Documentation has been discovered that illustrates how early techno-humans operated their ancient data processing machines.

a computer glossary or, coming to terms with the data processing machine from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

There’s been some controversy on the web in the last few days regarding the fair and reasonable enforcement by a website of their Terms Of Service (TOS).

You can read all about the Ariel Waldman vs. Twitter dust up on Ariel’s blog or in one of the many discussions going on in both Twitter and Friendfeed about the incident.

I don’t intend to chime in with my opinion on the situation. I would, however, like to make a suggestion to help social sites avoid this sort of problem in the future.

Hire a moderator.

Forums and chat rooms have been around from the early days of the internet. In the beginning they were free-for-alls, flame wars were frequent and these once valuable means of communicating were nearly rendered useless. It wasn’t long before board owners began recruiting friends or frequent contributors to act as moderator, those charged with maintaining order and seeing to it that the forum or board’s rules were enforced.

Lately start-ups like Twitter and Friendfeed are causing the conversation to move from the forum to the web-based service.  There are still certain things that I believe forums can still do better than any other format I’ve yet seen.  But the services do offer one advantage impossible to equal in the average forum.  They tend to be populated by the uber-geeks and tech futurists, the people who write the blogs everyone seems to read.  They often attract the type of crowd you only wish you could entice into your forum.

They also make inviting targets for spammers, stalkers, and riff-raff that can become irritations to your regular members.

If your site is a social center of any kind and your TOS promises to provide rule enforcement, you’re going to need help with that.  A programmer shouldn’t be expected to have moderation skills.  There are people who have experience with forum and/or IRC moderation.  Most of us enjoy helping out in forums we like to visit.  It’s a way to repay the hospitality, to contribute in a positive way with the community.

Twitter is making a mistake in changing their TOS in an effort to avoid dealing with issues like these.  Your online reputation is as important as the one you have in the real world.  No social site should ever want to appear negligent.

They need to maintain their TOS, which wasn’t much more than the same agreement you agree to in joining a forum or IRC channel.  Then they need to hire some moderators.  Their members deserve a feeling of safety while using their service.  A strong TOS enforced by moderators is a far better solution than ignoring the problems and claiming no responsibility.

I feel it’s my obligation to warn others about developing issues kept out of the mainstream media by those who wish us to remain ignorant (note: I remain ignorant by choice, but other people are kept ignorant by the suppression of information like that I’m about to reveal.)

Thanks to revelations reported by whistleblowers and other independent musicians we all understand the risks imposed by our reliance on fossil fuels, especially foreign oil. Speaking scientifically, foreign oil contains many free radicals, elements that can be detrimental to our way of life in the West. Free radicals should never be liberated by the burning of foreign oil.

But equally important, though never reported, is the increasing shortage of electrons available to those of us in the West since the invention of electricity.

Those of us who stayed awake through most of our advanced physics classes can tell you that matter cannot be created. That means that we can’t create new electrons. The more all-American electrons we use up in computers, GPS systems and such reduce the amount of electrons we have for future use.

Though the studies of electron depletion have been suppressed by secret government agencies, we can speculate that at current electron-usage rates, we will exhaust our supply of domestic electrons very soon. At that point we’ll have no choice but to rely of imported electrons, electrons purchased at high prices from electron-rich nations. Looking at the nations that don’t use very many of their native electrons; Cuba, Chad, Greenland for example; we can see that these potential electron hoarders will have good reason to extract every last electron-dollar out of their future sales. They need cash, not electrons. And we need electrons, so we’ll have to supply the cash.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that being miserly with your electron usage is the highest form of patriotism. Do we want future generations of our nerdy and geeky children to be subject to the outrageous demands of Greenlanders? Do we want our electronic gadgets to be held hostage by electron-rich Cubans? Of course not.

So measure out your electrons sparingly. Learn to be happy with 300Mhz processors and on-board video, both of which are electron economic. Give your night vision a chance to really function at its peak efficiency by leaving the lights off 24/7. Trash your TV and remember the joy of radio shows. Do all you can to preserve our remaining supply of American electrons. Further suggestions for electron preservation would be welcome.

(Update: some smarty-pants just suggested to me that matter cannot be created or destroyed, but I can’t verify that as it wasn’t mentioned during the parts of advanced physics class I was awake for…and besides, it sounds just like the sort of misinformation those secret government agencies would want us to believe.)

If you, like me, watch The Daily Show, you’ve no doubt seen Demetri Martin on occasion doing a techy report or a story about the newest fad among the twenty-somethings. I just came across a few pretty good Martin quotes. His writing reminds me a lot of Steven Wright’s.

