Idea Repository: Camera With a Big Honking-Ass Sensor

So I've decided to start jotting down my dumb ideas that I'll never carry out but I think are good. If it sparks another idea in a person, great. If it sparks an idea on a project i'm working on later, great. I just figured, if i have these ideas, might as well not loose them.

Idea Repository #1: Camera With a Big Honking-Ass Sensor

Problem:
Now I don't know a whole lot about cameras, just enough to know that the bigger the sensor, the better the camera. The catch though is that if you want a bigger sensor, you have a buy a big camera‚—SLR type—and blow $800. I don't want that. In fact, I don't want all that other stuff that comes with any size digital cameras: extreme zoon, movie mode, in phone cropping, white levels, color alteration, blah blah blah. I just want a compact camera that takes amazing pictures. Point and shoot. Yet piont and shoot take crap pictures 'cause they have small sensors. Arg.

Idea:
Make a point and shoot compact camera with a big honking-ass sensor. That's it. Nothing else. Maybe a short 2x zoom. But that's it. Most people just want awesome pictures. They don't want to fiddle with all the settings. I can't be the first person to think of this. There must be someone who has tried this and confronted technological limitations. It's just too obvious.

More Energy in Grass than the Sun

Of all the sustainable things in the universe, from a planet to a star, from a daisy to an automobile, from a brain to an eye, the thing that is able to conduct the highest density of power-the most energy flowing through a gram of matter each second-lies at the core of your laptop. How can this be? The power density of a star is huge compared to the mild power drifting through a nebulous gas cloud in space. But remarkably, the power density of a sun pales in comparison to the intense flow of energy and activity present in grass. As intense as the surface of the sun is, its mass is enormous and its lifetime is 10 billion years, so as a whole system, the amount of energy flowing through it per gram per second is less than that in a sun- flower soaking up that sun's energy.

-Kevin Kelly

Tiny Ripples

“Each time a person stands up for an idea, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples builds a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

Robert F Kennedy

Honey from the Rock

This is the setting out.
The leaving of everything behind.
Leaving the social milieu. The preconceptions. The definitions. The language.
The narrowed field of vision. The expectations.
No longer expecting relationships, memories, words, or letters to mean what
they used to mean. To be, in a word: Open.

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, Excerpted from Honey From The Rock

Outgrowth of commons-based peer production

Several unexpected but foreseeable outgrowths of commons-based peer production have been:

1. Customization/Specialization. With free and open source software small groups have the capability to customize a large project according to specific needs and wants.
2. Immortality. Once code is released under a copyleft free software license the genie cannot be put back into the bottle.
3. Cross-fertilization. Experts in a field can work on more than one project with no legal hassles.
4. Technology Revisions: A core technology gives rise to new implementations of existing projects.
5. Technology Clustering: Groups of products tend to cluster around a core set of technology and integrate with one another.

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Jonathan Franzen’s and George Orwell's Rules of Writing

George Orwell's rules for writing:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

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Jonathan Franzen’s 10 Rules of Writing:

1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
2. Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
3. Never use the word “then” as a conjunction– we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page.
4. Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
5. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
6. The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto biographical story than “The Metamorphosis”.
7. You see more sitting still than chasing after.
8. It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
10. You have to love before you can be relentless.

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Guardian: Interactive Map of MId East Rebellion

LInk to map

Stewart Brand proclaims 4 environmental 'heresies'

Flattr - Curious to see how this will pan out

Could this be the future of making a living doing what you love?

When you sign up for Flattr, you dedicate a flat fee per month to the site. As you're surfing the web, you can click "Flattr" buttons next to a blog post, song, or podcast to put your money where your "likes" are. At the end of each month, your flat fee is evenly divided amongst the creators you've chosen.

Since the Swedish company launched last August, communities of creators (podcasters, citizen journalists, open source 3d printer hackers) are increasingly adopting Flattr as a virtual tip jar. The site's still small--70,000 users. The amounts are small too--users pledge an average of 3 euros a month and click just a handful of times, with each click averaging half a Euro in value. But as cofounder Linus Olsson told Fast Company today after his SXSW panel, the cultural impact of this kind of crowdfunding is growing.

