I just came across a long-winded blog post from a friend I haven’t seen since high school. He’s now in Shanghai, being annoyed by the coarse manners of the locals. Something about his description of the place really resonated with me. It fully explains why I was so much more comfortable in Hanoi than Saigon, for example. Here’s an excerpt:

And i think that’s what drives me to keep looking for cool places to hang out or live. That’s why I love reading about Austin, Portland, Berlin, Buenos Aires, and other meccas for creatives, indies, and dropouts. The act of reading the articles about these places, followed by the act of imagining myself traipsing around these places, is purely fantasy–but that’s what some people are driven by. Maybe “fantasy” is the wrong word: you are driven by the sense that life is still big, and possibilities abound, and that you are free enough to craft, shape, mold that life into something that fits you. You know that you can’t change people (in Shanghai, everywhere) but you dream that there is some kind of place where you can just “fit in.” A place that resonates with you, that somehow possesses the kind of people and culture you need to thrive, to do your work, to relax and enjoy life properly, to lead a good life.

As i just explained, this too is the source of my discontent with China–it’s just too far from my fantasy city-state world where everyone is cosmopolitan and educated, stylish and cultured. Of course, I have never been anywhere that really comes close to that ideal. And even places like Paris and Athens that do come close only do so because I’m viewing them through the rose-colored glasses of the stranger, the one-time tourist. Delve deeper and you’ll no doubt hit a strata of complete asswipes too.

Here’s the full post.

I just got an email about this new citizen journalism site. It looks pretty slick and already has some interesting content from around the world. Getting alternative viewpoints out of China, Iran, or even (at times) the United States is no easy feat, and these guys seem to recognize this.

Check out, for example, their tutorials on how to install Tor on your browser so that you can upload to or browse Demotix without leaving a trail.

Here’s the info from the release:

As many of you already know, my partner Jonathan Tepper and I have launched Demotix, a website for user generated news. Think of it like Flickr or YouTube, but only for original photo/video news taken by freelancers or the man on the street. They/You tell us what is going on, we tell the WWW and the world’s mainstream media. As of today, our site is now live. You can visit us at: www.demotix.com

Why are we doing it?

• Only four US newspapers have foreign news desks (the NY Times, LA Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal), and there are only 141 US foreign correspondents currently working today (in print and broadcast media)
• In the UK, a 2006 study of the broadsheets showed that more than 50% of the news was directly attributable to press releases
• The world’s media (over 90%) relies on the wire services – the Associated Press and Reuters – for their news. But some 80 countries, or 40% of the world’s nations, have no bureau from either agency.

The news is shrinking daily. We hope Demotix can plug that gap, and more. We hope Demotix will bring Web 2.0 to journalism. We hope to be giving a megaphone to the man and woman in the street with a story to tell.

Eventually we hope that Demotix will be THE place where anyone in the world can go, in safety, to upload news – major, minor, local, cultural, political, whatever. Even before launch, we have agreements with the Daily Telegraph, Newsweek, La Repubblica, and others – and will now supply them with a daily wire and picture feed of ‘citizen’ news. We have also built partnerships with Reporters Sans Frontieres, Witness, Global Voices, Committee to Protect Journalists, Committee to Protect Bloggers, Index on Censorship, OpenDemocracy and others. I have just come back from Cuba and Iran where the feedback we received was fantastic.

Please visit our site and let your friends and colleagues know that we exist (even better, pass this email on to everyone in your address book). Ideally, ask your friends who have interesting photographs and videos of great stories to upload them. And bear us in mind for whatever you witness. We need all the help we can get, so if you know anyone we should speak to or anyone who might be of help to us as we launch the start-up, please put us in touch.

Thank you for your help and please visit our site: www.demotix.com

A fake media history from the future: http://idorosen.com/mirrors/robinsloan.com/epic/

It runs about five minutes. The invented histories and news presentation technologies in the 2008-2014 time span are interesting and plausible.

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 Rilke poem, recited by Tim O’Reilly at Web 2.0 as he talked about the great challenges we face (and have always faced) as individuals and as a species. Something for me to hold close:

The Man Watching

by Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

Some more notes:

Sarah Deborah Scranton: Scenes from “The War Tapes”

Filmer of the war tapes, a personal look into the lives of soldiers in Iraq. The presentation achieves this intimacy not only through clips of the documentary, but also through the personal stories of Scranton herself. Wouldn’t it be cool if every polarized political debate be given this context, first?

Robert Wright: How cooperation (eventually) trumps conflict

Moral development, History has a direction. “Non-zero-sum-ness” as the driver for these trends, but also as the thing that links us in negative outcomes as well.

Deborah Gordon: How do ants know what to do?