- I wonder what the most intelligent thing ever said was that started with the word ‘dude.’ “Dude, these are isotopes.” “Dude, we removed your kidney. You’re gonna be fine.” “Dude, I am so stoked to win this Nobel Prize. I just wanna thank Kevin, and Turtle, and all my homies.”

- ‘Sort of’ is such a harmless thing to say. Sort of. It’s just a filler. Sort of - it doesn’t really mean anything. But after certain things, sort of means everything. Like after ‘I love you’ or ‘You’re going to live’ or ‘It’s a boy.’

- I went into a clothes store and a lady came up to me and said “if you need anything, I’m Jill”. I’ve never met anyone with a conditional identity before.

- I wrapped my Christmas presents early this year, but I used the wrong paper. See, the paper I used said ‘Happy Birthday’ on it. I didn’t want to waste it so I just wrote ‘Jesus’ on it.

- Graffiti… I don’t like graffiti, unless it teaches me something, you know? Like “Oh, that’s how Alex feels about Maria. I wouldn’t have known if I had not walked by there, thank you.” Graffiti’s the most passionate literature there is, you know? It’s always like “Bush sucks!”, “U2 Rocks!”. I want to make indifferent graffiti. “Toy Story 2 was okay!” “I like Sheryl as a friend, but I’m not sure about taking things further.” “This is a bridge!”

- A quick way to start a conversation is to say something like “What’s your favorite color?” A quick way to end a conversation is to say something like “What’s your favorite color… person?”

- If you have a pear shaped body, you should not wear pear colored clothes, or act juicy.

- I was on the street. This guy waved to me, and he came up to me and said, “I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else.” And I said, “I am.”

- Some jokes are short and elegant, like a mathematical proof or a midget in a ballgown.

- The worst time to have a heart attack is during a game of charades.

Tags: demetri martin, the daily show, humor, quotes

Every muscle requires exercise to remain in top form. Your arms, legs and abdomen all benefit from regular workouts. As we age, all our muscles tend to atrophy, to grow lax and become less efficient. We need to work harder at keeping them firm and working at their best. Why should our brain be any different?

There’s a tendency, as we grow older, to accept preformed ideas. Call them memes. In a sense, it’s a matter of mental laziness. Rather than conceive new ideas, we tend to adopt opinions and attitudes that generally fit our thoughts. We get tired of thinking. We need to keep our brains active, to exercise our minds, if we want to avoid the pitfall of lazy thinking.

One way to accomplish that is to visit a Web site like Lumosity. Think of it as a brain gymnasium.

Lumosity is the brain fitness program designed by neuroscientists that is scientifically demonstrated to improve your memory, attention and processing speed.

Improve memory and attention with Lumosity
Did you know that the human brain starts slowing down as early as age 30? The good news is that you can speed it up, and improve even your most basic cognitive abilities at any age. Keep your brain performing at its best with Lumosity, a brain fitness program consisting of engaging brain games and exercises developed by some of the leading neuroscientists in the country.

Lumosity beta users have experienced:

• Clearer and quicker thinking
• Improved memory for names, numbers, directions, etc.
• Increased alertness and awareness
• Elevated mood
• Better concentration at work or while driving

The brain needs care just like the body
New research shows that we can improve the health and function of our brains by flexing our mental muscles. Exercising the brain leads to better brain performance today and healthier brains in the long run.

Computer-based brain exercises can improve how well we think
In a recently published study funded by the National Institute of Health, scientists found that memory, attention, and mental processing speed can be improved by training the brain. Moreover, they found that the improvements persisted for at least five years after the training.

Lumosity is more than just a site, it’s a mental health club. Join for free while it’s in beta and begin to get those brain cells in shape.

Tags: lumosity, brain, mind, exercise

The next must-have, urban-geek cool gadget. I’m putting it on my wish list.

Tags: microsoft, surface, touch-screen, emerging technology

Another cool tool and member of the GoogleEarth family has been released.  Here’s John Hanke’s explanation of Google’s Lat Long Blog,

Welcome to the Google “geo” blog. As web mapping (dare I say “the geoweb”?) matures, we’re finding that we have a lot more to communicate about new developments in Earth, Maps, Local, and our APIs. The tools are becoming more powerful, more accessible, and more interrelated — not only to each other, but also to the web at large and to things like search. Things are changing so fast we thought a blog focused on this topic would be the best way to communicate with you, both about our products and about the overall development of geo on the web.

