This flowchart is a concerted effort to explain our current global food shortage. What hasn’t been included is the huge population boom since the industrial revolution. If you can describe to me how to include that in this chart you’ll win a prize. Actually, I’ll give you my thanks and give you credit at the bottom of the post. Thanks. : )

Contributions are welcome (and probably necessary).

Food Shortage Flowchart by www.shorthandlogic.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Sources:

• Keith Bradsher, Andrew Martin, Shortages Threaten Farmers’ Key Tool: Fertilizer.
  NYTimes.com. April 30, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/business/worldbusiness/30fertilizer.html
• BBC News, Q&: Rising World Food Prices. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7340214.stm

We went up on Thursday (Apr. 3) for the 9 o’clock Jicks concert. Malkmus was amazing of course; playing a set comprised mainly of songs off of the Jicks new album, Real Emotional Trash. They played for upwards of 2(!) hours, including a 4 song encore.

As we arrived it could be heard that John Vanderslice had already begun. Rebecca and Alex had to leave us at the front gate and go find Rebecca’s ID.

It’s a little strange that I’ve praised Vanderslice for so many years (being a fan of his older stuff, I can’t profess a knowledge of his entire works) and was ultimately let down by… I don’t know what to call it. Frilly arm waving, an attempt at something great by playing a poignant acoustic set in the middle of the audience (no offense but it sounded quite amateurish) left me with a sense of being cheated. The man is a great lyricist and can produce some amazing songs/sounds from within the studio but the bravado he performed with on Thursday was a few motions short of retarded.

I’m surfing the web on the New York Thruway Authorities free wifi.

Also enjoying a Half-Caf / Grande / Soy / Caramel Macchiatto w/whip.

(Long drive)

Yesterday I was overjoyed to read this interview with British scholar and TED lecturer Susan Blackmore. Thank you Wired for bundling three of my greatest passions; technology, anthropology and philosophy into one neat little article. Of course this is just breaking the ground on the subject. As a species we’ve only just begun to explore the function we play in relation to the balance of the Universe.

For those of you who didn’t bother to read the article:

A meme is an idea or thing that is passed from person to person and is either adopted for its usefulness or other purpose — in some cases becoming a wildly popular idea that can’t be stopped — or abandoned to die a quick and ignoble death. A meme can be a song or snippet of a song, a dance, an urban legend, an expression or behavior, a product brand or even a religion.

The meme that is the meme is not new, Richard Dawkins first proposed the term over 30 years ago in his book The Selfish Gene.

The idea that Blackmore proposes is that, fundamentally, ideas evolve the same way as biological beings do:

The whole idea of a meme is that it’s information that is copied with variation and selection. So any idea that is copied from person to person is a meme. But an idea that you think up for yourself and is not expressed is not a meme. The emphasis has to be on copying, because that’s what makes evolution possible. Lots of ideas are never copied at all. They just go to a couple people and then they fizzle out.

Honestly, the way Blackmore goes on to describe memes is a bit creepy. She gives them virus like qualities, and makes them out to be living organisms inhabiting the human mind. Just as our bodies could not exist without the symbiotic relationship of our organs and the living cells and systems they are composed of, the meme could not exist outside of the human mind.

From a philosophical perspective it seems that the shortsightedness of this feeling is that we are wholly unaware how we are tethered to the larger whole. We consider ourselves individual beings but if you back the camera up we make up as a whole, humanity. Backing up some more you could see our existence as just one piece of consciousness, etc.. For all of our differences we could not exist without the whole.

Throughout history we have tried to understand why, but the meat of our existence lies simply in doing. There is nothing to gain from questioning because we will always do what we are naturally inclined to do.

Therein lies the danger of memes. They lead toward a direction we ultimately have no control over, that is the viral nature of the beast. But then again, danger is just the idea of supposed harm.

Gah!

Somehow I feel it all involves our aversion to pain.

Making music by yourself is awful lonely. =\

As a ‘response’ this post is a tad divergent, I’m simply running the narrative as it plays out in my head.

Read Are Wold’s post on seperating storage from the web.

I spend more than a third of my day on the computer and half of that on the internet. Recently I find myself slavishly logging my self and my soul into a couple of social sites I will leave unnamed.

