kip/bot/blog

I’m convinced that there is a condition, that should be in upcoming DSM , of environmentally induced cognitive diminishment. I’m calling it “the Googles” and I believe I suffer from said Googles. I’ve been thinking about this condition since reading Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic article “Is Google Making us Stupid” (my blog bit about it here). Carr has witnessed several diminishments: Shortened attention spans, decreased ability to focus on complex ideas, and the near impossibility of thinking deeply about something. He attributes it to Google because their commercial model, which is central to so much of our knowledge seeking, encourages short-attention span and quantity of items viewed over quality of the viewing.

On first reading the article, I immediately saw myself and my friends in those symptoms — trouble reading novels, never reading an article to completion, rarely stopping to re-read a passage, and a rushed, frenetic sense that I need to quickly skim the next thing lest I miss something. Carr has an upcoming book that describes the situation as being chronically stuck in “the shallows”. But I think it actually goes deeper. I think the symptoms above have related symptoms and speak to a deeper condition:

- inability to formulate original thoughts within various pockets of my industry of internet marketing (and its sub-disciplines of design, UX, and strategy), it feels like our conversations are increasingly about analogies and metaphors and case studies. “Let’s do it like Apple”, “this is how Google rolls”, “we need to do for x category what this company did in y”, “let’s adopt this model”. These threads lack originality on two levels. First, it’s all by reference to something else. There’s no blank slate, there are no truly fresh looks (you may bring in fresh eyes, but that voice is usually just reacting and spouting first thoughts, not helping to go deeper than where you started). Second, it multiplies the shallowing effect Carr talks about. What does anyone mean when they reference Apple or Google? Do we really have a deep, shared understanding of what we’re agreeing to? Do we understand what it means in terms of day-to-day work?

- inability to have deep conversations or true information exchanges having the Googles means that my talking style has started to resemble the research/information gathering style above The person suffering from ‘the Googles’ has conversations full of quick hits across a wide range of topics and entries. Like a stone skipping across a lake, they never go deep. Googles-infected conversations tend to be the exchange of memes or the matching of related links. A colleague utters a word or phrase embedded in a sentence with deeper thought. But I latch onto that word and immediately my brain bubbles up search results of related links. Then, without connecting the dots or evaluating the context, I blurt out my top-ranked meme. My counterpart is just as likely to latch onto my keywords and do the same. We leave these conversations with a half-shared understanding of what we’re doing and lack the energy or will to push deep. Dialog is replaced by a semi-grounded free association of memes, references, and synaptic firings sparked by keywords in the sentences spoken.

So these are my symptoms, deficits, diminishments:

- shortened attention span
- reduced focus
- inability to follow complex texts
- difficulty staying in a deep conversation
- diving below the memes and hyperlinking in my brain into original thoughts

I call the cluster of symptoms ‘the Googles’ and I am starting treatment (next post . . . )

I love this Instructable and wish I could do it for me. The author, responding to that clear-but-squishy-edged school of thought that various stimuli are good for infants, created a remote-controlled pattern of fiber optic lights in his soon-to-be-born baby’s ceiling. He can remotely control the overall brightness, the rate of twinkling, and the phases of the moon (waxing and waning):

Full lesson at Instructables

I don’t have key attributes.
There isn’t a four pillar architecture that adds up to me.
I don’t have primary or single emotional takeaways.
I don’t have a single, drumbeat voice.

People/me trying to be a brand. Waste of spirit.

As the Mad Farmer says:

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

That is all.

