/patternHunter [/ph]

To add completely unnecessary fuel to my fire for random WebCams...

"According to Fertility Hollis, there is no chaos. There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher. What we can’t understand we call nonsense. What we can’t read we call gibberish." - Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

"Steven Johnson (author of the fantastic Mind Wide Open and other books) has written a fascinating essay about his new creative process, which involves a suite of tools that store his notes and works in unstructured databases, and tease out and suggest subtly connected ideas, so that as he writes, his computer jams with him, suggesting neat tangents to his subjects." /Boing Boing/

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"I admit to a certain affinity for William Gibson's characters Colin Laney ('Idoru,' 'All Tomorrow's Parties') and Cayce Pollard ('Pattern Recognition'). I suppose the critical difference is that Laney and Pollard are well-paid for their right-brained intuitive savvy, while I pursue 'weirdhunting' purely for the fun of it." /Posthuman Blues/

"After embedding RDF information in millions of web pages over the past couple years, Creative Commons and the folks at Nutch have created a search engine that stores, reads, and indexes the embedded information. The search engine is one of the first public examples of the Semantic Web in action, alllowing anyone to remix culture freely and legally." /O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2005/

"Marc Smith, who runs the Netscan project which provides analysis of Usenet... shared how they are using social network analysis to identify types of participants in threaded discussions." /Many-to-Many/

"'I feel like Alexander Graham Bell," said (filmmaker David) LaChapelle when introducing the film. "Oh, and I'm not really here -- this is a hologram.'

"It was a film without film, a movie without moving parts. The premiere of Rize that took place last Saturday at a ski lodge here was a historic event -- the first feature film to be delivered via wireless technology." /Wired News: Feature Films Without Wires/

"William Beatty was writing for amateur scientists, but it's pretty global: The road to failure often contains:
1. Secrecy
2. The conviction that someone is about to steal your idea.
3. Focus on selling your idea to the government or a big corporation.
4. Loss of humility and focus on fame
5. Belief that scientists and businesses (the smart ones) will hail your discovery." /Seth's Blog/

"I love (William) Gibson's central theme: 'We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition...' And I've come to realize that the process of song writing is a form of pattern recognition itself." /The Making of PatternRecognition.mp3/

The deoxy newsbot "monitors headlines from 260 diverse news and information sources, providing continuous Web and IRC updates. There are currently 4501 links from 260 sources in 18 categories. The most recent update happened while you were reading this sentence."

"The most striking design consequence of relying on the shuffle feature is the complete elimination of the screen, something that I think may be unique among MP3 players, and would make no sense were users not expected to let the machine make decisions about what music they're going to listen to." /IFTF's Future Now/

"Picasa -- the free photo-sharing service recently bought by Google -- just went live with version 2.0 about an hour ago. Included in the new edition, a collage-generating tool (an example is shown at left), photographic editing features, CD burning, sending pictures with Gmail, and a Blogger button for automated publishing to your you-know-what." /Boing Boing/

"Grafedia.com is allowing people to tag URLs about the city which link to a bit of art that they store for you. Ostensibly, you do this with a cellphone, and you can retrieve the meaning behind the URL by sending a message to “@grafedia.net” (which is) kind of cool in a William Gibson novel from 1985 sort of a way." /Screenhead/

"The title of this post is a William Gibson image from All Tomorrow's Parties (he gets genuine hipster bonus points for naming a novel after a Velvet Underground song). It refers to the empty windows of closed jewelry shops--the dramatically lit black velvet drapes are still in place, but the gems have been removed. (To blog is to write, to write is to try to do so well, and this Gibson phrase is good writing: descriptive, evocative, resonant. While you may not achieve Gibsonian perfection, as a blogger, it's something you should aspire to.)." /Blogging With AquaMinds NoteTaker/

Jim Hobbs compiled a great collection of William Gibson-related internet, printed, video and other sources that looks like it has been updated regularly) /Monroe Library Resources on Wlliam Gibson (1948- )/

You can also find a comprehensive, cross-referenced list of technologies suggested by Gibson in his novels and short stories. /technovelgy/

If that is not enough Gibson to hold you over for a while, check out the transcript of the No Maps for these Territories documentary film. And, if you are actually reading this post, you really should buy the movie for the love of Case!

