) to further their power. I think that perceptions and shared misconceptions must be the essential target of effort. Lately I've been trying to put some thought into how to attack misconceptions.

If you look at a statement made in a debate, you can say that the statement can be repesented as a logical extension of other statements. One can imagine a branched tree of statements in this manner. Often when people argue, especially those split along party lines, they are arguing different branches of a tree without realizing it. Branches that often are somewhat virtual, like superpositions or the branches of the level IV multiverse over time. The thing is that if both debaters follow their belief tree back far enough, they can identify the point where their belief system diverges.

If we could build a system that can represent knowledge and allow people to intuitively and easily identify their belief systems and locate the divergent point, they can focus their debative energy on the point that really matters. I think that this would result in great progress in shared belief systems as a whole, and that superior political systems will emerge from this practice.

Working on such a system would be complex (social networking, reputation systems, authentication, human computer interaction, visualization, distribution, etc, etc) , but I feel like it's a much better use of resources than trying to make it easier for citizens to participate in a game that they can't win anyhow.

saying goodbye to the fell street exit, market street overpass. thump thump thump. kachunk kachunk kachunk!
--Dav via Danger Hiptophttp://www.danger-island.com/dav/

I like to read. Unfortunately I have not had much time to read in the past six months or so. Actually I haven't had much time to read since joining a startup 2 years ago because I must be averaging 60+ working hours a week since then, but that's a bitch session for another time.

What I'd like to discuss now is how tall my stack of books in the to-read queue has grown. That measure is twenty four and one half inches, surely the highest it has ever been. Many of these I picked up at a county book sale on my last trip to North Carolina, where they were going for $0.50 for a paperback and $2 for a hardback. Some I picked up on impulse at various independent booksellers around San Francisco, knowing full well that I had no time to read them, because I am an addict and can't control myself.

Here they are.

• The Periodic Kingdom: A Journey Into the Land of the Chemical Elements by Atkins, P. W.. I'm actually a third of the way through this one. It's pretty good.
• A New Kind of Science byStephen Wolfram. This book has 848 pages plus an additional 349 pages of appendix. It weighs more than a duck. I got a couple hundred pages into this and realized I needed to put it off until I had more time to give it the proper concentration required.
• Israel/Palestine: How to End the 1948 War by Tanya Reinhart. I'm about a third through this one. It's small and fits in my motorcycle jacket so I can carry it around easily. It mostly covers the past couple of decades in the region. I find the tone a little too biased against Israel, which is a shame because I think very convincing arguments can be made against Israel without any bias whatsoever.
• Jiu Jitsu Complete by Kiyose Nakae.
• An Introduction to Logic by Morris R. Cohen and Ernest Nagel.
• The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner. This is considered to be the first cyberpunk novel. It was published in 1975.
• The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. I've been meaning to read this for decades.
• Fraud by David Rakoff. This is a loaner from Mie.
• Karma Cola : Marketing the Mystic East by Gita Mehta.
• Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold. I bought this from the author when he did a reading at The Mechanics Institute.
• The teachings of Don Juan :a Yaqui way of knowledge by Carlos Castaneda.
• The Cave Girl by Edgar Rice Burroughs. This was published in 1925, but the cover seems to have a more modern flavor (one in a long line of similar covers, apparently).
• Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share, and Teach Haiku by William S. Higginson.
• Let's Get Lost: Adventures in the Great Wide Open by Craig Nelson. This was a gift from my housemate Cheu.
• Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. This predates (1968) The Shockwave Rider and it is recommended to read it first.
• Adolf Hitler by John Toland.
• Aku Aku: The Secret of Easter Island by Thor Heyerdahl. That's right, I haven't actually read this yet.
• Mathematical Snapshots by Hugo Steinhaus.
• You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers. I bought this from the author at a book reading at The Regulator Bookshop in Durham, North Carolina. Which is odd only because Eggers and I both live in San Francisco.
• Water Wars : Privatization, Pollution, and Profit by Vandana Shiva. I hear future wars are going to be fought over water, not oil. And the future is fast approaching.
• The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910-1913
• Economics by Walter Wessels.
• The Coming Biotech Age: The Business of Bio-Materials by Richard W. Oliver. I bought this one two years ago! The damn Biotech Age is going to be over by the time I actually get to reading about it.

In preparation for Mie's arrival from Tokyo next week, I mowed the lawn so we can have a nice comfortable picnic.

p.s. I know a bunch of animated gifs on one page is annoying, I promise to stop doing it so much now...
--
Dav via Danger Hiptop
http://www.danger-island.com/dav/

Just ran across the Webgeek 0lympics website. I think I may try to participate in the time trial (which is build a website in 12 hours or less). Although the contest will run from midnight until noon in my timezone, so unless I'm actually coding at world class levels and can knock it out in a few hours I'll probably just give up and go to sleep :)

I've been out of town all week, on a rather important business trip that I may or may not blog aboutlater (I'm not sure I want to connect my professional life to my personal life here). The trip was to Saint Louis and it went very well.

I want to give a shout out to a great artspace/cafe I happened upon and spent quite a few hours in. It is called The Commonspace and is located near the University of Missouri at Saint Louis campus. Free wi-fi and good conversation.

Before I left on the trip I printed out a copy of Adam Greenfield's "The minimal compact: An open-source constitution for post-national states". It turned out to be an inspiring manifesto calling for the creation of a new constitution for a virtual nation. A constitution that is based in spirit and in structure on the Open Source Software movement. A fascinating idea. I passed it on to my friend David Danzig. He was a housemate of mine in Durham, NC while he was earning his law degree from Duke University, and favored consitutional law studies so I look forward to hearing his opinion on this proposal.