"Taz.de, a major German newspaper, has put up a leaderboard of the most Flattr'd stories. A couple of months ago the most valued story got five times more payments than the next most valued story, but it didn't have anywhere close to five times as many pageviews. What we're finding is that value and use are not necessarily correlated. We can now make statistics of value for the first time in history."

It's heartening to think of people's conscious decisions to reward content they find valuable as providing a counterweight to the tyranny of SEO. There's a poster-boy blogger in Germany who's making 2000 Euros a month from Flattr. That doesn't mean that crowdfunding is going to replace traditional media business models. One question at the panel was from a forlorn-sounding journalist for Time, who basically asked when Flattr is going to give him his job back. The answer: Not any time soon.

"That’s a problem with the established media," Olsson told Fast Company. "They think in old terms--fixed price for fixed content. Of course we want journalists to have a living through Flattr. But maybe you could say it's better to have ten people working one day a week doing what they like than one person doing it full time." That's a nice idea, of course, but people's children do tend to like to eat more than one day a week.

Still, if you take for granted, as Olsson does, that the model of "forcing" people to pay for content is "broken," then the discussion shifts to how money can be used in other ways--to build a relationship between creator and consumer, as an expression of support, as a gesture of goodwill or an investment in someone's future. "It's a logical progression, from creating, sharing, and spreading content to creating, sharing, and spreading money," he says. "Money's just another tool to help people do what you think is important."

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Governments have systematically overestimated access to information

With a tear in Clay Shirky's eye, the 500-strong SXSWi audience in downtown Austin broke into a spontaneous round of applause.

It was halfway through Shirky's keynote speech, with a photo of Egyptian Christians joining hands to protect praying Muslims in Tahrir Square, that his rallying cry for "more responsive governments" really moved his audience. "I always tear up when I talk about it [the photo]," the leading web thinker admitted.

It was the most poignant moment of SXSWi so far – and in a talk that his critics would find it difficult to file under "digital utopianism".

Shirky admitted to "getting it wrong" in previous writings about how social media can affect political change. Although it is "still early days" in understanding at what point social media can be said to have affected social change, it is now clear that "disciplined non-violence [which brought down Tunisia's Ben Ali] doesn't come from synchronised turnout".

"Governments have systematically overestimated access to information," Shirky said.

"They've also systematically underestimated access to each other. Access to conversations among amateurs is more politically inspiring than access to information. Governments are afraid of synhronised groups, not synchronised individuals.

"The history of print should make us sceptical of the theory that media is inherently political, or even that people are inherently political. Just because someone isn't talking about politics in their spare time doesn't mean they wont turn out in Tahrir Square when the serious business starts."

Referring to the image of Egyptian Christians and Muslims, Shirky said: "All politics is local. If we want our country to help the Middle East then it can't tolerate anti-Muslim sentiment here."

Asked about his hope for a more globalised, tolerant US, Shirky added: "My fear is that the US may be entering a period in which we retreat from world. I wish I was more optimistic than I am."

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The New Humanism

Over the past few decades, we have tended to define human capital in the narrow way, emphasizing I.Q., degrees, and professional skills. Those are all important, obviously, but this research illuminates a range of deeper talents, which span reason and emotion and make a hash of both categories:

Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.

Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.

Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.

Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.

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3 Tools for Futures Thinking & Foresight Development

Really great stuff from emergent by design. So good I had to quote it all.

1. Trend Analysis

In order to develop the capacity for imagining alternative futures and create design solutions accordingly, it is useful to be aware of the current driving forces and megatrends underway. The “STEEP” categories [Social, Technological, Environmental, Economic, Political] give us the mental framework for understanding the complex web of change around us, and can also be further broken down into subcategories for refinement. For example, “Social” could be viewed at the more granular levels of culture, organization, and personal.

