On the idea of this matter of influence of desires and beliefs, it is possible to build an endless construction of beliefs and desires about beliefs and desires.

Favorite succinct comment from the article: I posit that free will does not exist. . 1.) All that exists in the universe is comprised of matter and/or energy. 2.) Nothing that exists outside the universe can affect anything that exists within. 3.) All interactions of matter and energy, including on the quantum scale, are governed by immutable laws, whether these laws are known or unknown. 4.) Consciousness is a product of interactions between matter and energy within the brain subject to the aforementioned laws. If one accepts the enumerated statements above as true, then the only logical conclusion is that the fate of every individual in history, and indeed that of every particle of matter in the universe, was irrevocably fixed at the very moment the universe was first conceived.

Moreover, the Flash plugin has historically been a resource hog. When I was doing more Flash development a few years ago, some fellow developers and I figured out that we could actually get the fan in a Pentium machine to turn on by running certain Flash scripts. What that means is Flash is eating up resources on the CPU at a ridiculous rate and heating up the chip. For Apple’s iPhone that would translate into both heat and lowered battery life. My bet, is that they want people to get used to the idea that the iPhone has great battery life and doesn’t heat up in your pocket. Then, when they do introduce Flash, consumers will more likely be aware of who is the correct party to blame when playing Desktop Tower Defense kills their iPhone.

I don’t really understand this criticism on several levels. The first problem is the idea that it’s a problem that 2% of Lulu’s titles are really supporting the other 98%. Perhaps you aren’t aware of how publishing companies, music labels and movie studios operate. They look for what they think will be hits, fund them, and hope that some of them make money. Most of them don’t. Most bands don’t get re-signed after a sophomore album. Lots of movies don’t make money. Thousands of (published) books never sell more than a few thousand copies before they go out-of-print—and some of those still win Pen/Faulkner and Pulitzer awards. The only thing that Lulu has done is turn the filtering process of what is successful over to audiences—the market decides. This puts the responsibility of marketing squarely on the shoulders of authors.

I don’t see anything wrong with that. Real creative work is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. So yeah, authors who are apathetic or uninterested in taking their work to the next level aren’t going to do well, but then, they never were, and you can’t blame Lulu for that. As for how the 2% are getting screwed by Lulu because they’re not switching to a POD or a “real” publisher; again, I just don’t see the problem. You keep the rights to the book. Market your work. Put it in the hands of reviewers, sell it, have a copy on you at all times. Use Lulu to organically build a fan base. Then, take your numbers to a small publisher and show them that if they opt-in on your next book, you come with a built-in audience. Lulu’s not going to stop you. But as opposed to traditional publishers, the onus to market your work is on you. And you know, if you talk to a lot of published authors you’ll find out that it’s not as if there was ever a guarantee that traditional publishers were ever going to do that good a job of marketing your book. Author’s will (even with traditional publishing) always have a responsibility to curate and sell their work (provided you care about having a career as such).

Mark Ruffalo and Martin Sheen and George Carlin are all men that I respect and admire for their talent. But they are not engineers, architects, and physicists. I respect your right to question the government’s investigation, but where here on your site are the opinions of professionals with valid arguments against the facts as they currently stand?

I really don’t think the 9/11 truth movement does itself any good at all by trying to change the physical facts of what happened. If you believe that someone was behind it, pursue who you think was responsible; but stop reducing the travesty of the event by claiming that it was something other than what it was. Calls came off those planes—to friends and loved ones. There were witnesses to these crimes who testified just before losing their lives. There were men on those planes who steered them into the towers. If you believe those men were paid by our government or secretly given access with weapons to the planes, that’s one thing. Publishing nonsense about missiles and cockpits being empty or how Hollywood stars don’t understand structural engineering isn’t helping your cause any.

Some of you may have noticed how quiet it’s been around Banapana lately (for about the last month). I am now prepared to reveal the reason why. I have been spending the last few weeks preparing my novel, “Carousel Cowboy,” for indpendent publication with Lulu. I’m currently in the typesetting stage, the cover is designed, and things look good for hitting my September 22nd deadline. I’m actually glad I went the independent route because it’s given me the freedom to do some things that I don’t think traditional publishers are quite ready to stick their necks out to do.

