Preoccupations

Theology in high places

Joi Ito, way up high in the mountains of Utah:

I just finished chatting with reverend AKMA about my last post, trying to see if there was something similar to good theologians and open source leaders. We talked about the importance of humility and the risks of greed. (AKMA pointed out that he was by far the most humble person on the planet.) I noticed that my thoughts seem to be somewhat more spiritual than usual.

Then I remembered reading somewhere that there was a scientific study that showed that people were more likely to have spiritual experiences in high altitudes due to the lack of oxygen. They theorized that maybe a lot of enlightenment in the past occurred on mountains because of this. (A bit disconcerting to think that a lot of our theological thought comes from the asphyxiation of hermits.) But then I remembered another article I read somewhere that said that 20% of all scientific studies are wrong. Then AKMA reminded me that according to David Weinberger, 78% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

Now via Cameo Wood (commenting on the original post):

Why revelations have occurred on mountains? Linking mystical experiences and cognitive neuroscience

Shahar Arzy^{a, b, c}, Moshe Idel^d, Theodor Landis^b and Olaf Blanke^{a, b}

^aLaboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Brain-Mind Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland
^bDepartment of Neurology, University Hospital, Geneva, Switzerland
^cDepartment of Neurology, Hadassah Hebrew University Hospital, Jerusalem, Israel
^dFaculty of Humanities, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

Received 26 March 2005;  accepted 21 April 2005.  Available online 28 July 2005.

Summary

The fundamental revelations to the founders of the three monotheistic religions, among many other revelation experiences, had occurred on a mountain. These three revelation experiences share many phenomenological components like feeling and hearing a presence, seeing a figure, seeing lights, and feeling of fear. In addition, similar experiences have been reported by non-mystic contemporary mountaineers. The similarities between these revelations on mountains and their appearance in contemporary mountaineers suggest that exposure to altitude might affect functional and neural mechanisms, thus facilitating the experience of a revelation. Different functions relying on brain areas such as the temporo-parietal junction and the prefrontal cortex have been suggested to be altered in altitude. Moreover, acute and chronic hypoxia significantly affect the temporo-parietal junction and the prefrontal cortex and both areas have also been linked to altered own body perceptions and mystical experiences. Prolonged stay at high altitudes, especially in social deprivation, may also lead to prefrontal lobe dysfunctions such as low resistance to stress and loss of inhibition. Based on these phenomenological, functional, and neural findings we suggest that exposure to altitudes might contribute to the induction of revelation experiences and might further our understanding of the mountain metaphor in religion.

Mystical and religious experiences are important not only to the mystic himself, but also to many followers, as it was indeed with respect to the leaders of the three monotheistic religions. Yet, concerning its subjective character, mystical experiences are almost never accessible to the scholars interested in examining them. The tools of cognitive neuroscience make it possible to approach religious and mystical experiences not only by the semantical analysis of texts, but also by approaching similar experiences in healthy subjects during prolonged stays at high altitude and/or in cognitive paradigms. Cognitive neurosciences, in turn, might profit from the research of mysticism in their endeavor to further our understanding of mechanisms of corporeal awareness and self consciousness. Science Direct

I must ask my theologian friends about this.

Audioscrobbler »»» Last.fm

More tags to be thought of, played with, explored: Last.fm (my profile here) has been relaunched this week as the the true face of Audioscrobbler-as-was — Audioscrobbler is now the name of the engine powering the service. For the history, Wired ran an article in 2003 on Last.fm and Kottke picked up on it here. The comments to Kottke's post are worth reading.

Richard Jones has posted this on his Last.fm Journal:

As you've probably figured out by now, the place to be on a day-to-day basis is here, at www.last.fm.

The audioscrobbler.com site will become a technology playground and resource for developers. We'll expose everything imaginable via webservices (RSS/XML etc..). This will enable some interesting new applications. For example, with the new tagging system we could create a free service doing something similar that moodlogic offers. Plugins for winamp (or whatever) that build smart playlists based on tag and profile data from the audioscrobbler webservices will be possible.

We have the data here, and as soon as we have the webservices, I want to be able to make smart playlists in amarok based on my favourite tags. It'll also be possible for other community websites to integrate music profiles into their site. Eg: users of example.com grab a plugin, and join the example.com group. The example.com site can then pull in profile data for its users. We could even generate neighbours within groups. That would rock as a music-addon for other sites actually.. Would be good to have your a/s profile integrated into your other favourite community sites.