Once a trend is identified, both its causes and impacts can be considered. For instance, a rise in life expectancy might be caused by rising living standards, better medical treatments, and healthier environments. The corresponding impacts of this trend may be that a longer portion of a person’s life is spent in retirement, and so there will be an increasing demand in goods and services for the elderly and perhaps a bigger financial strain on families to care for aging parents or grandparents. What types of environments should be designed in order to accommodate these changes?

Another example is the increasing amount of “leisure time” people are now facing. Technological automation has made human involvement in many processes unnecessary, and global economic recession has left many unemployed. If these trends continue, what types of structures must be designed in order to redirect the wasted productivity and surplus mental power that is currently sitting idle? When thinking about the world at this scale, the “big picture” pops out and we can begin to think about design in terms of strategic preparation for our future.

2. Visioning

Clarifying a vision is one of the most powerful mechanisms for engaging a team, organization or community and getting them excited to push forward into new territory. A successfully designed product or service should intentionally impact the thoughts and behaviors of society and culture, and serve as an example of the mindset and values of its creators. So, what does this future humanity look like? Creating that clear vision is a precursor to planning, and a key to creating the conditions to mobilize a group of collaborators around a common goal.

There is a nice guideline in the book Futuring that breaks down this process of “Preferred Futuring” into these eight tasks:

1. Review the organization’s common history to create a shared appreciation.
2. Identify what’s working and what’s not. Brainstorm and list “prouds” and “sorries.”
3. Identify underlying values and beliefs, and discuss which ones to keep and which to abandon.
4. Identify relevant events, developments, and trends that may have an impact on moving to a preferred future.
5. Create a preferred future vision that is clear, detailed, and commonly understood. All participants, or at least a critical mass, should feel a sense of investment or ownership in the vision.
6. Translate future visions into action goals.
7. Plan for action: Build in specific planned steps with accountabilities identified.
8. Create a structure for implementing the plan, with midcourse corrections, celebrations, and publicizing of successes.

Ultimately, it’s not about creating MY vision, but about creating a SHARED vision. As responsible, forward thinking humans, we all want to create a better future. But what does it look like? Have we defined it? Have we described it? Who are we within it? What does interaction look like? If our idea gained mass adoption, what would that mean? What does that world look like?

If we can see it, we can build it.

3. Scenario Development

As an extension of visioning, scenario development is where the power of narrative comes in. Throughout human history, we are defined by the stories we tell each other and ourselves. We create meaning and understanding by the way we remember our stories, like personal cargo that we carry in our minds. Our surroundings, natural or designed, are artifacts and objects within those stories. When thinking about the future, whether it’s the future of society, the organization, or the self, developing a series of scenarios allows us to objectively deal with uncertainty and imagine plausible costs and benefits to various actions and their consequences. It is often suggested to create a minimum of three scenarios when considering future events or situations by identifying futures that are possible, probable, and preferable. Here’s a suggested five sample scenario from the Futuring book:

1. A Surprise-Free Scenario: Things will continue much as they are now. They won’t become substantially better or worse.
2. An Optimistic Scenario: Things will go considerably better than in the recent past.
3. A Pessimistic Scenario: Something will go considerably worse than in the past.
4. A Disaster Scenario: Things will go terribly wrong, and our situation will be far worse than anything we have previously experienced.
5. A Transformation Scenario: Something spectacularly marvelous happens – something we never dared to expect.

Once the stories has been written that describes what each of these scenarios looks like, the conversation can begin. What is the likelihood of each of these? What is the desirability? What are the correlating values of the people? And most importantly, what actions can be taken today to steer the ship and design towards or away from the various scenarios?

Two common methods for determining a potential course of action are forecasting and backcasting. While forecasting starts in the present and projects forward into the future, backcasting starts with a future goal or event and works it’s way back to the present. In this method, the sequence of events or steps that led to that goal are imagined and defined, so that a roadmap to that desirable future is created. In either case, the scenarios generated serve to illuminate pathways to action.

New era, new god, says Paul Saffo

Over a century ago, Nietzsche observed, “Almost 2,000 years and no new God!” Indeed, though hundreds of new religions appear and disappear every year, it has been centuries since a truly new great religion has appeared on this planet. We are overdue for a new god.

