nthmost

On July 10th (two Saturdays from today), I’ll be running another Alternative Energy Workshop at Noisebridge in the Turing classroom, starting at 2pm. It’d be excellent if you could RSVP over on the Facebook page, or comment here on the blog if you want to come, leaving an email address I can actually reach you at.

More from the FB page:

DITCH THE DIESEL! Come build your own solar energy generator.

Dr Geoff Horne of Alternative Energy Zone brings clean energy to your houseboat, homemade platform, or deck camp with a hands-on workshop designed to get you rolling with an easy-to-build, very affordable solar kit.

This is a hands-on, information-rich workshop where you’ll get to build all the components yourself and ask as many questions as you can muster.

While this workshop is geared to support the total beginner, our resident expert, Dr Geoff Horne (organizer of Alternative Energy Zone, a long-running Burning Man Camp that requires all campers to bring their own non-diesel, clean energy generators), will be able to enrich even the experienced alternative energy maker.

This is a free workshop, donations to Noisebridge (a nonprofit hackerspace in San Francisco) strongly encouraged.

Terence McKenna, well-known for his refrain of “culture is not your friend”, explains how thoughts and beliefs occur within a framework, an “operating system” — and if you want to be able to think new thoughts and have different beliefs, you need to change your operating system.

…wherein I more formally announce my schemes for the next 4 months.

First off, what I’m most excited about:

the MemeHacking branch of NotaCon

I’m co-organizing a separate branch of NotaCon this year dealing specifically with memetics. You can read more about it on the MemeHacking Conference page.

The call has gone out to specific persons and to the general public for interesting presentations and panel ideas. So far, the response looks utterly fascinating.

If you’re interested in memetics — i.e. the study of thoughts and ideas capable of self-replication and evolution by natural selection — check out the MemeHacking blog. We’re writing essays about recent scientific research through the lens of memetics.

MemeHacking gives damn good tweet.

You should should totally follows us on Twitter (@MemeHacking of course). We get retweeted by @Richard_Dawkins. You know, the guy who invented the word “meme” in 1976.

Relatedly, you”ll want to check out our sister site…

MemeWeaving.com

On MemeWeaving.com we’re collecting videos, papers, slideshows, podcasts, and all other content related to neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, cognition, behavioral economics, marketing, and the like. Why? Because we want to make it easy for people to surf through the stuff that’s influenced us and given us hope that we can discover the memetic operating system: US.

MemeWeaving has a little social networking doodad built in that we’re experimenting with. I added it because I think it will be useful for the Memetics Conference — people will be able to link up with and discover more interesting people who appreciate thinking about information, human brains, and culture through the memetic perspective.

Feel free to grab a free account!

It’s about time to completely revamp this site.  It’s been about 3 months, right?  Yeah, it’s about time.

Expect the worst.  In the meantime, enjoy the earworms of 2009.

“You’re metastasizing nicely!”

CriticalMass.org posted a blurb about a study in the UK showing how women cyclists are more likely to get run down than men cyclists, apparently because they are far more likely to stop at red lights and stop signs and follow car traffic laws.

A commenter named Elijah responded by asserting that he felt safer for following the same rules as cars, and lambasted fellow cyclists for feeling to be “above the law”.

Sensing there was a point to be made regarding rules and practicality, and the actual point of traffic systems, I ended up writing kind of a long reply, so I’m reposting it here:

Elijah, you may personally feel comforted in obeying the laws, but that doesn’t mean you are actually any safer. And if this study was well-conducted, your sense of entitled protectedness may actually work against you statistically in the long-run.

The issue at hand is not whether bicyclists should be able to “get away with” breaking/bending traffic laws. The issue is whether, in practice, having bicyclists actually follow traffic laws results in safer conditions.

Traffic rules work not because they are correct, and certainly not because we as a society tested their effectiveness in simulated conditions before deploying them on American roads. They work because they establish shared expectations of how others will behave, so that each individual is able to make predictions about what other individuals will most likely do under a certain set of conditions.

Drivers do not expect bicyclists to follow the same traffic rules as cars. That perspective may be changing in some cities (perhaps in SF, where I too spend a lot of time dodging cars whether or not I follow the car traffic rules), but the fact is that bicycles have different capabilities and safety concerns than cars, and thus will always act differently than cars in various traffic circumstances, and thus will cause all traffic participants to make different assumptions about the behavior of bikes in traffic than for cars in traffic.

If ladies in Britain are getting run down because they’re not being seen by cars, it’s because cars don’t expect to have to look there. Right or wrong, the bicycling culture has produced a situation in which bikes are expected to jump the light rather than wait like sitting ducks among a mass of cars who can’t see them.

