Stuff that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else.
Seth Raphael – MIT
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke.
What does it mean? We have a very very tiny idea of what technology is here. Using your hands is a kind of technology.
Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Incantations for Muggles: The Role of Ubiquitous Web 2.0 Technologies in Everyday Life
danah boyd, Doctoral Candidate, School of Information, University of California-Berkeley
Thank you so much for getting up at this hour. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Harry Potter, there are way more readers of HP than there are of BoingBoing or Digg combined. Muggles are those who are not wizards, those who do not have the magic.
Muggles have magic all around them… but don’t see it.
The talk is titled this way because it can be read on 2 levels — we’re here celebrating magic, because we are the wizards. But then we start to not think about Muggles, and mock them. Does that make us EEEeevil? What powers, and responsibilities do we have?
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I am an information junkie. I admit it. I have 75 RSS feeds set up in my reader as a sidebar in my browser (Sage in Firefox). I have, after much much pruning, reduced my bookmark set to only 35 sites here at work (at home, it is maybe 5 times bigger than that). If I am honest with myself, they turned into RSS feeds, mostly. Worse, every day I visit at least four message forums and scan through recent posts.
I am also on IM and email. I hit the news sites, like CNN or BBC, usually three or four times a day. I get both Time and Entertainment Weekly delivered at home, and actually read them cover to cover (usually on a two week delay). Plus, I get two or three other magazines that were given as gifts.
It’s easy to get into information overload mode.
…was apparnetly caused by too many concurrent MySQL connections. As usual, nothing had changed. And we were doing so well lately!
In any case, I did notice that the Google Feedreader blog decided to reprint “But is it art?” and boost my subscribers by 30% in one day. 😛 Maybe that had some effect.
Anyway, there seem to be a few lingering effects which I am working on fixing now. And I will get a Sunday Poem up before bed!
So both my kids are, as I have mentioned before, hooked on Viva Pinata. I just gave them XBox Live Silver accounts (the free ones) so they could send pinatas back and forth, and configured the family settings so that they could only be seen by friends. Then they friended one another. But when they go to the Post Office, they cannot see anyone at all in their friends list — the only person they can send crates to is themselves. They can’t even send one to me! Anyone know whether there’s specific Family Settings required for sending crates? I searched around on the Net, with no luck, and the manual is no help either…