"The problem for many children in elementary school may not be that they're not smart enough but that they're not stupid enough. They haven't yet been able to make reading and writing transparent and automatic. This is particularly true for children who don't have natural opportunities to practice these skills, learning in chaotic and impoverished schools and leading chaotic and impoverished lives. But routinized learning is not an end in itself. A good coach may well make his players throw the ball to first base 50 times or swing again and again in the batting cage. That will help, but by itself it won't make a strong player. The game itself -- reacting to different pitches, strategizing about base running -- requires thought, flexibility and inventiveness." /The New York Times/

"Gladwell's back again in bound, written form, this time exploring how first impressions affect decision making. In Blink, he argues that by distilling the first few seconds in which we interact with a person, product, or idea into what is useful information and what is misleading, we can learn to make better decisions. 'We talk endlessly about what it means to think about a problem, deliberative thinking and rational thinking,' he says. 'But we spend very little time talking about this other kind of thinking, which is happening in a split second and which is having a huge impact on real-world situations.'" /Fast Company/

"Tags" are a means of manual categorization that Technorati is currently supporting: "The photos come from our friends at Flickr... The links come from the nice folks at Del.icio.us... The rest of the Technorati Tag pages is made up of blog posts. And those come from you! Anyone with a blog can contribute to Technorati Tag pages."

Cory Doctorow calls Technorati tags "one of the most exciting things I've seen all month." /Boing Boing/

Clay Shirky suggests that tagging may support "emergent intelligence" by "(lowering" transaction costs for contributions and fixing mistakes. This increases participation and the probability of the right data actually existing in the first place. It also enables a dedicated community to self-govern... (for example) blog posts gain authority through link attention. Consensual wiki pages gain authority over time. Links and snapshots bridge across places, physical and virtual. Tags are applied in the blink of an eye and patterns emerge from the crowd." /Many-to-Many/

FutureHi recently posted "a bunch of MP3s with lectures and interviews with psychedelic neuronauts Robert Anton Wilson, Mark Pesce, and the late Terrence McKenna." /Boing Boing/

SearchViews is a relatively new blog dedicated the "search engine industry" (yes, there is one... now) that has tons of great content and speculation on the future of search.

"(William Gibson's) Pattern Recognition is also driven by another underlying sense that my own weblog contains numerous entries that lack connection even though they lie in wait. So I thought I would try a different kind of entry that made an attempt to bring together a sampling of readings in a single entry that forced me to try and identify patterns (whether successful or not)..." /Experience Designer Network/

Clay Shirky: "The other day I was listening to an interview with Malcom Gladwell about his book Blink, which posits that snap decisions are better than carefully considered judgements. Especially when made by experts who have developed a muscle memory of the brain. One of the callers pointed out (at 9:00/30:15) we are better than making snap decisions work better at discrimination (does it belong in the good category or the bad category) between things than characterization (determining the nature of things). Fine, I thought, that's tagging." /Many-to-Many/

"(T)he notion that the judgments we make in a couple of seconds can be as good as or as reliable as those we reach after careful deliberation and assimilation of lots of information seems (to use a word you and I both like) counterintuitive. The longer and harder you think about something, we usually assume, the better you think about it. Blink suggests that this isn't always (or even often) the case.

"(M)y critique is not focused on the shortcomings of individual decision-making. It's focused on the shortcomings of deliberate decision-making. I'm simply not convinced that the "expert" sitting in his office, gathering all the facts and painstakingly sorting through each one, is necessarily in a better position than the expert who makes fluid, instinctive decisions in the moment." /conversation between Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki/

Thin-slicing also starts to answer the question "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" /FutureHi/

GoogleSuggest is amazingly cool. Definitely a great new way to surf the randomsphere.

Googles also recently announced its plan to digitize and freely share resources from research libraries and Oxford.

"It may be only a step on a long road toward the long-predicted global virtual library. But the collaboration of Google and research institutions that also include Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library is a major stride in an ambitious Internet effort by various parties. The goal is to expand the Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic, body of material and create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world's books, scholarly papers and special collections." /The New York Times/

Google also recently launched Google Print: "To use Google Print, just search on Google as you normally would. For example, do a search on a subject such as 'Books about Ecuador Trekking,' or search on a title like 'Romeo and Juliet.' Whenever a book contains content that matches your search terms, we'll show links to that book in your search results. Click on the book title and you'll see the page that contains your search terms, as well as other information about the book." /Google Print/

And if that is not enough Google for you, "There's some idle suspicion that Google intends to expand their functionality to include sharing of desktop files. This seems pretty likely given their acquisition of Picasa, which included something called 'Hello' - an IM-like application for chatting and sharing pictures. Moreover, if they decide to merge this with orkut, to allow file sharing just with your friends network, then that's a pretty compelling offering." /Boing Boing/

"(A) cabal of MIT engineers gather around one of the university's computer science gurus, Tom Knight. Their aim is to create a field of engineering that will do for biological molecules what electronics has done for electrons. They call it synthetic biology.