Okay, okay -

Facebook for one. They are now serving up ads and letting companies slyly slip ads in between recent picture of my drunk friends and the relationship status of some near stranger and their significant other.

(If AIM users could be considered stalkers Facebook users could be called voyeurists.)

If this is the new face of communication, it isn’t what one would expect. Really, why would initiatives like OpenID’s be important if the web community lets conglomerates like Digg, Facebook and Myspace construct the framework for our existence?

Why can’t users sell their content to companies who push it live onto the web? What if the company subscribes to the users? Any front end publisher like Facebook or Amazon makes money off it’s users. It is undeniable that these folks provide the service but we have a choice. With the wide-open availability of software, web-hosting and an audience users will find multiple services to suit their basic needs. Where once the web was singular it is now divided.

Large sites with many users that are riding on the wave of the Web2.0 boom are benefitting from a following of passionate users who are also developers. If a user voices their opinion or need in the forum or the comment section of any given site and an individual with the privelage or know-how (read: professional or hobbyist developer working with a sites API for example) creates a module, plugin, hack, theme or whatever you would like to call it the website and it’s publisher gain from the creative, thoughtful or necessary discussion by it’s users.

It is the users who are doing the work why should anyone be rewarded for owning a piece of code? Code enables users to exchange property, handshakes, dinner plans… energy, where they would normally be denied because of distance/time but without the need of the users there would be nothing. The ‘magic moment’ happens when two users reach out and exchange exchange a piece of information. In instances like Facebook and MySpace it is the users who gives value and purpose to . It is the users of Facebook and Myspace who give value and purpose to the community and it’s sponsors.

LET US NOT FORGET THE VALUE OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY.

The RIAA reminds us over and over again that individuals own the words on the radio. On the web everyone is broadcasting.

This is the Open Source movement.

Sorry for the rant. I’m not sure what the purpose is, I’m a measly code monkey with a little free time tonight. I will add thoughts as they happen. Maybe if I’m motivated later I’ll turn this into something more than a chaotic mess. Piss in the snow in the comments section. Thanks.

Last Edited February 21st 9:50pm.

There is no other way to say it. Holy cow is this thing fast! I am currently testing Webkit build r30090 (DMG download link) against standard Leopard Safari 3.04. This unoptimized WebKit build version is running circles around the standard Safari browser. It isn’t even close.

Webkit is the Open Source project that Apple’s Safari is built around. From what I can tell it’s a hell of a lot faster than Firefox and Safari. I haven’t tested it on Windows but it is available!

WebKit is an open source Web content engine for browsers and other applications. We value real-world web compatibility, standards compliance, stability, performance, security, portability, usability, and relative ease of understanding and modifying the code (hackability).
[Webkit Project Goals]

The entire site has a cool Web 2.0 feel but that isn’t just pretty, it is actually useful.

I’m not posting this because I have some beef with Firefox, but I enjoy the freedom to choose and I do notice a significant difference between the stripped down Webkit browser and my copies of Firefox and Safari. That being said, stripped down is the correct phrase seeing as I have Greasemonkey and Firebug installed in Firefox.

Still I use Firefox on my Mac because it is faster than Safari and does what I need it to.

While it is exciting to contribute to the project by downloading the nightly build these sorts of projects don’t come with a warranty. What I mean is, neither Webkit nor myself are responsible for anything that happens to your computer if you decide to try this out. Personally, I won’t be managing my bank account or checking my email (I have Mail.app for that) with the Webkit browser but y’know to each his or her own.

Edit: Unfortunately there is some tedium involved in running Webkit on Windows. More information can be found at “Installing the Developer Tools“. If anyone gets Webkit running on XP or Vista would be kind and leave a comment? Thanks.

The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images.

[Read more @ the Library of Congress Blog] [Here our some words from Flickr]

These photo’s are free of restrictions (for now?) which gives me butterflies because these pictures are hot!

The LOC is providing a great public service by integrating with Flickr and letting the community sort through the archives. Users are definitely enjoying themselves. (Hover over the image and view the notes - okay maybe it’s not that funny but it made me chuckle at 10:41am.)

Here is some documentation from the LOC’s “Prints & Photographs Reading Room” on Copyright and Other Restrictions. In case you were wondering “[the] Library is unaware of any lawsuits involving the use of its historical images“.