Warning: this site has the potential to become work-unfriendly.

Tags: google, maps, blog

According to a recent New York Times article, the presence of laptops in the classroom is being reconsidered.

The students at Liverpool High have used their school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography and hack into local businesses. When the school tightened its network security, a 10th grader not only found a way around it but also posted step-by-step instructions on the Web for others to follow (which they did).

Scores of the leased laptops break down each month, and every other morning, when the entire school has study hall, the network inevitably freezes because of the sheer number of students roaming the Internet instead of getting help from teachers.

So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse…

“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

Such disappointments are the latest example of how technology is often embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums. Last month, the United States Department of Education released a study showing no difference in academic achievement between students who used educational software programs for math and reading and those who did not.

Those giving up on laptops include large and small school districts, urban and rural communities, affluent schools and those serving mostly low-income, minority students, who as a group have tended to underperform academically.

Many school administrators and teachers say laptops in the classroom have motivated even reluctant students to learn, resulting in higher attendance and lower detention and dropout rates.

But it is less clear whether one-to-one computing has improved academic performance — as measured through standardized test scores and grades — because the programs are still new, and most schools have lacked the money and resources to evaluate them rigorously.

I don’t feel that it’s fair to either the schools or technology to demand instant results from such a new experiment. Schools haven’t had much time to figure out the best way to incorporate technology into the educational process. The technology can be adapted to meet the needs of students and administrators both, but that takes time as well.

Computers are here to stay, and as with many new “gadgets”. the young will often be the first-adopters. We can’t expect schools to adopt a Luddite-like attitude toward computers in general and still meet the needs of the students. While I might agree that laptops in the schools create more problems than they solve, and may never be appropriate for the classroom, desktop machines that have software to control access to the internet and that can be locked down or turned off during tests, etc., need to be included in the learning process. Further, I don’t think this issue is limited to laptops or computers. The same debate is being waged over the place of cell phones on campus. New technologies require new policies, and those take time and research before being implemented.

Schools need to determine how best to use computers in the classroom. Students need to learn how best to use the internet as part of their education. Computing is not a single solution, it needs to be integrated sensibly and practically into the current system.

I also don’t believe that technology is contributing to the decline of humanity, as some pundits have suggested. It has introduced new elements into society, and some of those deviate drastically from what we’re used to. We can’t turn back the clock and pretend that computers don’t impact our lives. It achieves nothing to be overly nostalgic for times gone by and to suggest that past lifestyles would somehow be workable in our modern times.

We are no longer a rural society. There are still remnants of that lifestyle here and there, but it’s nowhere as predominant as it once was. Change may not always be perceived as good, but it is often inevitable. We are headed into a future where technology will touch on nearly every aspect of our lives. We can either learn how best to deal with that eventuality, or we can attempt to live in denial and fall further behind the curve. Everyone will have to make their own decision.

But the schools, in order to prepare students for their futures, need to accept the presence of computers in their lives and find the best way to introduce that element into the classroom.

Tags: laptops, schools, technology, new york times

I came across my Aiptek HyperPen USB digital tablet today and was able to download the drivers for XP (I had previously run it under 98SE). With it installed, I now have a much better input device for use with Photoshop and Paint.net. I even found a way to use my Aiptek in Linux.  Is that cool or what?  Now I don’t have any excuse for not getting more creative.

I can’t draw for beans (which is why one of my majors in college was drafting, the non-artist’s way to be artistic) but I’d like to create a handwriting font. Actually I print, I don’t write cursively. Another hangover from drafting. Between Chris’ vast repository of cool links and Google, I hope to find a way to use the software I already have to create a personal font for emails, blog entries, etc.

Tags: aiptek, tablets, xp

Honestly, sporks are magical, mysterious, wondrous.  They must be the utensils of the gods.  Their design is perfect, which is evidence of a divine designer…most likely an employee of Taco Bell.

As we can see from this detailed and scientifically accurate image, sporks are direct descendants of the common fork and spoon.  Millions of years of evolution and a plastics manufacturing company in Taiwan  have brought us the spork we all know and love today.

Sporks are the reason the gods gave us mouths.  We were not given the gift of sporks until we could show that we were sufficiently advanced to make use of such a gift.

Please feel free to share your love of sporks.  Post your testimonial.  Share your passion.

(For more information on these blessed instruments of eatery, check out this page or contact any of the professors of spork history at Spork U.)