'I think this will likely be the most important thing I've done,' says Knight, whose track record already includes designing some of the earliest network interfaces, bitmapped displays, and workstations. 'We're at the cusp of some dramatic changes.'" /Wired 13.01/

"One thing I observe is how people who are younger seem to take in smaller, more granular bits of information, as though they are rocks skimming across a lake, touching down briefly for a bit of information before the next lift off to the next dip for something" /Many-to-Many/

"Fans of the Hipster PDA have been cropping up around the Interweb, so I thought I’d share my favorite hack for organizing your cards on the go. Like the Hipster PDA itself, it’s a lo-fi no-brainer, but I’ve found it a useful and durable way to keep things straight. /43 Folders/

I'm a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I've been up linked and downloaded, I've been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I'm a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond!

I'm new wave, but I'm old school and my inner child is outward bound. I'm a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I'm interactive, I'm hyperactive and from time to time I'm radioactive.

Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin the wave, dodgin the bullet and pushin the envelope. I'm on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I've got no need for coke and speed. I've got no urge to binge and purge. I'm in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I'm a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial!

I've got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can't shut me up. You can't dumb me down because I'm tireless and I'm wireless, I'm an alpha male on beta-blockers.

I'm a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion-forward. Up-front, down-home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built-to-last! I'm a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case pretty maturely post-traumatic and I've got a love-child that sends me hate mail.

But, I'm feeling, I'm caring, I'm healing, I'm sharing-- a supportive, bonding, nurturing primary care-giver. My output is down, but my income is up. I took a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash-flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds and I watch trash sports! I'm gender specific, capital intensive, user-friendly and lactose intolerant.

I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the "F" word in my emails and the software on my hard-drive is hardcore--no soft porn.

I bought a microwave at a mini-mall; I bought a mini-van at a mega-store. I eat fast-food in the slow lane. I'm toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically- formulated medical miracle. I've been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed and, I have an unlimited broadband capacity.

I'm a rude dude, but I'm the real deal. Lean and mean! Cocked, locked and ready-to-rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide. I've got glide in my stride. Drivin and movin, sailin and spinin, jiving and groovin, wailin and winnin. I don't snooze, so I don't lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty and lunch time is crunch time. I'm hangin in, there ain't no doubt and I'm hangin tough, over and out!"

-George Carlin

"Swarming is the tactical (or, in some cases, operational) maneuver of converging of highly distributed forces at a single point to leverage the military principle of mass. That is, you don’t need to have more powerful forces than your opponent, you just need more powerful forces than they have at the point of conflict." /A Theory of Power, Jeff Vail's Critique of Hierarchy & Empire/

"Unlike other media, evocative media requires you to be present in the experience, so you can listen to the responses and emotional cues, and adapt your presentation to the ever-changing environment. In many ways designing evocative media is much more challenging than designing for paper or a browser, because of the complexity and unique circumstances of any given presentation environment." /beyond bullets/

"Clay Shirky continues to just totally nail the questions of metadata, authority, and user-created content. Today's installment: why crappy, cheap, user-generated, uncontrolled metadata will win out over expensive, controlled, useful, professionally generated metadata." /Boing Boing/

Here are a couple of interesting articles regarding chaos, order and pattern recognition. The first article is on the dance between chaos and order in Jackson Pollock's later works.

The second article (purchase required) is about "weak signal" detection and amplification in complex adaptive systems (CAS) that looks at the spread of ideas and innovations and emphasizes informal participation versus disassociated "command and control" and predictability.

Wharton’s Emerging Technologies Management Research Program even hosted a conference entitled, Peripheral Vision: Sensing and Acting on Weak Signals, "to address the challenges of managing at the periphery."

