designcult

The feeds! The feeds!

I mentioned in Decluttering my digital inboxes that I'd been pruning my feed reader. The ones I removed were either defunct, not as interesting as they used to be, or interesting but wrongly paced (IO9 for instance is a great way to keep up on the trashy side of science-fiction media --- if you can cope with 20 posts a day. I can't.)

Poking through the list of blogs I read regularly did let me figure out which I really like, at least by one measure -- the ones where I pinned hundreds of articles to read for later in 2008. Usually these have a common mood rather than a narrow subject, and a pretty eclectic range of links.

My (Roughly) Top 5 Blogs

1. Coilhouse "A love letter to alternative culture" -- Coilhouse is for people who miss Mondo 2000 and think that goth is not quite dead yet. What's startling about Coilhouse is how easily it could be crappy and how not-crappy they mostly manage to be. The trick seems to be to actually take things seriously and go light on the snark. I approve.
2. Kottke - This is sort of like saying you like The Beatles. But I do like the Beatles! Kottke has had the best links for years.
3. Warren Ellis - Warren Ellis writes comic books and is a filthy, filthy man. Read with caution, and don't look at any link he prefaces with "What is best in life?" unless you're already a hardened BME reader. (And if you don't know what I'm taling about, you really don't want to click on those links).
4. Tor- relatively new effort by a science-fiction publisher to correct online for the slowly-dying offline science-fiction magazine market.
5. Waxy - If Kottke is The Beatles, Waxy is The Rolling Stones.

And to go with that, I sampling of new blogs for 2009 -- we'll see which ones I'm still reading in 2010.

New blogs for 2009

1. Grognardia - Talks about roleplaying games (the paper pencil and dice kind) within the context of reviving "classic" RPG gaming, like early versions of D&D. Strangely compelling, assuming you are still or ever have played roleplaying games.
2. Homegrown Evolution - Authors of The Urban Homestead, this blog is (mostly) about how to live more sustainably in an urban environment. There is much discussion of chickens.
3. Brazen Careerist - Blogs about life & business are usually dull and almost always say safe things that sound like things you should say. Penelope Trunk is not dull and not safe.
4. AASCII - Jason Scott runs Textfiles.com (recording the history of BBSs) and has interesting things to say about computer history, social media online, and the preservation thereof.
5. SFist - Local San Francisco news and links. This is much a sign of my discontent with the San Francisco Chronicle as anything else.

Asimov, Robots, and War

First, this post is total Adam Nash bait.

Today's Fresh Air had on P. W. Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. It's a pretty discussion on a number of fronts, including technical, ethical, policy, and even interface design issues. (Apparently, for example, the military based designs for some of their controllers on X-Box controllers, reasoning both that the video game manufacturers had done a bunch of ergonomics research for them, and that they could save on training costs since the typical military recruit would come "pre-trained" on such controllers.)

But my ears really perked up when they started discussing the Three Laws of Robotics. For the rusty, that would be Asimov's laws of robotic behaviour, first included in his 1942 story Runaround:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Singer and Terry Gross talked about how quickly those laws break down when applied to warfare -- since we already have semi-autonomous machines capable of taking lethal action out there, for example. I'm not sure Asimov ever tried to apply, or meant to apply, those laws to war -- probably time for some rereading on my part. They did mention one slightly more sinister model: Ed 209.

That scene seems slightly less funny now that a South African military robot killed 9 people and wounded 14 because of a software glitch. That sort of thing starts making me think more of Skynet or, if you prefer less dorky time travel with your sinister future robots, Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series, in which self-replicating machines attempt to exterminate all life in the universe.

I'm definitely going to pick up Singer's book, but also revisit Manuel De Landa's War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, written in 1991 and using early examples of the usage of robotics technology in the Gulf War (as well as much earlier examples, going back to the Renaissance.)

Decluttering my digital inboxes

I'm a loose Inbox = 0 adherent. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can read plenty about it here.)

As an example, my personal email inbox is currently at 3, and my work email inbox is at 10. This is pretty damn good for me, and I've spent a chunk of 2009 so far getting to this happy place. Of course, those aren't my only inboxes! There's the physical mail inbox, of course, but recently my attention has been forced to include inboxes from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Livejournal, and Delicious. The inconsistency of how they handle messaging -- and how I handle messaging from each source, which is in turn based on a mishmash of factors from quirks of their UI to the social nuances of who I'm connected to on each platform -- means that I haven't been able to route all of those usefully into one box, so lo, there are many boxes. All of those currently set to 0, as part of the same New Year's ... I can't quite say resolutions, because I haven't fully articulated them yet, but New Year's impulses. I'm also not counting on staying in this happy place, because life happens and you can't spend all your time making things unbold.

(On the other hand, I'm nowhere near as bold as Danah Boyd on the inbox front. I am full of admiration for her approach, however.)

And then there's my feed reader. I'm a happy Bloglines user, and I'm reasonably content with it -- the recentish redesign removed some of the clunkiness, and at the time I made my fateful RSS Reader decision (do you know where you were when you decided on a RSS reader?) it was a pleasure to use a non-Google product because it was demonstrably better than the Google product. I understand that the tables may now have been turned, but I don't want to know about it. I'm a feed addict, and the thing had become a source of stress -- too many feeds unread for too long, all that boldness taunting me with missed content. So, I'm in the middle of a huge revamp. The first step was ditching many feeds that I don't like, don't read often enough, or post too frequently. The second was adding a few -- sparingly -- that I want to follow in the new year. The third, and longest, is taking all of the pinned articles (and I had 1000+ of those) and either reading them, deleting them, or tagging them in Delicious. (I'm rapidly approaching the crazy person tier of Delicious users.)

This all may sound a little obsessive. Actually, it is a little obsessive. But if I clear the decks enough, it will remove some nagging sources of stress in my life while allowing me to keep up with what I want to keep up with, rather than running away from it all entirely (as tempting as that sometimes is). It's the digital equivalent of taking those 300 New Yorkers you have stacked up on your coffee table and packing them off to recycling, only you actually get to keep the good articles.

Next: more exciting obessiveness with feeds and emails!

Lettuce and 2009

I'm going to try something a little different in 2009, now that this blog has been left fallow for a while. Now that the soil has had a little time to replenish itself and the pests have died down a bit, we can start again ... and maybe not torture that metaphor any more than strictly necessary.

There's lettuce in my light well. Or, at least, there are lettuce seeds in my light well, nestled in about 5 gallons of organic potting soil from the Sloat Garden Center. (The one actually on Sloat.) The soil is in a self-watering container made from 5-gallon buckets, made using the instructions from The Urban Homestead (rather than the really nice video I just linked to because I only just found it). My daughter was fascinated by this process, and not just the dangerous bits with the saw and drill.

The hope is to start growing a little of our own food, even though we live in a tiny apartment near the beach. Despite my urges to the contrary, I'm trying to start small, and build up slowly to more ambitious tasks. Tasks that might involve worm poop, or chickens.

We'll see if this is the start of something, whether the lettuces actually sprout, whether this is a late-blooming manifestation of my British gardening fiend heritage, and whether lettuces alone will feed a family when the zombies come. Probably not, on that last one. Better get some more buckets.