Sociological, psychological notes – Page 32 – Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord

Everyone’s using Layars

Just started re-reading the 1991 (..!) Gelernter classic Mirror Worlds. Nomen est omen, author-itywise.
Then it struck me: Mobiles weren’t invented back then; can you imagine ..?? And Home Improvement was the hit of the year. Some Tim Berners-Lee guy first proposed HTML. Even PCs version 1.0 were still not ubiquitous.
And then this Gelernter published this masterpiece about virtual worlds. Not some random tech prediction, but insightful, visionary stuff.

But the reason I give you this, is: In 2009, Layar started. Where has that gone ..!?

When you know what I’m talking about, you see the link with the above. And might wonder as well. Yeah, one can DuckDuckGo them, but that’s not the point, which is: Where’s the exponential unicorn disruptor daily jubilant news about them, whilst they have grown in prominence ever since ’90 ..? Why not ..?

Oh well, I’ll leave you with:

[Once, friggin’ SotA at Noto]

Books, disrupted ..?

Remember when I posted about the Books business doing quite well, despite having been called to the grave ..? (As here)
Now, this arrived: Audiobooks have begun to outsell print.

Oh.

Which is a very disinterested Oh. Since, how would you envisage wandering through the pages, your eye being caught by some particular peculiar words ..? How about paging back to a clue you remember to be at about the fifth line top left towards the end of the first chapter?
Yes, reading may change.
Or not. People might still be buying books as they did before. And audio books may be a different thing. Like calling a car engine a liquid fossil fuel using explosion version of a steam engine. But why would you? Why not just think up a completely new category of … ‘narrative audio’ ..?

Then, loosening and losing the idea of a linear text, whole new ways of narrative narration might be possible. Like, this, in not Dutch but English or whatever language, to be ‘read’ in any way/order conceivable … ah, the need for guidance springing up. And the need, probably, for perfectly life-like auto-readers-out-loud not have to have actual humans doing that once and for all.

Well, that’s OK. Who’ll make this all happen? And:

[Books *not* going this way… e‘Burg]

Ringtones on deaf ears

[Abridged repost; relevant again]
There seems to have been an explosion of (news over) ~mojis lately. Like, the past half year has seen a proliferation of subsets and niceties that, as a phenomenon, spell the end of interest in messaging.

As the phenomenon (not this which is great in any absolute measure) is so very much the same as we saw with ringtones…
Arrrg! Yes indeed they spelled the end of the introductory phase of mobiles. The more it became a fad to have some peculiar ‘tone, the more one exposed oneself as a somewhat (?) pathetic Laggard, not quite knowing yet how to have and treat a phone as perfectly normal tool without having to brag how great one was for having one in the first place.

Can you see the same with messaging? If not, you may be the one that actually paid for the nicest ringtone you disabled in shame for not getting any but negative recognition after a couple of days again.

So, … next up in this series: How “Like us on Facebook” went the same way in the 2^nd half of 2015, latest… And:

[Siegfried& not quite]

We need another Blue (h)It

No, no IT; It. Dean Kamen style. Nor the It, Amsterdam style 😐
Now that the BttF hoverboard didn’t pan out as planned (qua planning, 21 October 2015) and first clumsy (but PoC?) prototypes having only recently surfaced (huh) and the halfway product of self-balancing two-wheel hoverboards are quite fancy but far from mainstream yet,
We do need something of the It hype and fuzz that surrounded the development / grand splash intro of the original Segway. Maybe, probably, in a completely different direction but something similar possibly pervasive.
And have all the excitement of the buzz; and maybe this time around, actual watershed roll-out; and as a far-fetched wish, something that may e.g., help the environment big time. The latter, may be the ideal for the world.

Oh, and now that we’re at it (sic); I did notice that in bygone days (like, a couple of years ago) before Disruption and its #fail aspects (Netflix yes, Uber no), all the talk was about Blue Ocean strategies. By incumbents. Not being jobless (re)growth. Et cetera. Is there a good comparison on all the aspects one can list for the one, for the other, and in comparison ..? Could both approaches be married or not, and what do we learn from that fact (or not)?

To leave you with:
DSCN8589
[Where the colourful life is; Zuid-As (contradictio)]

Software Defined Everything, not your monkey’s business

Lately, we have been reading a lot about Software Defined Everything (haven’t you …?), in particular sw-def networking. As the flexible way to the future.
Now, it turns out that humans may have had an edge over monkeys (and apes) by, for quite some time already, having had just that bit more software-defined Brain work than the competition. Though research is out also (since about half a year+) that apes using tools, have entered the Stone Age with that, for some 4300 years at least already. Now I will not refer here to the mix-up that your boss is, in this all.

But I will note that the Software Defined Everything, in similar vein is where the Singularity starts to take over, as the System evolves away from the human brain limitation to adapt to its environment. Yes, that’s a bit of thought stretch but you’ll manage. Still…

[At least the apes among you might figure out the Three-Body Problem at the table …; Nicolaci, Noto]

Porter’s half “value” chain

The problem: Half an <undefined> chain isn’t much good.
Because … There’s no money anywhere in the ‘Value Chain’ oft portrayed. As it is in Starreveld’s model. [You’re out of luck, in Dutch only and even then, no pics .. oh, there‘s one]

Which points to an even bigger error: No clear(ly communicated) def of Value in the first place. Allsorts went off and did a lot of heavy lifting (they wished! The lightweight airheads the majority was!), but achieved … not much; little; nothing worth their salts.

Obviously. And also, obviously very much required, these latter days, that a proper all-inclusive and operable definition of Value still is created, leaving mere ‘money’ in the dust similar to the distance between ‘data points’ and ‘information’. But let’s start with completion of the core model not keep it in half.

