Laughing Meme

It’s cheating to start a blog post with a quote from Winston Churchill. He was that good. – Fred Wilson

I’ll probably steal that line some day.

Like anyone who used to blog with frequency pre-2005, I’d like to post here more often — not just to fill up bits and bytes, but to write again. Remember when blogs were more casual and conversational? Before a post’s purpose was to grab search engine clicks or to promise “99 Answers to Your Problem That We’re Telling You You’re Having”. Yeah. I’d like to get back to that here. – Dan Cederholm

This is the idea I’ve been trying to place with again, really starting just this week, rejecting the consensus about how to blog that’s emerged over the last couple years, and holds up Digg-ability and Techcrunch-i-tude as good indicators. Dan, of course, said it better.

It’s probably an indicator of slipping into my dotage, but a new stray link and I’m happily back wandering through those early archives, even my own, having stumbled across a rather odd review of the rather minor Ruled Britannia, circa 2003 earlier this evening.

Power rises linearly with the number of processors, but as the square of the speed of a processor. – Greg Pfister

Which means the best hope for extending the battery life of your iPhone is grid computing.

One of the most interesting workshops at the NYC Anarchist Book Fair this year was Matt Hern’s talk “Against Tolerance”. And one of the most useful ideas I took away was an off hand comment on hope vs. optimism, which he attributed to Cornel West, who attributes it to Havel.

You have to draw a distinction between hope and optimism. Vaclav Havel put it well when he said “optimism” is the belief that things are going to turn out as you would like, as opposed to “hope,” which is when you are thoroughly convinced something is moral and right and just and therefore you fight regardless of the consequences. In that sense, I’m full of hope but in no way optimistic. – Cornel West

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. – Václav Havel

I’m finding it useful.

“[New York] is the company town for money” – Richard Lefrak

“If a fish market in the right Manhattan neighborhood today could get hold of “wild native oysters” and market then as such, because this is how New York operates, it would probably be able to charge outstanding prices and have New York Times readers, after the article on wild oysters came out, gladly paying the price. [...] And for all that, they would taste like cultivated ones.” – Mark Kurlansky, The Big Oyster

“…it should take energy and thought to push issues upstream due to the associated costs of having to deal with them once they are propagated… when you optimise something you always do so at the expense of something else.” – Bill de hOra

“Social technologies that make things more efficient reduce the cost of action. Yet, that cost is often an important signal. We want communication to cost something because that cost signals that we value the other person, that we value them enough to spare our time and attention. Cost does not have to be about money. … Spending time with someone is a valuable signal that you care.” – Danah Boyd

Photo by bowbrick