I’m starting to think I should start expressing myself in movie and TV bits from now on:

- “Too many notes”
- “A little saucy”
- “Am I here to amuse you?”
- “We’re coming with you!”
- “There is no try. only do.”
- “He’s dead Tom. Nothing you can do to bring him back.”
- “One ping, Vasily, one ping only.”
- “We must give this _______ a wide berth”

Love this email I just got from Amazon:

Full disclosure: I get quite a kick out of the Dan Brown oeuvre, despite the horrible writing. It’s like the old computer adventure games made into a book. Literally. The old games — like MYST, Journeyman Project, Tex Murphy, Last Express, Obsidian, Lighthouse, Gabriel Knight, even the fighting adventure games like Resident Evil — had a winning formula:

- gruesome/startling crime in the beginning (Lighthouse wins this one hands down with not one but two great openings: 1) you explore a house with interesting objects, but only when you press the answering machine button to get a hysterical call for help does the game kick in with a great drive through the rain sequence that presents the credits and great animated lightning effects); and 2) when you explore the house of the friend who called you, you see a baby quietly sleeping in its crib. When you return to the baby’s room, you see an alien stealing the child. Seriously jump out of your skin freaky. Dan Brown has the usual Robert Langdon being interrupted in some refined pursuit (dreaming about hiking the pyramids with a babe, or giving a lecture) and then being dragged to a mutilated corpse.

- discovery of solvable riddles — adventure games are riddled with barely- to not even close to plausible riddles that you’re happy to solve. They propel the story. Nearly every image presented in Dan Brown allows the reader to puzzle out the clue.

- obscure reasons for villainy The worst example of this was a ten minute or longer discource in Journeyman Project Turbo. These reasons usually warrant a page or two of monologue and sufficiently flawed logic for Langdon to feel the need to correct the villain on the true meaning of the text. Not quite “that belongs in a museum” but close.

Final disclosure, while I won’t leave my battery on, my morning ritual of turning on the wireless will have an extra jolt of excitement (I like it even when I’m just getting the paper) tomorrow morning.

Psyche! I finally made it to Maker Faire and it was every bit as fun, interesting, and inspiring as I hoped. It was big and massive with welded giants of art and smashery. It was cool and witty with installations that made you laugh and wonder how the hell they did it. It was people-focused, having a large number of things that required no power or revived old skills (from vaudeville to composting to a lotta lotta Victoriana). Most of all, though, it was smart and, I hate to use the word, empowering. Everything had wit and intelligence and everything was comprehensible with a little help from the presenters, who were psyched to explain what they were doing.

My favorite, and I kept going back over and over again, were the soldering areas. Both the MAKERShed (MAKE Magazine’s store at the Faire) and Sparkfun (my favorite purveyor of fine electronic goods) had large tables set up with soldering stations where people could take the kits they had just bought and put them together with the help of staff.

These tables were never less than half full and it looked like there was always a mix of adults/kids, noobs/pros, male/female (though the females were predominantly adult). Sparkfun and Make both did a nice job of putting out projects that were doable, but not simplistic. Some kits let you solder two wires coming out of a battery pack to a thing that’s already running. While you learn to make a decent connection, and you’re not likely to fry any parts, you don’t really learn much and it’s not all that energizing. These kits, involved matching resistors, getting polarities right, and required some precision. I love the intensity on everyone’s faces.

The only disappointment is that there wasn’t much around renewable, social, or eco-preneurial. The DIY ethos was strong — make rather than buy, fix rather than replace — but it seemed like they could have dialed some of that up more, without being over-earnest or taking the fun out of it. Example: they had several playground toys designed by MAKErs. They were fun, looked cool, and had some interesting story to them — one was bicycle powered, one worked like a swing and was powered by leaning and leaning back. It would have been cool, given the theme, to see some of the playground toys that generate electricity or pump water.

Still, it was awesomely fun. I bought my second arduino kit and I’m converting space into a little work area and unpacking my soldering iron and box of switches, pots, leds, resistors, caps, transistors, etc and getting back to work. My first goal is to work with the Peggy:

It’s a board that allows you to address a 25*25 grid of multi-color LEDs. Loads of possibilities, especially if they’re connected and working in synch.

More pictures and vids and more to be added to a set on my flickrstream.

But will it be my FB friend?