More news to come on this when I've thought about it a little more :)

The forums are buzzing with "discussion" — lots about the new look, the disappearance of (some) stats, the new profile editor, the absence of the grapevine … Some of the criticism on offer is worthwhile and, positive or negative, meant well, but …  As dikonstrukt said:

… constructive, well-meaning criticism on how to improve things is no doubt appreciated by the dev team. However, I think it's disgraceful the level of respect many people are showing. Whether or not you like the new site, all AS users should recognize that an enormous amount of hard work went into creating the new site. If you have some criticism, you should at the very least acknowledge that. … When you add this to the fact that many of the complainers do not even donate, it is too much to believe. … As for me, I love the new site. Sure there are issues, but I know you'll work on getting them fixed. Thanks much for coming up with an excellent new site, I will definitely start my monthly donation back up.

Netiquette! What Ben Hammersley was talking about at Reboot.

I like the new colours. Tags were what we were asking for and now we've got them! I need to play with them a lot before I can see how this is going to go. In many ways, for all the differences between photos and music, I'll be comparing and contrasting my experiences here with those at Flickr. But right now, I'm grateful to the Last.fm team and what they're giving us: there's no cooler or better site online for music lovers.

Update! This is good: see what your friends are listening to, on one page. (Ah … this is a subscriber-only feature. Subscription = $3 / £1.50 / €3 / ¥350  a month.)

My alternative soul

via Smart Mobs I read of IBM's research, as reported in New Scientist:

Personal computers could soon fit entirely on a key ring. Researchers at IBM in New York, US, have developed a way to carry a powerful, personalised virtual computer from one PC to the next, without losing the user’s work. The trick is to store the virtual computer on a USB key, or any portable device with substantial storage space, like an MP3 player.

The virtual computer’s "soul" - as the researchers dub it - can then be uploaded to a new PC simply by plugging the portable device in. This host machine needs no special software or even a network connection to take on an entirely new personality.

The SoulPad system does not provide an instant switch, however. A user must typically wait a couple of minutes while the software configures the host system for use. It uses three separate layers of software - a base operating system that automatically configures the host computer's various components, a layer of encryption to keep sensitive data secure, and a "virtual machine" containing the user's portable computing environment, for example, their web browsers, word processing or music software

As I moved on in my aggregator, I was thinking about whether this, a portable, take-it-along-with-you device will be the future of personal computing, or will it be found on the web? And no sooner had I formed the question than I read Richard MacManus on just this news:

I can easily envisage a time in the future when we will not require a physical device to store one's computer "soul". I suggest that before long, you will be able to store all of your personal data on the Web. The IBM SoulPad is just an intermediary step towards a SoulWeb. Because why would we need a small mobile device when we can store everything on the Web?

Yahoo's search figures

At Open Tech, I was more than a little struck by the figures Jeremy Zawodny was reeling off, climaxing in the bald statement that Yahoo! has billions — 2, 3, 4 — of page views daily and 'billions and billions' of pages indexed: 'and no, I won't say how many billions we have' (around and about 15 minutes in on the mp3 recording of his talk).

I put down to naivety my surprise at the sheer scale of current Yahoo! search operations we were being invited to imagine (even allowing for sales pitch), so I didn't ask him about these figures. But I see now that this posting on the Yahoo! search blog has led to some informed reaction:

As it turns out we have grown our index and just reached a significant milestone at Yahoo! Search – our index now provides access to over 20 billion items. While we typically don't disclose size (since we've always said that size is only one dimension of the quality of a search engine), for those who are curious this update includes just over 19.2 billion web documents, 1.6 billion images, and over 50 million audio and video files.

John Battelle has swung into action:

… there are some tantalizing examples (I will add some in the next post) that one might expect would yield significantly different results between Yahoo and Google, given Yahoo's massive new size, but don't. The math, in essence, seems not to be adding up. At least, that is what the Google scientists are saying. But then again, I am not a mathematician, and there are always at least two sides to the story. So stay tuned and we'll see how this one plays out ...

Web 2.0: irony fatigue

Some may be suffering fatigue or irritation with the term, or just be plain bored by it, (eg, here, here, here), but let's not get caught up in a cycle of weary, ironic sighings. When Web 2.0, the term, was first used is of historical interest, but what matters for many an end-user is that being online is much more interesting and useful now than it was even just a short while ago. If historians and scholars of the net can think of a term better than 'Web 2.0' to describe this phenomenon of growing inter-connectedness and web-as-platform, then all well and good. In the term, there's nothing; in the experience, there's a lot. Hype is unnecessary and unhelpful: the experience speaks for itself (and, of course, leaves much to be desired).

Besides, Web 2.0 is so last year. Now we're either on Web 3.0 or about to be.

(Footnote: great to see The Guardian mark the tenth anniversary of the internet as a mass phenomenon with a leader.)

Google News, RSS and a Google News search modifier

As widely reported today, Google have (at last) introduced RSS on their News site. BBC Backstage has this: 

RSS feeds can be outputted by adding the argument "&output=rss" to any Google News search (for example a search for backstage.bbc.co.uk in RSS). 

