cheesebikini?

John Brockman at edge.org asked many of the world’s smartest and most interesting scientists, technologists, artists and authors to draw up potential “laws” or rules of nature that occured to them as a result of their work. So far 160 of these people have submitted nuggets of wisdom from their respective fields, and together their contributions form one of the most entertaining and inspiring documents I’ve read in months. Here are a few of my favorite submissions:

Tor N¯rretranders’ Law of Symmetrical Relief: If you find that most other people, upon closer inspection, seem to be somewhat comical or ludicrous, it is highly probable that most other people find that you are in fact comical or ludicrous. So you don’t have to hide it, they already know.

Tor N¯rretranders’ Law of Understanding Novelty: The difficulty in understanding new ideas originating from science or art is not intellectual, but emotional; good ideas are simple and clear, but if they are truly new, they will be hard to swallow. It is not difficult to understand that the Earth is not at the center of the Universe, but it is hard to believe it. Science is simple, simply strange.

Lee Smolin’s Second Law: In every period and every community there is something that everybody believes, but cannot justify. If you want to understand anything, you have to start by ignoring what everyone believes, and thinking for yourself.

Steven Kosslyn’s Second Law: The individual and the group are not as separate as they appear to be. A part of each mind spills over into the minds of other people, who help us think and regulate our emotions.
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[ UPDATE 12-2-03: Diebold backed down and withdrew its legal threats against people who published the memos. ]

I’ve jumped on Berkeley’s latest truth-and-democracy bandwagon. Election machine manufacturer Diebold wants to steal a page from the Church of Scientology playbook: they’re bullying people who speak out against them, trying to silence criticism via threats of frivolous yet expensive lawsuits. Students and indy-media Web sites that criticize the firm have been slapped with cease-and-desist orders from Diebold lawyers.

Now people are slapping back. We’ve turned this into a game of whack-a-mole — if Diebold shuts us down, others will pop up to host this information in our place.

Join the good fight; download a copy of the memos that Diebold doesn’t want you to see:

Thanks to Joe Hall for pointing out the latest New Yorker cover illustration.

It spotlights the dying megacorporate music cartel’s absurd policy of bullying hundreds of its youngest and most important customers through lawsuits.

Here’s a detail from Mermaid Wave, a new revelation from my old high school friend David Bollt.

Please enjoy a photo (71K) of the full painting. You’ll find more of Bollt’s best at davidbollt.com, including the dark and compelling American Spirit series.

I love a filet mignon or a backyard cheeseburger. But the more I learn about the huge corporations behind today’s American beef, the guiltier I feel about financing them.

Consider Cool to be Real, a Web site funded by the big American cattlemen’s lobby and designed to persuade little girls to spend more time stuffing their faces with beef.

The site poses as a health, fitness and nutrition resource. It encourages partaking in “Nutrition-To-Go,” which means gulping down foods like chili and cornbread, and barbeque beef sandwiches. “Smart Snackin’ recipes” include “Beef Taco and Cheese Pockets,” “Beef on Bamboo,” and “Pizza Pie with Mashed Potatoes.”

More choice cuts from the site:

“‘Real Girls’ are busy and need lots of energy. You can get that extra energy and build muscle – which helps your metabolism – by eating regularly, at least every three to four hours. Be sure to get both protein and carbs in every meal. Enjoy a beef wrap for lunch or spaghetti and meatballs for dinner.”

“As energy requirements increase, so should protein intake. Chow down!“

I don’t want to pay these dirtbags another cent of my money. But how can I find American beef that’s not affiliated with this site? Won’t I have to give up cheeseburgers, or order my beef from New Zealand? Not for long. I hope.

Imagine: when networked wireless devices with cameras are cheap and widely used, I’ll be able to take a quick snapshot of the label on the meat that I’m considering purchasing, right there in the supermarket. Server-side software can scan the UPC code and match it to records in a database of food producers, distributors and retailers.

