Mudpuppy's Magnetic Monster figures tin is a great gift for the monster-loving kid in your life -- it's a set of lovely illustrated magnetic monster body-parts to mix and match into your own gruesome creations. Comes with four reversible backgrounds for enacting monstrous dramas of your choosing -- and the tin is just the right size to stick the backgrounds on and build monsters upon -- great for car trips and the like. I found mine at the wonderful, friendly kid store Hello Sunshine in Toronto, but they don't seem to have it in their webstore, so here's a US retailer that'll sell you one over the web, for those of you not local to the shop.
Link
Nearly twenty years ago, people who had met online began to meet in person at the WELL office in Sausalito. These interviews from a WELL party, circa 1989, include me, Stewart Brand, Flash Gordon, M.D., Hank Roberts, Janey Fritsche, the late Tina Loney (the woman with the bird) and the late Bob Bickford. Party material courtesy of and copyright by InCA productions.
Link. The video is lacking only one thing: IDs for the people on the screen, as they talk. Anyone want to take a stab at that in the comments here?
Clay Shirky's posted a transcript of a recent talk he gave on "cognitive surplus" -- the idea that automation gave us an enormous amount of free time to think and cogitate, and that sitcoms and other light entertainment from the past century were a way of absorbing that surplus, something we're just shaking off now:
[S]he shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.
Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.
The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we're still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there's an interesting community over here, there's an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because there's so much complexity.
[S]he shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."