No doubt there will be all sorts of new opportunities to include Google News results in backstage.bbc.co.uk prototypes. 

And here's a tip from Ben: Don't forget you can use the "source:bbc_news" modifier in a Google News search to return results just from the BBC News website. For example, "Space Shuttle" news from BBC News in date order.

Cooking

After several years of heavyish commuting and split-site living, it's good at last to be getting back into cooking. Today, it's also a pleasure to see Simon Hopkinson being singled out for star treatment now that his first book, Roast Chicken and Other Stories, has been chosen by his peers as 'the most useful cookery book of all time':

Waitrose Food Illustrated magazine had lined up a panel of more than 40 leading chefs, restaurateurs and food writers and asked them to consider 100 cookbooks, then choose the most indispensable one of all. Hopkinson's 1994 work, which is separated into chapters by ingredient headings such as Almonds, Duck, Lemons and so forth, was the outright winner.

It's my favourite modern work by an English cook. In it, Hopkinson praises and thanks a number of friends and influences who have shaped him as a cook. There's a wonderful tribute to Richard Olney (alive when Hopkinson's book appeared): 'Richard Olney is not a professional cook in the normal way of things. However, he is, in my opinion, the greatest living writer on food and wine today. … it is his writing on food that has given me the most pleasure and inspiration. Both the French Menu Cookbook and Simple French Food are classics and compulsory reading for all. Methodic descriptions are told in such a gentle and prosaic way that the result and taste of the final dish becomes perfectly obvious to the reader. He nudges you along so that you get it right.'  Hopkinson also has a wonderful description of lunch with Olney (pages 125–6 in the original edition).

I've enjoyed recently making blackcurrant jam using Raymond Blanc's innovative recipe (in Cooking for Friends), with much less sugar content than is usual (perhaps 55% rather than 70–80) — sweet enough to enjoy, but not so sweet as to bury the natural edge of the fruit's own tartness.

Finally, I came across some good postings about sushi last week, five in all. Here they are: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Update (13.8.05): there's a piece on Hopkinson in today's Independent.

Another one for the file

I have a (paper) file, 'Strange But True', of stories that I pick up occasionally from newspapers and magazines. I've not really maintained this zealously online, but here's one that's too good to miss. Why do I sometimes collect these stories of extraordinary coincidences? Teaching literature, particularly novels (no surprise there), frequently leads to students saying — 'that's ridiculous/incredible/implausible', when it's "just" a matter of coincidence. Ours is a world where miracles are anything but extraordinary (apparently!), and these stories, whipped out and flourished before a disbelieving class, have a sobering effect. This one's from yesterday's Daily Telegraph:

A soldier's 60-year quest to return a fallen comrade's rosary beads to his family has ended - with his widow's next-door neighbours. After numerous searches and nationwide appeals, the relatives of Pte Tom Jackson, who died in 2000 at the age of 83, have traced Pte Stanley Cloughton's family. In an extraordinary coincidence, it emerged that neighbours of Pte Jackson's widow, in Darlington, Co Durham, were related to Pte Cloughton through marriage.

In an emotional meeting yesterday, two of Pte Cloughton's descendants, Tom Cloughton and Gladys Dodd, were presented with the beads and met Pte Jackson's widow, Vera, 83. The two privates served in the 8th Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry in the Second World War and were stationed together in France in 1940. The rosary was thought to have been exchanged at Arras. Pte Cloughton asked Pte Jackson to keep it safe because he thought his comrade was more likely to survive. Pte Jackson never saw him again but kept up the search until he died. Mrs Jackson said: "Tom always wanted to find the family. I really couldn't believe it when we found relatives after all this time, but especially the connection with next door. …

The Jacksons later learned that Pte Cloughton had been killed during fighting in Tunisia on March 22, 1943, at the age of 24. He is buried in the Medjez-el-Bab war cemetery. When Mr Jackson died, his widow continued the search. After fruitless appeals through newspapers and magazines, a letter printed in her local newspaper was seen by chance by Mrs Dodd, from Darlington, a distant relative of Pte Cloughton. She contacted Mrs Jackson, who said: "I couldn't believe that her brother, Tom, is married to my next-door neighbour's daughter. All this time and the answer was on my doorstep.

It's worth repeating here what John Forster, Dickens' friend and biographer, wrote in his The Life of Charles Dickens:

On the coincidences, resemblances, and surprises of life, Dickens liked especially to dwell, and few things moved his fancy so pleasantly. The world, he would say, was so much smaller than we thought it; we were all so connected by fate without knowing it; people supposed to be far apart were so constantly elbowing each other; and to-morrow bore so close a resemblance to nothing half so much as to yesterday. (Volume I, Book First, V)

Three things I'd like to see

'And another thing' — taxi-driver mode.