William Gibson: "I have a didactic passage within the book about the possibility of there being no more Bohemias. And that's an idea that I got from Bruce Sterling. I'm interested in that because, in my own lifetime I've seen commodification become so virulent and lightning fast. Any kind of street-generated cool will be mass-produced by the entertainment factory within days and sold back to the next bunch of young consumers. But maybe we don't need it anymore, since we're no longer industrial. Maybe everyone, to some extent, is a Bohemian these days. What I thought of as straight people when I was twenty years old are kind of an endangered species." /Gettingit.com/

"William Gibson had a good go at capturing marketers in their native habitat two years ago with Pattern Recognition, a work of science fiction set so precisely in the near future that by the time it came out in January 2003, it was dazzlingly contemporary, the first novel to use 'google' as a verb. Re-read at the turn of 2005, the story of cool hunter Cayce Pollard (who is allergic to brands) still has an icy elegance, but it is already dated by the specifics of what were then the latest mobiles, laptops and labels. Perhaps it needs a decade on the shelf before it can be read as a perfectly preserved time capsule." /www.theage.com.au/

"Cool hunting, advertising, and marketing pervade Pattern Recognition - the book's acronym is PR, after all. Pollard 'knows too much about the processes responsible for the way product is positioned in the world, and sometimes finds herself doubting that there is much else going on.' But The Footage is there to prove her wrong. The Web makes it possible for an independent artist to gain a global following for no commercial purpose whatsoever. Gibson exploits the inherent tension between the monoculture and the emergence of novelty. On one hand, the monoculture lives by assimilating originality. On the other, new art has nothing but the monoculture to launch itself from. It's one of the happy paradoxes of modern life." /Wired 11.02/

Chaotic Cognizance: "Nodal points (are) points of high interest in an information field. Richard Thieme takes this definition further:

Nodal points are emergent patterns in nested aggregates of data, clearly enough to make predictions. The key to the pattern is the person whose personality gives coherence to the data. A friend who does "cybersleuthing" tells me it is nearly impossible to eradicate the pattern created by our choices. She has helped to create identities from whole cloth for people in the witness protection program, but says there is nearly always some leakage. She once tracked a man who had changed identities three times as he moved across the country. He could not erase his preference for petite brunettes, and that factor led her to him. In a world in which the patterns of our behavior are updated daily in massive databanks, what does it mean to be free?

Chaotic Cognizance continues: "The most obvious realm that this ability applies to is that of coders and hackers. They immerse themselves in the internal workings of some immense project and try to hold the entire functionality in their mind at once; it makes coding easier when you know exactly what each part of the program can do and where its code is located. When I am in ‘hack-mode,’ sometimes there comes a moment when I recognize that the code base is no longer a beautiful thing; and that by realigning my perspective I can remedy it. I feel like these flashes of correctable elegance come to me due to recognizing nodal points while immersed in the program’s entrails."

"In Idoru by William Gibson, ... Laney is a quantitative analyst with a concentration deficit that he can adjust 'into a state of pathological hyperfocus,' thus enabling him to be 'an extremely good researcher' (Gibson 30)... Laney's employers view him as an instrument to do research. Nominally a 'research assistant on a project' at DatAmerica, a group of French scientists teaches Laney to detect 'nodal points' within masses of unorganized data (Gibson 31)." /Idoru Essays/

"Laney finds 'nodal points,' or 'emergent systems of history,' 'the shapes from which history emerges,' in 'vast floes of undifferentiated data'; 'he palps nodes of potentiality, strung along lines that are histories of the happened becoming the not-yet.'" /Introducing William Gibson/

"Colin Laney, I'd like to say, is half of William Gibson. Part of the novelist's job, and particularly the science fiction writer's job, is to find the seeds of the future in the present. Science fiction does not claim to predict what will actually happen ten, or a hundred, or a thousand years from now. Rather, it explores the vast reservoirs of potentiality that lie hidden, already, in the here and now... The other half is Gibson the narrator, the weaver of fictions. Laney is basically a passive figure, obsessively caught in the grip of the patterns he apprehends. But Gibson, as a novelist, actively shapes and reworks those patterns. He gives us characters, plots, and situations, focusing our hopes and desires and fears. And in some ironic manner, Gibson's novels are even helping to mold the future which they apprehend."

Gibson himself acknowledges his connection with Laney in this interview with Literascape: "'The nodal point is probably at some level a metaphor for what I feel I do. Laney and I have the same job, looking for faces in the clouds.'"

