Considering the other day’s post, I thought I would post something a little less flame-y and defensive.  My interest in information does actually go further than only making debate against those who have a differing opinion.  I’ve been working on a work to be entitled “This is Information” that I imagine to be a kind of unification of the concepts of information between physics, communication theory, artificial intelligence, psychology, design, and various other disciplines.  There are a lot of varying concepts on the subject of information, which should come as a surprise to no one given we are only still in the dawn of this “third wave” of civilization.  A project that pulls it all together has seemed to me like a good use of time for a while now, so without further ado, I present the introductory section to the chapter on entropy and anentropy:

Consider a simple glass. It is not a complex object in shape. And it is not relatively complex into terms of its materials. To simplify it, we can just say that a glass is made out of sand. But that’s not all that makes a glass. To construct a glass requires energy. It also requires information. The glassmaker must know the temperature to heat the glass to, how to cool it, and numerous other things. The more complex the structure of the glass, the more the glassmaker must know. But the information is not transferred to the glass. The energy it takes to sustain the glassmaker, the energy his motions require, that energy is transferred to the glass. Gradually, if that glass were left on a sandy beach somewhere, natural forces would tear it apart. We call this increase in disorder in the universe entropy. Glasses tend to shatter and not form themselves from nothing. It is as if the natural resting state of the universe is total disorder and randomness and everything is moving in that direction. Everything except the glassmaker, that is.

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I’m coming out of the novel-preparation-stasis today just to post a real quick note about a talk that I just saw Cory Doctorow give at Clemson. His presentation was fantastic. I had been expecting a somewhat understated “nerdy” talk, but not at all—the issue of copyright history and reform is clearly where his passion lies. I was amazed that he kept up the pace and energy that he did for the entire hour. Beyond that, he managed to draw some wildly clear connections that, though I’ve read quite a bit about the issue before, I had never noticed before. The talk was just rife with fantastic information and anecdotes, and he was even nice enough to answer a copyright question I had about my own work. Probably, the highlight of the talk, though, was that after championing the creative commons and railing against our current copyright regime, one of the audience members asked him if he knew he was being videotaped. He responded by saying that he was glad to see it, and that “for the record I release” the audience, the university, etc. to a resounding round of applause. Nice to see someone put their money where their mouth is these days. I pledge allegiance to the creative commons.

It’s one of those things that is questionable ethically, but unfortunately the matter is just not covered by the law. Mark Zuckerburg, of Facebook founder fame, is getting sued by several old classmates who say that he stole their idea. From the stories, I’d say it looks like he did, but personally, I take an ideas-are-free stance on this. In fact, I don’t think patents should be issued unless there is a functioning prototype, not vaporware. Getting a patent should be about investing the time and energy into making an invention work, not just thinking of it. I mean, after all, even Edison said that success was 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. I think the perspiration should be rewarded.

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.