• A thorough reform of 'categories' in TypePad. Adding tags to a posting à la Technorati method is not effortless and categories themselves are too broad to be very useful as tags. People have been commenting on all this ever since Technorati implemented their new service back in January (Dave Sifry: 'Technorati now supports Tag Search across leading Social software sites'): eg, Suw Charman ('Until we have a way to automatically tag or create tag suggestions that can be approved or disapproved by the user, we are going to have to rely on people bothering to tag their posts') and Mathibus.com:

There’s one thing that really bugs me about all this: a tag is much more precise than a category. There is no denying that. Take this richly tagged photo of the Star Wars cast, for example. It has a lot of tags, I’m not even counting them. Seriously, there’s nothing wrong with applying that many tags to a photo. In fact, I can imagine people wanting to search for C3P0 on Flickr.

Now, imagine that photo was a blog post you made. Would you create all those new categories, just to apply them to this one post, so it could be spidered by Technorati? I think not!

We need automated, user-friendly tagging processes within TypePad and then the facility to search and exploit these tags. Just compare and contrast where Flickr is now with tags!  A major blogging service, a social software service, needs, by definition, to be affording its users rich opportunities to share, discover and explore, and tags currently have a key role to play here.

In announcing new features at Flickr last week, the most important thing (I think) that Stewart Butterfield had to say was: 'Both interestingness and clustering rely a lot on what people are doing, whether it's with the photos they like, or the tags they are using. You can think about it as people-powered searching' (Yahoo! Search Blog, my italics). Blogging services as we currently know them are very top-down. This may now come to be seen as a curious thing: I wonder how long before a tipping point is reached and people want more freedom to mash and mix and access their and other's data beyond the constraints currently set for them by their service-providers. (Jeff Weiner's got it right: FUSE — find, use, share, expand.)

• Comments. Another area where blogging software needs to be re-thought. We read each other's stuff, we like certain things, but we're too busy to post a reply/comment — or we don't have anything worth adding beyond, 'I was here, I enjoyed this, thank you'. Jyri made this point (and more) here, providing a mock up of a possible UI here. Something along the lines of gestures is needed to supplement what we already have in comments.

• Conferences/events. Both at Reboot and Open Tech, I realised only afterwards, reading on the web, that people had been present with whom I've exchanged ideas in emails, or via comments, or whose blogs are, in any case, important to me. Frustrating, as well as bizarre, then, to know you'd been in the same space as them but had had no way of recognising them beyond a name tag — or even, in some cases, of knowing they were even there! I see Thomas posted about just this a little while ago, focusing on the central problem of aggregating identities across digital communities: 'The gap between digital and physical must close'.

(Not the same thing, of course, but this might also be a useful place to remind myself, at least, about those software initiatives being made that are intended to help us discover people nearby who are interested in what we're interested in: Six Sense, Nokia's Sensor … Such programs could be a monumental distraction, but, then again, I think of those times when I've had serendipitous conversations with interesting people at plays, galleries, films. Ways in which I might enable these to happen a little more often would be good.)

Web-services or own machine/server

November 2003. That's when I started experimenting with a TypePad account. Very quickly, other bits and pieces began to gather: Flickr, del.icio.us, Basecamp … I remember suggesting that this would be the way forward, web-based apps, and the immediate reply was: 'What happens when they lose your data or the connection goes down?'

Well, there are issues, of course. Recently, TypePad has been wrestling with server-related problems and Basecamp has been afflicted with very occasional outages. But these are problems of scaling and management that, as Web 2.0 businesses get to grips with the market that exists for these services — the level of demand, the issues that a global market brings with it (an outage at 9am London time spells real problems for Europe but may pass relatively quietly in the US) — are being addressed. We are, after all, in at the birth of a totally new way of doing business, managing educational resources, etc. (And TypePad is now running very fast, by the way.)

And then, about 2 hours ago, my ThinkPad T42p, which is a great machine but has had some (infrequent) problems with its display ever since I bought it in March, went down. I suspect a system board failure. Whatever, it won't start at all. So? I switch to a second machine, am back online — and I don't think I've lost any data as everything significant was running on web-based servers … (When I started home computing, many years ago, MS Word was what I used all the time. Now, I hardly ever open it, let alone print from it.)

Backing-up in full, at home, every evening, is a real drag. If companies exist that will do that for you and will maintain their servers in a condition that is both generally reliable and as responsive as possible for their global users, then it's a no brainer — quite apart from the all the other good things they bring, web-based apps make for a simpler life for all IT-users. This, in the end, is a key thing that Web 2.0 will mean to the man and woman in the street (and being connected, always on, means "the street" will be very important in determining just how big Web 2.0 is).