The Goldfish Chronicles

 I’ve an mp3 playlist of songs from the last 50 years playing. It’s one I put together for an ‘British Happy Hour’ at work but then was too ill to attend (that flu the other year that was going to destroy the world). It reminds me somewhat of days in my childhood listening to my parents music in the living room while I also did something else. Reading the newspaper, a book, cards with my sister etc. It’s something I try to recreate with my kids when I can, but not often enough.

Summary: Music is a nice background to another task.

Switch to the turn of the millennium. The background is now TV. Especially so when visiting my in-laws, they’re addicted to a TV that no one is looking at, but also fairly often with my own family. TV has, to some extent, muscled in on that background music, yet it demands more attention. Not hugely terrible.

Summary: Video replaced Radio. We stopped multi-tasking and started context-switching. We believed we were were single threaded.

I’m a fan of the television. Happy to watch it, occasionally there’s something on that fits my tastes and I can enjoy it. What I dislike are breaks in the TV. A break of a week I can somewhat handle - it has a charm to it, but the brainwash attempting commercial breaks are an antithesis to why you sit down to watch said TV. You learn to flit back and forth between contexts, always struggling to settle in to your intended context before the next context switch comes.

Summary: Adverts destroy attention. We replaced multi-tasking with context-switch thrashing.

“The Shallows” is a popular book at the moment pointing to the Internet as a changer of our brains - destroying deep thinking. It’s one I need to read - Amazon Prime will be delivering it :). The title is unfortunate, the Internet is a wide open concept and no more describes reading a live Twitter stream than it does the complete works of Dickens online. “Popular Internet Culture” is probably a better phrase, and much like commercials it’s probably accurate. Odd to point to the net when TV has had 60 years of changing people’s brains. Still - it has a good balance of reviews and sounds like a rewarding read.

Summary: Our brains are always adapting themselves to fit the communication model of the current culture.

In 1999 Douglas Adams wrote How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet. It’s a great read and it, oddly for the computing world, does not seem dated. One of the points he makes is that the Internet is bringing us back to interactivity instead of one way communication from an elite to a minority - it’s made us skeptical again. Our brains are highly evolved social politics engines, they’ve been brainwashed for decades are now are starting to get back to what they’re good at. Following twitter streams, facebook, flitting from subject to subject.

Summary: Deep thinking is unnatural.

Yet we are more than fallen apes (or less ). Civilization is our solution to the slow speed of evolution. It is man-made evolution. A good quick fix, though we all know that it’s only a few meals away from being lost. Someday someone is going to get happy with the idea of trying to bake their civilization into their evolved being (genes), but it’s not today. Thinking is a core part of that man-made evolution, it’s one of the accelerants we apply to the long slow seconds.

Summary: We need to think.

I like the notion that at heart we are a contradiction of evolution and civilization. A series of last minute fixes applied to millions of years of development. We’re forever accelerating the speed at which we apply those patches, and the length of time in which they will last without careful maintenance decreases.

I also like the notion of background radio vs commercials. True multitasking vs context switch thrashing. I’ve been watching Firefly recently while also playing a football management game. Both require attention, but it seems to flow nicely as a gentle oscillation of context switching, with a backup of multi-tasking from my ears. Throw in coding or IM and it becomes thrashing.

As someone who feels he’s been paid for a decade for his context switching skills, I often feel on the defensive nowadays against the popular notion of multitasking as context switch thrashing. This notion of multitasking vs single context switching vs oscillating context switching vs context switch thrashing makes me happier - there are other strategies between single-thread deep thinking and the thrashing of our wetware as it bounces back and forth between streams of input.

Sounds like there’s lots being written in England about our keeper issues. It’s all poppycock. Ghana’s Richard Kingson was superb, a great World Cup and he and Ghana deserved their good run.

Kingson is the Wigan Athletic reserve goalkeeper. Behind Chris Kirkland, who is about 5th in the queue for the England shirt. It’s not what you’ve got in terms of players, but what you do with them and how much they believe.

Another English World Cup over. For the entire tournament I ‘believed it was possible’ for a maximum of 8 minutes. I think that was shared with the team on the pitch too, we always seemed to lack a belief that we would actually do well, bar the minutes after Upson’s surprise goal.

It was an odd performance individual wise. Our keeper didn’t look that bad, James was fired up and while I’d have hoped he could have saved one of the goals, he only ever had a 25% chance on each one. Our fullbacks played well, Cole got stuck in well and Johnson looked good going forwards and backwards. After that though, it gets worse.