First and foremost, the entire book will be available on my fiction blog Troped. Secondly, many of the parts that were cut from the book will still be available on the blog. As you can see from the cover design, an email for the book’s narrator is prominent. That puts everyone who buys the book in direct contact with me, which I very much want to be the case. And finally, since the parts of the book and the blog coincide (the book is structured around posts as opposed to chapters) people can comment on the book by going to the blog entry of the same name and making their comments there. ((I’m not quite through posting it in its entirety. That will take another month or so. And it won’t be in the same order as the book until I implement a timeline function on the blog in a little while.)) Last but not least, publishing it myself allows me to release it under a Creative Commons license—same as the blog—reflecting my stance on copyright law. So stay tuned. ((And sign up for an email notification if the book’s release over at Troped.))

So Gen X were slackers and Gen Y are kickin’ it? There are some nice statistics on Steven Johnson’s blog that show that our new Web medium is encouraging participation and entrepreneurship. Kids rule! —give them video games. And maybe Johnson is right in his tome “Everything Bad is Good For You” that this development has more to do with a generation that has grown up with interactive mediums (i.e. video games and the web) than a generation that grew up with a passive medium (i.e. television).

On a slightly related note, Mr. Johnson just came down here to Clemson to give the opening talk to the freshman class, who were required to read “The Ghost Map” over the summer as their first assignment as Clemson University students. I’ve seen Steven Johnson speak before up in New York, and his style (and level of nervousness) have really improved. I thought the points that he made about what went into the book were enlightening beyond the text, and from what I’ve gathered from the faculty here, there are quite a few students who now intend to go into sanitation engineering—you know, at least for the next 14 months or so. Freshman—you’ve gotta’ love ‘em.

I have to confess that I have not read “The Ghost Map” just yet—still slogging through Pinker’s Book (and being made fun of by the rest of the Psychology department for it). But even without reading it, I suspect it may be one of his better books. I’ve read them all, with the exception of said historical narrative, and the last two, Mind Wide Open and Everything Bad is Good For You had the information but not insight—the big insight. I don’t know how else to put that. Both Interface Culture and Emergence literally changed my world view. They influenced where I was heading with my own academic pursuits.

Let’s put it this way, great ideas are obvious after the fact. Once you see all the connections, it just becomes very obvious to you, that yes, this is the way things work or function. And I have to say that having worked with computer interfaces all my early adult life, I was still surprised when Johnson pointed out just how much influence the GUI had on society. It was astounding, and I think most people still don’t realize the impact. And it was equally astounding when he revealed how simple automatons could create immensely complex systems. I am still influenced by that particular work when I look at something like Danny Hillis’ Freebase.

Of course, Johnson isn’t inventing any of these theories or ideas. A lot of people complained in the case of Emergence that he really hadn’t explained the matter of emergence deeply enough. ((Although his critics all equally failed to explain what exactly they themselves were talking about)) But the critics really miss the point here, and it’s something he discusses in interface culture (somewhat) and discussed a great deal in his lecture. We live in a world of experts, and we need synthesists—people who don’t just understand the theories of the day, but that can reach across disciplines and what he calls the Long Zoom in order to pull these theories together and find revelations in the matrix of the information. I do think he generally accomplishes that. It would appear (from my mother and father’s reactions to the book) that he also did that with The Ghost Map.

My father is a mathematician here at Clemson, and I used to look at my father’s generation and think that we really needed more people like Steven Johnson, synthesists who would pull the data together. But something else that Johnson mentions in Emergence about the web has gotten me thinking slightly differently. My father’s generation really did need big visionaries who could see across wide swaths of disciplines, but this next generation, growing up on the web—they all have that ability already. Granted, watching them use Facebook in the library, I’m not particularly given over to a utopian optimism about the future of science, but you have to think that the nature of an interactive medium in the lives of these young scientists is going to make them a lot more aware of what is going on elsewhere in their discipline and in science in general. And that will make them synthesists inherent.

I also think the suit is really off the mark because it is utterly beside the point that Facebook has created a social-networking site. Been there, done that. What facebook has managed to do, that no other web site has, is create an intersite applications platform. Even now, as I post this, on my own blog, on my own server, this post is being injected into my Facebook news feed via the awesome Wordbook plugin. It turns out to be a dynamite way to update your friends about your blog. ((I’ve always felt that an email list was just too intrusive)) Perhaps that sounds trivial, but intersite networking through web service APIs is a good chunk of the future of the web. Some folks call it the mashup for short. ((Intersite web service API networking application is such a ridiculous phrase, it would probably net you $100,000 from a VC if you had the balls to say it in front of one.)) The mashup is one thing, establishing a site where regular non-coder folks can essentially create their own mashup page is why you should head over to the Yahoo Buzz Market and buy some Facebook shares. And if they ever go public, they’d be a pretty good real stockmarket bet too.