Intelligence Weekly: Music

The philosopher in me likes to ruminate on programming as a form of art. I love to see bits of code--something that looks like nothing to the uninitiated eye--shaped into a thing that looks nothing like the parts of its sum and something that we can all, understanding or no, benefit from. I find comfort in relating programming paradigms to axioms of life and consciousness. I rest in the order of such mathematical languages and their intrinsic beauty.

So often in social situations, I feel sensations of grief at the inadequacy of words. I wish that I could tell you something like

for(x = 0; x < infinity; ++x)

     System.out.println(x);

and you would know with unquestionable certainty not only the meaning, but also you would feel what was contained therein. And there would be nothing unspoken between us. But then again, I would probably lament that too, somehow. We run such complex applications.

Music, like programming, provides the succor that I seek in what otherwise feels akin to chaos. I'm pleased that technology has made it possible for us to make it, to make it more than it was before, and to share it as we do. It's our endless struggle to nail down a feeling and to express what may always be tacit and unutterable.

I think I'll always try, in my simple way, to say what I know can't actually be said. The cost of being here is the insurmountable obstacle of being separate with the inherent desire to connect. It's terribly painful, but I'm enjoying it all the same.

Intelligence Weekly: IMAlive

Image by f-l-e-x via Flickr

When I was a child, I would sometimes lie in bed at night and speak the mantra "I am alive" to myself over and over until I was able to conceive the strange sensation of my mortality. I still do this practice from time to time, and I think it helps me to remember that whatever might be happening at that moment in my life is impermanent.

IMAlive is a website dedicated to being present for people in moments of crisis. Certified volunteers are available for immediate chat with anyone who is seeking someone to reach out to for help. Thanks to the beautiful internet, and a thousand willing strangers, a half-hour chat can be a life-affirming beacon for a person who has lost hope.

Intelligence Weekly: New Ways of Working

In keeping with my strong tradition of lists, here are some things that make the large corporate office working environment sucky:

• You have to travel to get there
• There are people who steal food out of the fridge and lotion bottles from atop desks
• There always seems to be a droning noise in a room filled with cubicles
• The lighting is generally atrocious
• There are lots of, let's say, personalities to deal with
• For some reason, it's hot or cold as hell
• You feel like Big Brother is constantly watching you
• It is difficult to maintain focus on work with so many distractions
• Bathroom: poo and booger smears (What is up with that?!)
• Equipment shared by hundreds of people tends to break frequently
• You must be extremely mindful of conversation topics, the width of your tank-top straps, what your T-shirt says, whether your shoes could be classified as flip-flops, and whether the minutia of your actions might be abusing the company in some way or offending someone who sits a few feet away from you

Although I tend to fare well in a large office environment, it's definitely not my most preferred working situation. Sometimes it can feel a bit as if you're being herded like cattle. Thanks to technology, the limitations of where and how work can occur are gradually diminishing, and the nature and structure of work are changing in ways that people like me will be able to utilize in order to flourish.

Thanks to technology, small business is booming. New ideas are cropping up, and offices are able to keep staff streamlined and to create well-honed teams of people who work well together. I can assure you that as a developer, I will be looking for privacy and quiet in order to produce at my very best. Check out Fog Creek Software for a fine example of a company who is taking this idea to heart.

Teleworking is becoming increasingly common and can save a company quite a bit of money, as well as improve the quality of life for employees who would otherwise need to commute. Not to mention the potential for being able to work in one's pajamas. I submit that this would significantly enhance the quality and productivity of my work. Wink.

I also recently discovered the concept of Co-working, which is a situation in which a group of independent contractors share a work space. Although the concept isn't exactly new, this community method of working is newly available to many people in the tech field. I love this concept, and I hope to do some freelance developing in such a community someday. 

Check out New Work City for a New York based example of how co-working happens.

Intelligence Weekly: Technology For Liberty

Tonight I read this article on Huffington Post. Apparently Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) officials in San Fran got a hot tip that a protest was set to occur, and they decided to cut cellular communications in order to prevent people from coordinating a potentially dangerous gathering.

Lately there has been a great deal of discussion on the subject of technology being used to promote liberty, in light of the Arab Spring. Check out this article on the impact and relevance of social media during the uprisings.

After reading the HuffPo article about BART, I browsed some of the comments to see how others felt about the situation. As one can expect when reading any comments related to a politically charged situation, the reactions were very polarized. I did hit a link from one of the indignant reactors that took me to the source of my inspiration for this post: a YouTube video of Naomi Wolf speaking to an audience about her book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. I highly encourage you to follow the link and watch the video. Over 1 million people have seen it--a testament to technology for the preservation and promotion of liberty--and I feel it's such important subject matter for anyone who cares about the fundamental liberty that we stand to lose.

Intelligence Weekly: Post Secret

"Secret" has many meanings. For the purpose of this blog, I am referring to personal knowledge--pleasant or unpleasant--that an individual hides within himself.

"Secrets make you sick." Alcoholics Anonymous uses the phrase to encourage members to divulge secret stressors that contribute to their addictions. Secrets--especially those that are particularly emotionally impactful or those that we feel we must not discuss--can easily lead to obsession in one form or another. Likewise, happy secrets can be nearly impossible to conceal. They affect our moods and our manner of interacting with and perceiving the world around us.

It is difficult to deny that secrets affect us all on a very primary level. Ages old wisdom encourages that we write them down. In our modern, technical era, we can share our secret joys and burdens at Post Secret.

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

I partake every Sunday. As for my own secrets, my canine companion, Bear, knows them all.

Inspiration acknowledgement for today's message goes to Radiolab's April 9, 2007 episode on Stress.

Check out this APS Observer article: The Science Behind Secrets by Eric Jaffe.

Intelligence Weekly: reCAPTCHA

Each week I plan to include a fascinating fact that underscores how we use technology in creative ways (sometimes without realizing it) to enhance our lives!

If you're a frequent denizen of the Interwebz--and if you're here, I know that you are--you may have recently encountered (and been annoyed by) a verification widget while using a website. A verification widget is that pesky box with words or data that you must type in correctly (even though it's all mashed together and there's the Web equivalent of paint splatter and debris strewn across it) to verify that you're a human and not a bot. See the image below, for example. The purpose of this exercise is to cut down on infuriating spam (the electronic kind, not the meat, per se) in forums, e-mail, social networking sites, etc.

Google offers one of these anti-bot services for free, called reCAPTCHA. If you type words into the reCAPTCHA verification widget, you're actually helping to digitize books and probably saving the planet somehow!

"About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books."

Learn more about reCAPTCHA here.