Our centre didn’t hold, from Terry and Upson (Terry made Upson look worse than Upson deserved), to Barry and Lampard where Barry’s work rate and Lampard’s occasional moment of scoring hope weren’t enough to make up for a lack of control of the game, and on to Rooney and Defoe up front. I always feel that we play Rooney too far up front, having him deeper to pick up balls with a Defoe or someone ahead seems like a good direction for Rooney as time goes by. It’s hard to knock the strikers though, Gerard was notably not natural on the left (though I’m a huge fan and happy to see him as captain), and Milner didn’t seem to link up well, though I prefer him to SWP by a mile.

Best player of the tounament? It’s a stretch to choose someone isn’t it James, Cole, Gerard, Johnson. Pick one, they’re the only ones left standing imo.

Best new name? Capello. As with any new name he showed that he’s got what it takes to be a star member of the team, but he isn’t quite there yet. If we can afford it I’m hoping he’s here for the next 12 years and presides over a rebuilt England from youth where it’s fine to pick players with form instead of the big names (as let’s face it, the big clubs won’t have English players anymore). Let’s accept 2014 as a learning experience and focus on a good performance in 2018, whether it be in the USA or Russia. Hopefully our 2nd round appearance is enough to keep us in the seeds in 2014, but I doubt it.

Bit worrying that my not related to work gmail account just gave me an ad of:

“Ready to Leave Amazon?”

Seems like the identity vision of the future is now here; my email provider is able to deduce where I work and sell space on my inbox to targetted headhunters. Maybe they cross-referenced linkedin in,it’s not as if I have a lot of emails that talk about the dayjob.

Just discovered the http://nemo.sonarsource.org/ CI system dashboard. It rocks - definitely check this out.

I remain a big fan of the notion of animated maps as a teaching aide to history. Here’s a nice one of North America post Columbus:

Non-Native-American-Nations-Territorial-Claims-over-NAFTA-countries-1750-2008.gif

An old blog by now, but I’m slow.

I like reading this: http://geekfeminism.org/2009/11/29/questioning-the-merit-of-meritocracy/ - being in the male, white, English as first language, degree holding camp, it’s still valuable. We can be self-effacing too. It was very noticeable to me that I had to change my style of doing things once I was doing computing as a job, and once I got more involved at Apache. Of the two I’ve not found Open Source to require more pushiness, but I have found it easier to be pushy there (online decouples things). That led to a bit of burn out online, while in the dayjob I have to remind myself in things like self performance reviews to think about selling myself instead of always critiquing myself.

So agreed - we don’t have meritocracies. We aim for meritocracies, but all too often they become shoutocracies.

Two licenses that attempt to formalize putting something in the ‘public domain’:

• The Unlicense
• CC0 (surprisingly hard license to find the url for)

Welcome to the next frontier of license proliferation.

The comments to this make for very interesting reading:

Ugandan king ‘not backing down’

First instinct: Yikes, things getting scary in Uganda.
Second instinct: Of course it’s the Internet, so untrusted sources are taken with a pinch of salt.
Third instinct: Yet the crowd can be trusted to self-manage; ie) the comments have a common message to them rather than a typical zealot/flamewar.
Fourth instinct: But there is an editor, so a series of conflicting messages can be massaged into a common message.

So it comes down to whether I trust the BBC to edit. I largely trust the BBC (more than others anyway) to report without bias. Why do I find myself not immediately applying that to the editing? Odd.

Summary: Yikes, looks like things are getting scary in Uganda.

Noticed Ben Hyde linking to Wordle.

Stupid dumb licensing statement of the day from the Wordle site:

May I make money off of Wordle images?

Yes. The images created by the Wordle application are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license

A tool. That I put input in to. Whose owner claims ownership of the output of the tool by determining the licensing. That’s evil.
Of course he does state before that:

May I use my Wordles for…

Yes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use in any way you choose. (snip…)

So they’re mine to use in any way I choose… but he defines the license. Of course… it sounds like what I have to do is provide attribution to myself (obviously not the intent… but if I own it and have to use that license…hmm).

I can only assume it’s the font. Which is an interesting question that I was pondering idly the other day; font licensing. If I print up a lorum ipsem etc in a particular font, do I own that piece of paper? Presumably it’s messy.

Effectively this is the Afferro permissive (aka badgeware) license that I pondered on a year back. Rather than existing properly, it’s surfacing in dubious application of existing licensing.