Our current religious order formed in what Karl Jaspers termed the “axial age”—that extraordinary period between 800BC and 200BC that witnessed monotheism’s move into the mainstream with Zoroastrianism, the appearance of Buddhism, the establishment of Confucianism and the efflorescence of Greek humanistic philosophy.

Jaspers’s axial age shares close parallels with today. It was a time shaped by innovations in government, transport and communications. Population growth created new challenges demanding political innovations. New sailing technology transformed the seas from barriers to highways for ideas that travelled with trade goods to new lands. The consequent intellectual ferment yielded new world views, new uncertainties—and new religions.

Three technologies have brought us to the edge of another axial shift today. Air travel has given entire populations unprecedented mobility. The intermodal container has delivered a cornucopia of products to every corner of the globe. And cyberspace has become a promiscuous, meme-spreading hotbed of ideas.

Throw in the usual round of human misery served up by war, revolution and natural disasters, and the result is a potent cultural Petri dish from which a new god could spring. Populations around the world are struggling to find security and identity in this strange new future-shock world. The rise of fundamentalism is a sure indicator of dissatisfaction with the current religious order. Unhappy believers first look back to their roots for comfort, but origins rarely comfort and thus they will inevitably search for a new god.

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Warner Bros. to deliver movies on Facebook

Warner Bros. is apparently hoping to attract new fans by offering movies for viewing on Facebook.
The movie studio announced this evening it would begin testing a program that would offer movies for sale or rental for a brief period through its fan pages on the social-networking giant.

Beginning tomorrow, Facebook users can use Facebook Credits to rent "The Dark Knight" through the movie's official fan page on the social-networking site, Warner said in statement. The movie can be rented for 30 Facebook credits or $3, and Facebook users will have access to the movie for 48 hours through their accounts on the social network.

Facebook Credits is an alternative payment option for more than 150 games and applications on the social network. It's supported by games such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars, as well as Bejeweled Blitz and Madden NFL Superstars. Most titles still allow gamers to pay with credit cards, but it's Facebook's hope that eventually, users will buy all virtual goods with Credits.

The studio sees the social network as fertile ground for video on demand--considered a key revenue source for Hollywood studios grappling with falling box office receipts and lagging DVD sales.
"Facebook has become a daily destination for hundreds of millions of people," Thomas Gewecke, president of Warner Bros. Digital Distribution, said in a statement. "Making our films available through Facebook is a natural extension of our digital distribution efforts. It gives consumers a simple, convenient way to access and enjoy our films through the world's largest social network."
For Facebook, the program dovetails with the notion that it could someday supplant corporate Web sites, a scenario outlined by Stephen Haines, commercial director of Facebook's U.K. operation, at a conference in London earlier this month.

Facebook representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In addition to being able to pause the movie and resume it at their leisure when they log back in to Facebook, Warner Bros. said users will still be able to post comments on the movie and interact with friends on the network while watching their selection.

The program is currently available only in the U.S., and additional titles will be added on a regular basis over the coming months, Warner Bros. said.

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The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head by James F. Moore of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society

As the United States government becomes more belligerent in using its power in the world, many people are longing for a “second superpower” that can keep the US in check. Indeed, many people desire a superpower that speaks for the interests of planetary society, for long-term well-being, and that encourages broad participation in the democratic process. Where can the world find such a second superpower? No nation or group of nations seems able to play this role, although the European Union sometimes seeks to, working in concert with a variety of institutions in the field of international law, including the United Nations. But even the common might of the European nations is barely a match for the current power of the United States.

There is an emerging second superpower, but it is not a nation. Instead, it is a new form of international player, constituted by the “will of the people” in a global social movement. The beautiful but deeply agitated face of this second superpower is the worldwide peace campaign, but the body of the movement is made up of millions of people concerned with a broad agenda that includes social development, environmentalism, health, and human rights...continued reading

Real Life Fight Clubs

Uppercut from California is a place. on Vimeo.

and one in a Washington Middle School