Here’s a Nokia ad that hit all the right buttons, for me. It’s in keeping with the emerging cultural storyline that we now have, that the broadcast media of the twentieth century were a cultural blip in human development, and that technology’s ongoing development will now return us to the weird, deeply human world that we inhabited before.

We’ll see.

A couple items from my Flickr feed. The first is a photo of a landfills taped to all the trash cans at work. The second is my long-lost license got returned to me when someone simply dropped it, loose, into a mailbox.

I wonder if there’s a better way to integrate blog-like images into my actual blog…

Landfill Portal,
originally uploaded by Nargopolis.

License Reappears,
originally uploaded by Nargopolis.

This piece about Lessig’s new Change Congress movement articulates the difference:

The vast majority of interest groups in Washington, from the Sierra Club to the AFL-CIO to Planned Parenthood, are pursuing what Edsall calls “substantive reform”–attempting to push legislation and enact policies that will provide public goods, protect citizens from harm and redistribute benefits, rights and privileges away from the powerful and toward middle-class citizens and disenfranchised minorities. Then there’s a small cluster of about a dozen groups–Public Campaign, the Center for Responsive Politics and the Sunlight Foundation–that focus on procedural reform.

I just started learning Muay Thai (Thai kickboxing) last summer. Most of these months have been with Mark and Alexis Mian’s Alter Center (Mark is the one training me in this video.) Watching myself is very humbling, since I’m used to watching much more experienced (and fit) fighters training; I look nothing like them. I get tired very quickly. So much of my coordination, balance, and technique go out the window a minute or two into each round.

That being said, I love this training. It feels right to my body, and the movements come to me steadily, week by week.

Instructables moved to its new location in SOMA, today. From now on, I’ll be doing five-minute bike rides to and from work and two-minute walks to Alter Center, where I do my kickboxing.

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