Contrary to popular belief, ant colonies don’t have any central intelligence. The queen doesn’t control the behavior of the colony through chemical signals. In a series of experiments over the last 20 years, Gordon has demonstrated that colony behavior is fully emergent. Each ant, operating on a small set of rules (e.g. rate of contact with other ants), contributes a tiny part to colony-wide phenomena that ensure the survival of the whole. The experiments she describes are very cool, as are her descriptions of colony life. Ants seem to blur the line around what we designate an individual organism of a species.

Ben Dunlap: The story of a passionate life

In a talk that is more stage performance than lecture, Dunlap weaves a tightly knit story of his mentors. The experiences of all these men (coincidentally, all Hungarian) draw a picture of life well lived, an emergence from suffering with an unshakeable faith in people and a insatiable desire to learn and create.

Pangea Day looks amazing. Trailers for it have been playing after every TED talk for months, now, and I finally clicked over to check it out.

Starting at 18:00 GMT [Note: 11AM on the US west coast] on May 10, 2008, locations in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked for a live program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers. The entire program will be broadcast – in seven languages – to millions of people worldwide through the internet, television, and mobile phones.

Here’s a provocative example:

There will be public and private viewings all over the world, including about twenty in San Francisco:

A great article in the NYT. Long, but worth it. Excerpt:

The premise of the work is simple — get to know your potential customers as well as possible before you make a product for them. But when those customers live, say, in a mud hut in Zambia or in a tin-roofed hutong dwelling in China, when you are trying — as Nokia and just about every one of its competitors is — to design a cellphone that will sell to essentially the only people left on earth who don’t yet have one, which is to say people who are illiterate, making $4 per day or less and have no easy access to electricity, the challenges are considerable.

Thanks, Stephen.

A blast from the (misguided) past:

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

(From Kasima)

The last SF Bike Coalition bulletin had tit-for-tat links to a an SF Chronicle article about how bicyclists are more often at fault for their own injuries and an op-ed response from the SF Bike Coalition. Reading them, I am reminded of the tensions that I myself have with auto drivers during my daily bike commutes.

From what I’ve experienced, these tensions tend to arise because bicyclists and drivers have different assumptions about what proper use of the road entails. For example, when I’m riding on a bike, it seems like common sense (i.e. when considering safety) that I don’t need to stop at stop signs if there is no cross traffic. On a bike, I can stop on a dime. I have more than 160 degrees of peripheral vision and unobstructed lines of sight and sound. I can tell if there is traffic is coming or not, and if there isn’t, there’s no common sense reason why I shouldn’t just keep riding.

Some drivers (a minority) seem to be angered by this. They will accelerate past me, getting real close (though still at a safe distance - one doesn’t have a very good sense of the space around your car, from the inside.) They will very occasionally honk or even roll windows down to yell at me. I just try to smile back. This one man even got angry enough that he ran into an intersection out of turn (at Sixth and Harrison) and ran into another car that had right of way. I did my best to suppress my schadenfreude on that one.

From what I can tell, this behavior comes from the driver’s thought of “Hey, I obey traffic laws, why shouldn’t bikers?” I understand this to some degree. If I ever get pulled over for running a stop sign on a bike, I won’t argue. I broke the law and I’ll take the ticket. In my opinion, though, the law should reflect common sense. I drive way less often than I bike, but even so, it’s clear that in my lifetime I’m much more likely to hurt someone while driving a car than while riding a bike. After all, traffic laws exist to regulate the flow of cars which are so often the source of injuries, whether or not bikes are involved.

In any case, this thought has been knocking around in my head for a while. Today’s articles finally prompted me to search around for what other people think. On the BCLU (Bicycle Civil Liberties Union) site, I hit the jackpot. That page has no less than sixteen well-reasoned arguments for why bicycles should operate under different traffic laws. The most interesting thing I read there, however, was the fact that Idaho and and Montana already have these common sense laws on the books. For example:

MOTOR VEHICLES CHAPTER 7 PEDESTRIANS AND BICYCLES

49-720. STOPPING — TURN AND STOP SIGNALS.

(1) A person operating a bicycle or human-powered vehicle approaching a stop sign shall slow down and, if required for safety, stop before entering the intersection. After slowing to a reasonable speed or stopping, the person shall yield the right-of-way to any vehicle in the intersection or approaching on another highway so closely as to constitute an immediate hazard during the time the person is moving across or within the intersection or junction of highways, except that a person after slowing to a reasonable speed and yielding the right-of-way if required, may cautiously make a turn or proceed through the intersection without stopping.

(2) A person operating a bicycle or human-powered vehicle approaching a steady red traffic-control signal shall stop before entering the intersection, except that a person after slowing to a reasonable speed and yielding the right-of-way if required, may cautiously make a right-hand turn without stopping or may cautiously make a left-hand turn onto a one-way highway without stopping.

Basically, bicycles are to treat stop signs as yield signs and red lights as stop signs. Which, as it turns out, is already the social norm in San Francisco amongst bikers (and the way that I myself ride.) If only we could get this on the books, here, we could have a much better understanding between drivers and bicyclists, not to mention making roads safer and more efficient for everyone.