I’ve blogged about this guy before, but this is one of those places where amateur is really cool.  Flintstone Stargazer is a flickr contact who does astro-photography (as well as other kinds).  In addition to posting his astro-pics, he also posts pictures of his equipment set-ups, the impromptu devices he makes to get things to work (mounts, stabilizers and the like).  He’s been taking a lot of pictures of Jupiter recently:

Jupiter was my big “discovery” when JRube got me a telescope for Christmas years ago.  I was on the roof of my Brooklyn apartment, in February and was drawing pictures of what I saw (like Galileo!), and found four dots — one big one with three smaller ones — all on the same plane.  Remembered that’s how Galileo found the moons, check my maps and sure enough it was Jupiter.   A few weeks after that, after consulting maps and schedules, I was able to see the red spot.  Nothing like the clarity of the photo above . . . my telescope wasn’t that strong, and there’s too much ambient light in Brooklyn.

While catching up on MAKE videos (where is Bre Pettis? nothing against Kip Kay, but I had grown quite fond of Bre), I saw a plug for RSINVENTIONLAB.com — the Radio Shack Invention Lab. It looks like a user-generated and curated set of projects using the stuff you find in the cabinets at the back of Radio Shacks.

Some design problems (though none of them caused by the pegboard and the tape and scrap paper look and feel) make it hard to find out what’s going on. But they seem have to some seeded projects (arduino, some MAKE b rolls) and then user-submitted stuff. The one above shows the charm and weirdness of this subcommunity: a box designed to capture EVP (electronic voice phenonomena). I would love to see this grow, as I am saddened every time I see a Radio Shack that doesn’t sell soldering irons.

“Our guild just moved up to number 20 on our server.”

I’m riding the subway home with a friend, the guy who, among many other contributions to my life, got me hooked on World of Warcraft (WoW). I haven’t played in forever, but the night before I logged onto WoW specifically to talk to him. (We’re at a point where I log on to WoW and we schedule subway rides home to get caught up.)

We talk a little bit longer when I realized what he said. “Wait. How do you know your guild’s rank?” Well . . .

Turns out (how often do I use that phrase? this is the last time) that Aspir from the guild Ludicrous Speed has created a site that taps into the WoW Armory and, using an algorithm all his own, ranks guilds. He’s doing for World of Warcraft what Bill James and the SABERMetricians have done for baseball: created an objective data-driven way of understanding and evaluating a game while at the same time giving fanatics and geeks a whole new way to spend endless hours talking about something they love.
So let’s unpack the sentence for nonWoWers (and make sure I’m getting it right).

One of the best things about Wow is that, while you can in fact play solo, the most crazy over-the-top (or, as the kids say off the hook) fun to have is doing group activities. These include quests, which every player needs to do to efficiently advance and which requires working in concert with 3 - 5 other players. Then there are raids. Raids are special places in the WoW game which are restricted to players of certain levels, contain really nasty hard to beat bad guys, and yield nifty treasures. To beat the nasties, you usually need over a dozen people with the right mix of skills and who work well together. Players create guilds for a variety of reasons, but most guilds are heavily focused on raids.

I’ve only been on raids three or four times. They are time-consuming to actually do, since most raids are complex and require multiple tries. They even take time to coordinate. Raid parties are usually organized by the in-game chat system, then people have to fly to the location, often stopping at a bank to pick up supplies, or going to a store to buy “mats” (materials) so they can make potions, bandages or other items needed for the raid. That’s a prohibitive amount of time for me, but the few times I have done it, it’s been some of the funnest gaming I’ve ever done. For a better feel of a raid, check out youTube for videos that guilds publish of their raids. (There is a whole genre of videos celebrating raid completions or mocking the d-bags who get a little caught up in it. Some of them show quite elaborate planning processes, including spreadsheets, maps, Xes and Os that look like a football playbook.)