Tags: sporks, utensils, taco bell

Linux is my primary operating system, at home and at work.  On both my desktop and laptop, you’ll usually find me using PCLos .92, though I occasionally boot into SUSE 10.1 or Fedora Core 6 for a change of pace.  I’m very much a Linux advocate, so you will understand why I enjoyed the following story from the New York Times.

Linux, the free operating system, has gone from an intriguing experiment to a mainstream technology in corporate data centers, helped by the backing of major technology companies like I.B.M., Intel and Hewlett-Packard, which sponsored industry consortiums to promote its adoption.

Those same companies have decided that the time has come to consolidate their collaborative support into a new group, the Linux Foundation, which is being announced today. And the mission of the new organization is help Linux, the leading example of the open-source model of software development, to compete more effectively against Microsoft, the world’s largest software company.

“It’s really a two-horse race now, with computing dominated by two operating-system platforms, Linux and Windows,” said James Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. “There are things that Microsoft does well in terms of promoting Windows, providing legal protection and standardizing Windows.”

He added that “the things that Microsoft does well are things we need to do well — to promote, protect and standardize Linux.”

That shift to industry-standard hardware has helped makers of personal computer chips like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, and makers of PC-technology machines including Hewlett-Packard, I.B.M., Dell, NEC and Fujitsu.

Traditional rivals of Microsoft in the software business, including Oracle and I.B.M., have championed Linux to undermine an adversary and have tweaked their database and other software programs to run on Linux. Companies like Red Hat and Novell distribute Linux and charge companies for technical support and maintenance.

So while Linux is distributed free, a sizable market has grown up around it. The yearly sales of Linux-related hardware, software and services is more than $14.5 billion, according to estimates by IDC, a research firm.

The new Linux organization is “a clear sign that we are going to continue to work together,” said Daniel D. Frye, vice president for open systems development at I.B.M.

The work of two other groups — the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group — will be folded into the Linux Foundation, and those organizations will no longer exist. Mr. Zemlin had been the head of the Free Standards Group.

Stuart F. Cohen, the chief executive of the Open Source Development Labs, said he was starting a new venture that would use the open-source development model to build software applications tailored for individual industries like financial services.

In an e-mail message, Mr. Torvalds noted that some of the original reasons for forming the Open Source Development Labs six years ago, like “helping companies come to grips with Linux and open source in general,” had in large part been addressed.

Referring to the new organization, he said, “The technical, legal and standards issues do seem to be part of a bigger whole.”

Mr. Torvalds said his role would not change. “I work on the technology itself, not any of the other issues,” he wrote. “I literally just sit in my basement and do technical management. Nothing else.”

Tags: linux, pclos, suse, fedora core, microsoft, linux foundation

I want to thank Sean for getting my access restored for this site. Somehow I got locked out since my last post. You know how juke joints are, you have to know the secret handshake or password. Forget it, and you are standing in the alley listening to the faint sound of gaiety from behind the locked door.

Speaking of juke joints, there’s one artist I think would be perfect for a 21st century juke joint, a singer who takes us back to those wonderful jazz cafes of the 40’s. Tom Waits has just released Orphans, a 3 disk set of songs in the classic Waits style. I got my copy last week and cannot listen to it enough. His melancholy, hard-life voice speaks of an age sadly past. If you love piano-bar, boozy jazz singers, check out Waits. You won’t be disappointed.

Tags: juke joint, tom waits, orphans

It’s soon to be 4 years of my interest in and association with Lockergnome and its captain Chris Pirillo.

I admire Chris a great deal.  Not just for being one of the most interesting and informed geeks I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with.  He’s an amazing person at a more basic level.  He’s a decent human being, and Chris knows that on my scale that is the highest compliment.

It might have to do with his Iowa roots.  That well-known and often envied Mid-Western attitude; helpfulness, neighborliness,  openness.  Chris is the real deal.

I’m sure others I’ve met through this medium are just as nice, just as interesting.  And I’d welcome the opportunity to get to know you all as well as I know Chris.  Of course to facilitate this, it means all of you are going to have to publish to the web, a couple of books, maybe even a magazine article every month or so.

Because that’s how I first got to know Chris.

I’ve met four others the same way, and all proved to be as interesting in person as they were on the net.  People really into the internet, those who work in and around it every day, are my kind of people.  Geeks are to computers what racing car drivers are to drivers.

Then there’s the elite.  Chris is among the elite, both as a geek and as a person.  As are you, Adam, Aryeh and Frank.

Tags: chris pirillo, lockergnome, internet

Pull up a chair.  Need a drink?  The band will be starting their next set in a few minutes.