"I think what I'm doing there is calling the species-wide concept of history into question. And it's sort of like the butterfly in the butterfly effect... I think that in the end of the novel (All Tomorrow's Parties) when the naked Japanese girl steps out of fax machines in every 7-Eleven on the planet -- the world ends right then. That's it. The singularity has happened. But the characters get up and make love and have breakfast and look for jobs. So yeah, nobody notices." /Gettingit.com/

William Gibson: "I see the present as being vaguely dystopian and vaguely utopian and the future as being much like that but with the volume turned up. I think utopia and dystopia are historical concepts at this point, but we just haven't realised it. Somewhere, we crossed the line, and now we're in this disoriented point of dystopia and utopia. But there are aspects of 20th century life that are phenomenal, and we just take it for granted." /[techno\culture]/

"An open innovation commons: When networks of devices, technological platforms for communication media, the electromagnetic spectrum, are available for shared experimentation, new technologies and industries can emerge. The way intellectual property is defined by international law, the kind of political regulations that govern spectrum use, the degree of extension of the rights of corporations to control the use of creations of individuals and to exert control over what others can create or distribute, will determine whether a cornucopia or a tragedy of the anti-commons occurs." /TheFeature/

By doing a Google Search: inurl:"axis-cgi/mjpg", you can view more than 4,000 webcams, the owners of which might not know you can view. If click on your browser's Refresh button, many of these cams will update every 2-10 seconds giving you near streaming of everything from corporate server farms to streetscapes to bars to military facilites to the DinoCam at South Dakota School of Mines to coffee shops to this strange LegoCity demo at Marshall. The most interesting one I have seen so far is this multiple camera feed at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.

And if that just isn't enough webcam fun for you, check out this wall of webcam links. Freaky!

"Unless you're one of those cyborg Scandinavian teenagers who was born with a Nokia in his hand, pecking out even a simple message is a thumb-twisting chore." /Disinformation/

"Vivisimo's Clusty aims to sort through the confusing welter of Web results and cluster them by topic, speeding users on their way." /Business Week/

"The Pew Internet & American Life Project is a wealth of information for anyone interested in data about online phenomena. Close to 27% of internet users report reading blogs, while close to 7% report creating blogs, 5% report actually using RSS and XML readers/aggregators, and 12% report posting comments on blogs according to this section of the Pew reports. The Pew data reports that there has been a 58% growth of Blog readers in the year 2004." /Smart Mobs/

"Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities, the political, the religious, the educational authorities who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations; informing, forming in our minds their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable, open-mindedness; chaotic, confused, vulnerability to inform yourself." /Still Sleeping/

"The year 2004 began with a war of the computer worms and ended with running robots as technology stories continually hit the news." /New Scientist/

"Brain research is beginning to produce concrete evidence that mental discipline and meditative practice can change the inner workings and circuitry of the brain and allow people to achieve different levels of awareness." /KurzweilAI.net/

"I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride." --William James /William Gibson's blog/

"BitTorrent's architecture means that the more popular the file is the faster it downloads - because more people are pitching in. Better yet, it's a virtuous cycle. Users download and share at the same time; as soon as someone receives even a single piece of Fokkers, his computer immediately begins offering it to others. The more files you're willing to share, the faster any individual torrent downloads to your computer. This prevents people from leeching, a classic P2P problem in which too many people download files and refuse to upload, creating a drain on the system. 'Give and ye shall receive' became Cohen's motto, which he printed on T-shirts and sold to supporters." /Wired 13.01/

"A blog — short for "web log" — is an online personal journal that covers topics ranging from daily life to technology to culture to the arts. Blogs have made such an impact this year that Merriam-Webster named it the word of the year." /ABC News/

"(Gregory Bateson)'s alternative view (of evolution) was to stress the role of information, that is, of mind, in all levels of biology from genetics to ecology and from human culture to the pathology of schizophrenia. In place of natural selection of organisms, Bateson considered the survival of patterns, ideas, and forms of interaction." /Edge/

"Our salvation -- if such a term is appropriate for us all -- lies not with our spouse, our children, our writing, our projects, confronting the so-called enemy... or with any of the neatly defined entities we've all labored with... forever.

"On the one hand, we can work with William Gibson's metaphor of cyberspace being a mass hallucination... acting as Panther Moderns...developing other hallucinations within that realm as has been suggested as early as the mid-90s in publications such as The Electronic Disturbance and Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas. Terrorize the U.S. terrorists... so that they loosen their grip, show their hand." /Richard Oxman/

"William Gibson's cyberpunk world describes sex as a highly profitable commerce in a virtual age. People wanting some quick cash can rent out their bodies without their minds as 'Meat puppets,' holographic sex shows are well-attended performance art, and a few bucks can get you all the virtual sex you can stand." /Sci-Fi/Fantasy/