So, that’s a raid. The WoW Armory is an API where players can check out other players and guilds. Here’s my main character:

The character name is Vishniak (named after Floyd Wayne Vishniak, from Neal Stephenson’s Interface. most of my characters are named after Stephenson characters and it’s great fun to run into other Stephenson characters — could I be any dorkier? oh yes . . .). Vishniak belongs to the guild “Victory not Vengeance” (I didn’t come up with the name, but I am proud to have been a charter member). Most important, Vish owns the “Destroyer’s Mantle”. If you look at the description, you’ll see that it “Binds when picked up.” That means that once I pick up the object, I can’t give, sell, or trade it to another player. Certain objects which bind on pick up (”BOP”), can only be acquired after the successful completion of a raid. Put another way, I can only own certain objects if I was present at the killing of a particular bad guy.

So, we have a classic web2.0 thing here. An open API that exposes data, a small, fanatical audience with no small amount of technical chops, and a larger, less technical audience that is curious about the data and will engage spiritedly in detailed conversations.

When Bill James began crunching through baseball stats by hand, he said he wanted to find baseball ‘truth’. Aspir describes his beginnings in slightly less exalted, but equally geeky terms:

I’ve been working on this site in my off time for probably going on 2 months now. It started one evening after my guild, Ludicrous Speed from Bloodscalp, downed Gruul for the first time and the other officers and I began to wonder, “Where does this put us in guild rankings on our server?”.

Gruul is a baddie in a raid. Notice, that he says “for the first time” (this becomes significant in debates about his scoring system). What Aspir did to answer this question was create a formula that would measure the strength of a guild. The formula is based on the BOP items possessed by a guild’s members. If you look in Vishniak’s bag above, you can assume that I am carrying around my best gear and you can tell from the BOP items which raids I have participated in (I can only have a Gruul BOP item if I was there at the time he was dropped). You can ladder up from Vishniak to my guild and find the other BOP items owned by other guild members.

So you could create a formula that assigns points to a guild like so:

gather a list of the BOP items owned by individual players in a guild, distill that list (de-dupe) to a list of bad guys beaten, assign values to those bad guys, add up the points and that’s the score of the guild. Rinse, repeat, and rank as needed.

Number geeks, baseball fans, and AD&D players will immediately see the logic of the formula and quickly identify at least four areas for intense theological and dorkily fun debate: how do you assign point values to the raids? how do you handle guilds who have completed a raid several times? shouldn’t you divide the points by the number of members? aren’t there other things that we should factor into a guild’s strength like average level, complete sets of equipment? It’s like asking who is the better baseball player, Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds? There are so many factors, objective, subjective and somewhere in between, that the arguments can go on forever and be entertaining for almost that long. (The most recent definitive answer to that question can be found in Baseball Between the Numbers. It’s Babe Ruth, btw. Bonds ekes out wins on hitting and fielding, but Ruth’s pitching — which the guys at Baseball Prospectus convert into runs contributed, the only measure that counts — puts him over the top. That discussion is also a good overview of baseball statistics’ current state of evolved geekdom. The exercise of converting pitching — the quintessential run prevention activity — into runs contributed — the atomic unit of baseball stats is — nerdazzling.)

And these debates are already starting. The FAQ on the guild ranking site, called Wowjutsu, is a quick look at the major issues under discussion (the equivalent of on-base percentage explanations, at the beginning of a baseball stats book — it’s important, but there’s so much more). The issues that have bubbled up to the FAQ indicate a rich future for those so inclined: the scoring of multiple kills of a boss, how to handle guild alliances, dealing with guild defections. Dig into the notes and you’ll see updates about tweaks to the formulas.

This is yet another testament to how good a game WoW is. No matter how many hours you’ve played it, no matter how many times you’ve done every single thing there is to do in the game, there is a way to breathe new life into it. Over the last three years, I have grown bored of the game to the point where I have uninstalled it to reclaim disk space, only to hear about something that pulls me back in This time, for players, it’s the Bill Jamesian search for WoW truth.