Oh well…:

[Capture that in moahnay…; at what translates to Eddie’s ‘hood]

The Season of Innovation

Anyone has stats on when, during the year, most actual innovations are dreamt up, or brought to light ..?

Just wondered, pondered, looking outside into a greyish dawn, and thought: Where are this year’s Innovations that make late fall / winter time more amicable ..?
Just because seasons are only a quarter of the year ;-| doesn’t sound like a good explanation; whereas any year, or innovation’s adoption wave, is a one-time thing only, seasons tend to re-appear quite regularly over and over again through the ages. So any real innovation might stick even better. [Will now halt this silly argument.]
Then again, can we pinpoint the exact moment an innovation is conceived, even when delivery may take some time (possibly, spanning a year) ..? Can we spot seasonal patterns ..? One could imagine that Nature’s recurrence and bloom, impacts the mind in similar ways. *waves.

So, if any of you Big Data lovers out there would have a nice graph, I’d welcome it. Plus:
DSCN4507
[Yes, that’s Spring, in Antwerp. Other corners are, in no particular order, Summer, Fall, and Winter]

Grendel’s mother

This indeed a repost. As matters in global politics made this material utmost relevant again, a couple of weeks ago. Has the news since addressed the below already, or will we learn from history that we don’t learn from history ..?

When the short summary doesn’t do justice to the core of the problem… Where the core is both a misreading of the depth and a misreading of its intentions.
As this here few little paragraphs have.
There’s no light way of putting this: Go read the … thing in its entirety and then, do understand it in all of its cultural superiority to today’s news accounts.

Yes, for the simplest of minds it may read like just a story. Hero, this, that, done. But to the slightest of more careful reader, it is overwhelmingly clear: The book contains so much profundity on the core of politics, societies, and clashes of war. Then you see that it’s not about slaying Grendel and some afterthought. It is about slaying the symptom, the fed, and only then can you get to fighting the real cause that (literally) both birthed and feeds the symptoms, the Mother of Evil. Pointing, too, at the continuity through generations of that concept.

Oh and did it mention anything about brothers or (maybe even worse ..?) sisters ..? Opening up all sorts of options for prolongation through the ages of this tension between what one (sic) could regard as Good and another (sic) as Evil? Mother doesn’t see Evil, she sees her pride, her son displaying the most beautiful (s)he can imagine. Yo don’t even know which side you’re on! Etc.

Yes indeed. It is simply not simple. It is The World As We Know It, and Man cannot change much about it…

For the latter, see how Western ‘powers’ led by the one, try to meekly and halfheartedly subdue Grendel in the Middle East; just enough to safeguard their own interests. Where they don’t see the full depth of mother’s lair, nor her issues. For those less ‘sues’, read this and see the eternity of the problem.

For now, this:

[A museum. Hence, still very relevant; Edinburg.[Earth isn’t flat, you know…]] ]]]] ]

Repeat mode: The definitive Top 2000 of 2015

Just to be sure you’re not led off the Right(eous) path by all those DJs out there playing songs from or candidate for some “Top 2000”, herewith a repost of the real deal.

Which of course isn’t; it’s the Top 2266 for one thing and Definitive is slightly understating it.
And yes, it is downloadable in plain Excel, for your own tinker and play, in this file; checked and clean (no subversive content).
Next, a few little notes (repeated from last year):

“That’s odd! The usual numbers 1 to 50 aren’t where they’re ‘supposed’ to be by common standards!” Correct. Because I‘m ‘Rekt. The list is mine; why put the Mehhh songs high up there? They’re in there somewhere, but its my list, my preferences..! yes I do like some almost-forgotten songs better, sometimes much, much better, than the expired old hands.
Especially.. see the notes, when the clip (much) enhances the song(s). Wouldn’t that mean the song in itself isn’t fully complete ..? No, it means in (since) the age of video, songs with clips (‘integrated’) can much surpass mere songs by themselves, for a cubed sensory experience.
There’s more than 2000 yes. Because, already after the first 500 or so, determining the relative rankings becomes awkward. Hence, the cut-off would be random …! (why not 2048, that would make more sense in this digital (i.e., binary) age).
If you would still have some (preferably wacky) songs you miss, please do comment them to me. I’ll see whether I’d want to include them still, or not. Hey, it’s my list so I decide, geddid?
The actual end result order is far from definitive (sic). It depends heavily on one’s momentary temper and the memories that spring to mind like Proustian madeleines. And on one’s ability to hear quality. Such is life.
When dabbling with the Excel file yourself, feel free to play around with the ranking mechanism. What worked for me, was to first split the songs into bins of about 250 size (designate some song to be in the first bin that will end up being ranks 1-250, another song to bin 5, which is around the 1000-1250 mark, etc.), then sizing down bin 1 etc. to 8 smaller bins. Then, numbers 1-50 get a personal treatment one by one to their end rank, the rest gets (got) a random allocation within their bracket. After this, sort and re-apply number 1-whatever. Through this, actual intermediate bin sizes aren’t too important.

Then, as a long, very long list. With a Moar tag otherwise it would be ridiculous… [i.e., for the complete list in the post, follow the link:]

Continue reading “Repeat mode: The definitive Top 2000 of 2015”

The Good Bad and Bureaucrats

Musing with the distinction between Bad and Evil (as here), and how Anger of the right kind (good to be bad b/c without/opposing evil intent) would be neither but the diametrical opposite of the former two’s effects in bureaucracy.

Noting that praxis makes the things get mixed up, as in:

[Supreme distort; DC]