Traffic laws are guidelines, not declarations of absolute Truth. Many different systems will work in the same situation. The question is what combination of written rule and cultural convention which are closest to the current status quo will maximize safety.

Welcome to yet another installation of WordPress on nthmost.com.  Let’s hope this one sticks, shall we?

Right at this moment, Skittles.com is capitalizing on the ability to find every Twitter post that includes the word "skittles" to power their front page.  The trend has blown up to the point where people are registering usernames like "skittlenigga" just to have every single post they make show up on the front page of Skittles.Com.

(Update: Agency.com may have copped this technique from a stunt by Modernista.)

What’s the point of this?  And why is it working?   (#skittles is presently the number one keyword on Search.Twitter.Com)

1. people want to be seen, and know they will be seen if they use the world "skittles"
2. people are going to post links to skittles.com to explain what’s going on AND improve their chances of being seen  
3. endless opportunities for horrible puns on Skittles’ "taste the rainbow" tagline
4. no matter what is said about Skittles, it’s going to get tons of people talking, and tons of people to view skittles.com.

Needless to say, other companies will no doubt follow the rainbow of using Twitter trending for short, hugely effective bursts of publicity.  Free ad impressions (or nearly-free, you still have to pay for bandwidth) are irresistible candy.

Reactions from Twitter:

  laughingsquid: along with making Twitter search the default for their website,Skittles is also using YouTube, Flickr & Facebook http://bit.ly/qGUao (expand)

  SEOinSeattle: Everyone will be talking about Skittles. They know they’ll take heat and crap, but if any publicity is good they just hit a home run.

  robofillet: Even if this Skittle stunt only lasts a day before they’re spammed to bits, they’ve done a great job social marketing. Skittles is trending.

  averagebetty: Tweet the rainbow of carnuba wax… bad for your teeth… brilliant marketing. #skittles

  emilychang: watching the tweets about skittles coming in and LMAO. the backlash has already begun. geek irony rules.

  bethlexicon: @hensel says the Skittles idea is good, but the spammers are bad. Seems like you can’t have one without the other, though. #skittles

  korch: finally twitter has a practical use, making this appear on skittles.com! squee!

As an aside, seems like the MARS company is trying to appeal to intarweb hipsterz…

meta-irony of the day: they’ve also gotten me to link to Skittles.com.  sigh!

On the concept of a Metablog

The Online Etymology Dictionary defines Meta thusly:

 prefix meaning 1. “after, behind,” 2. “changed, altered,” 3. “higher, beyond,” from Gk. meta (prep.) “in the midst of, among, with, after,” from PIE *me- “in the middle” (cf. Goth. miþ, O.E. mið “with, together with, among,” see mid). Notion of “changing places with” probably led to senses “change of place, order, or nature,” which was the principal meaning of the Gk. word when used as a prefix. Third sense, “higher, beyond,” is due to misinterpretation of metaphysics (q.v.) as “transcending physical science.” 

The prefix “meta” as found in the wild (colloquial usage)  is frequently found in front of bodies of knowledge (e.g. “meta-physics”, “meta-language”) and in front of nouns that imply action (e.g. “meta-data”, “meta-speech”) in order to add a semantic quality of abstraction and transcendence.  ”Metadata” is “data about data”, “meta-speech” would be “speaking about speech”, and “meta-language” would be the use of language to describe languages (grammars).

To put it more plainly, “meta” turns a word like physics, the study of the laws of the universe, into “metaphysics“, the study of the study of the laws of the universe.  Physicists observe and theorize on how the world works according to scientific principles, while Metaphysicists observe and theorize on how very wrong the physicists have got it.

So as far as I’m concerned, “meta-blogging” means blogging about blogging, and Wiktionary agrees with me.  In this metablog, I will be observing and theorizing on The Blog and its ancillaries such as Twitter, Facebook, and the like.

Topics I will probably cover soon:

• SEO critiquing websites, sizing up their potential for search optimization
• Eliminating writer’s block by allowing market research to influence your writing
• Strategic use of Twitter, and why it’s such a unique communications medium

I use Twitter a lot.  Here’s my personal Twitter account — I am “nthmost” of course. 

Related content around the web:

“Our Bold Blog Definition” on Dan’s Metablog — an essay on nailing down the definition of a “blog”

“Metablogging” on Writing for the Web 3.0 — a series of blog categorizations based on the author’s observations of blogging trends

Ironically, the only category that works for this post is “meta”.   Does that make the content of this post “meta-metablogging”?