The database, maintained by journalists or concerned citizens, can spit back the information that I want — in this case, whether the people who brought me this package of meat helped to finance “Cool to be Real.” And whether they irradiate their meat. And whether they shoot up their animals with dangerous drugs and hormones.

At my PC, I can specify which criteria concern me. At the supermarket, I can scan a product with my device and then see a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, based on what matters to me.

Already we have technology that can do all of this. To make it happen we just need enough interested people to build it out, enough concerned consumers to read up on these corporations and update the database with the facts about what goes on behind the scenes, behind the labels on the food that we eat.

In the meantime, I’ll hold off on that cheeseburger.

(Disclaimer: I didn’t come up with the vision of consumers in stores scanning UPC codes on the fly. Versions of this idea have been making the rounds for years. I’m not sure who first wrote about this idea, but it might have been Howard Rheingold in his blog or in his book Smart Mobs. )

Baby photo courtesy of Adbusters.org.

Mein Gott, has it really been more than five weeks since my last entry?

It’s been a crazy, hectic, life-altering month. The top headlines:

The grad school decision: My quest for a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Master’s degree continues. I was accepted by four great Information Management & Systems schools: Berkeley, The University of Michigan, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and The University of Washington. For reasons I won’t go into, this was an unbelievably difficult decision, but after talking to and exchanging e-mails with more than 25 professors, students, and people in the industry, and after spending countless hours reading related Web sites, papers, etc., I chose Berkeley. I’m glad the agonizing decision’s over and I can’t wait to get started in the Fall.

CHI 2003: I gathered a lot of this knowledge during the CHI 2003 conference, which was held in my hometown of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida (!). How strange it was to see all these brilliant people discussing HCI less than five miles from where I was born and raised, in a region where you normally never meet anyone remotely interested in product development or software development, much less in HCI. I was just a bit overwhelmed while trying to learn as much as I could about the schools I was considering, working as a student volunteer, showing people around town, taking in presentations, tutorials and demos, seeking out my heroes in the field, and just finding my way around my first academic conference. It was an exhilarating experience and a lot of fun.

The new gig: Last month I started my new full-time job at Stanford University’s Department of Dermatology. Among other duties, I’ll help to manage the input, cataloguing, storage, and retrieval the thousands of digital images that the department creates every month, as well as the associated medical records. It’s great fun so far; I’m the only computer person in the department, but the doctors and staff are super-smart and they seem much more open to change and to new technology than the users I worked with during two other medical gigs. I hope to pool efforts with people elsewhere on campus working on cool medical informatics projects like the Stanford MediaServer but there’s not much time until the Fall semester begins and I leave Stanford to start classes at Berkeley. I wish I had started this job a year ago…

Life should be a tad saner now, but now much. Among other things, I have to begin a Java class and possibly a data structures and algorithms class in preparation for Berkeley. These are busy days. But I’m lovin’ it all.

Last night a drunken Fez-wearing turtle came to me in a dream and said:

“You won’t know Jack about Experience Design until you visit Attaboy at his Yumfactory.”

Strange dream, no?

Attaboy art is featured at a free show that will take place March 15 though the end of the month at Culture Cache gallery, 1800 Bryant Street, San Francisco. New Yorkers can check it out in April at CBGB’s 313 Gallery.

Had I read the following essay in middle school, my teen years would have been much less of an ordeal. If you know a kid or a teacher or a parent, send them this: Why Nerds Are Unpopular by Paul Graham. Thanks to Dav for the tip.

Here are beautiful, inspiring, big-picture thoughts about the value of science, from the father of nanotechnology, Nobel laureate physicist Richard P. Feynman:
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Even if you don’t spend a minute on any other Creative Commons agitprop, please check out this great Flash movie, Get Creative (7 minutes). It explains in very practical terms the importance of the Creative Commons concept, and how it provides musicians and artists and audiences freedom to innovate.

(I saw this screened at the Creative Commons launch party and couldn’t find it online. Thanks to Dav for the URL.)