{ 2003.06.12 } There was barter. Then money came along to create barter at a distance. Abstracting bartering. But capitalism gamed money and used it for its own sake: hording, dumping goods; traderoutes, monopolies. Creates money rich and money poor. Could this happen with social exchange? Look at transactional analysis and strokes. If you abstract the stroke barter - ratemypicture et al/ instant messaging - then you create some kind of floating stroke that can move about. Take advantage of it? Amass it, game the system?

Look at something when you're walking, double blink at it/ Your higher brain shuts down until you're there (although you'll "wake" if something needing your attention happens in the meantime)/ Why?/ Maybe people discover that your lifespan is measured by how much of your higher brain you use/ synaptic telomeres/ and they want to preserve it. So: Cultural phase change. It's rude to interrupt people/ Everyone leaves messages/ Talking becomes more like email, IM, completely asynchronous. But this is how to start floating above the time-, space-bound social substrate, how to start abstracting the social exchange, which creates the money-like strokes/ And gives you celebrity.

{ 06.11 } Imagine a telic version of Chinese Whispers, not in a circle but down a line and back again. Originator asks a question which gets mutated. How does the answer get mutated on the way back?

Instead of a factual question, how about a collaborative one. "Everyone flip a coin. How many people got heads?"

What is the literate analogue of Chinese Whispers? Where is the written word lossy compression and decompression?

{ 06.10 } We should be able to sink storage piles in the ground. When you move house, you should go down into the basement and stick a giant spike into the earth, hook it up to your network, and the planet acts as a giant hard drive. With a finger, press the soil next to the spike and touch it to your mouth, and it would feel like damp and acidy, like licking a battery. And why do hard drives spin? It's cosmetic, surely, no other reason but that and that alone. Imagine, then, kilometer long stacks driven into the crust, spinning to store petabytes and petabytes, stabilisers for civilisation. There's a chemistry word for this, um: a buffer. They'd be gigantic buffers of knowledge, gyroscopes tying humanity to geology, guarding against collapse, steadying us but actively maintained (human ants scurrying to look after these things that bridge physical scales); part of the planet itself, and on that scale really like only a gentle fine mesh, hanging on by the finger tips, but each tip, to stand up, spinning.

{ } From D&G's A Thousand Plateaus [thanks Theo] so far, I've been most taken with the concepts of territorialization and deterritorialization. I've talked before about push and pull - from queue theory - as alternative ways of exploring a landscape. With pull, the landscape tugs at each step -- progress is blind, as with evolution. Push is goal-directed. D&G take a different cut across this and focus on two opposed dynamics. That is, a blend of push+pull has two different local outcomes (by local, I mean not just the portion that is exploring, but its whole area). These are territorialization (which maps fairly neatly to adaptation, in the simplest case) and deterritorialization, which I find way more interesting.

Exaptation, "from, so to speak, one aptness to another", is: the feathers of birds previously used for retaining heat being turned to flight. Or, (the example in ATP), humanity's move to the steppe allowing the larynx - that once had to be large to make noises to be heard in the forest - to be used for more subtle purposes, like speech. This is deterritorialization (and reterritorialization). It's an object becoming part of the landscape, something being taken for granted, the following iteration of a pull step where feathers also become secondary sexual characteristics, items in myth, duvet filling, figures of speech, quills. Or it's when (in Kuhn) a rogue scientific structure gets internalised and becomes the paradigm.

(Of course, I may have this all wrong. But who cares. ATP is fun(ny). It's laugh-out-loud witty in places. And it's really nice to have things sketched in my head so I don't realise they're appearing until they're there. Even if they are the wrong shape.)

{ } Unsolicited idea. Since BlogRolling already gives you more-or-less a buddy list, there should be a way to set Available and Away messages (or even Currently Listening To). Architecture: Tiny file on your server that can be updated by a standalone app or integrated into a weblogging tool (link the file to the weblog by autodiscovery, like RSS). The file should contain messages for each type, plus an extensible mechanism for filtering/fallthrough (eg, a certain message to appear on the blogrolls belonging to people also listed on your blogroll, and a default message otherwise). The small issue of extra traffic is mitigated (to a degree) by the centralised nature of the BlogRolling (or similar) service.

{ } Some Mac OS X apps.

• MacMerc's column on More Menu Extras points to tvMenu which shows your local tele in a menu, and can alert you when a selected show is going to start. Nice! Shame it's US only ("A worldwide version is currently being developed" -- XMLTV might be worth a look for that. I use it for my own tiny tele listing app).
• Acquisition [thanks Tom C] is a Gnutella client with a lovely interface. It works really well with iTunes: when a track's finished downloading, it adds it to your music library, and pops it in the Acquisition playlist so you can find it. Oh, and it's dead easy to use, with subtle hints to show you what's going on, and where.
• It's difficult to decide on the coolest thing about Ask the DJ [via mrbarrett]. Not only does it automatically figure out BPMs to your tracks, not only does it then magically mix them together, all the while talking nicely with iTunes... But it looks like a CD. Plus the cartoon lady dances when the music's on.

This is why iTunes comes with the OS, isn't it? So that apps it would be nice to work with a music app/library actually do work with a music app/library, because the API is known.

{ } An Introduction to Reverse Polish Notation [kind of via sippey]. The first calculator I ever used was RPN (my dad had an HP one), which was much more in line with how maths was taught at school. The first time I used a conventional calculator (a Casio which was a present to my mum), the button order was very confusing. Some see alsos...

• Harold Thimbleby's calculator resources [thanks Owen Massey] is a collection of his papers and lectures on calculator history and design. He argues that the interface is needlessly complex, and a modeless interface is a good alternative. There's an implementation of this, as a Mac OS X application.
• Neville Holmes' Truth and Clarity in Arithmetic (in IEEE Computer, February 2003, but unfortunately available for purchase only if you're not a subscriber) argues for calculators more suited for counting operations, not floating point ones. This is more in line with basic numeracy, he says, and then proposes a different set of keys -- hard to explain here, I wish the pdf was online so I could point to it. (But Holmes has footnotes to his column online.)
• Gizmodo's top gadgets of 1983 [thanks Tom C].

Enough! Enough!