...possible to glean certain patterns, and one that recurred as regularly as an urban legend was the one about how someone would move into a commune populated by sandal-wearing, peace-sign flashing flower children, and eventually discover that, underneath this facade, the guys who ran it were actually control freaks; and that, as living in a commune, where much lip service was paid to ideals of peace, love and harmony, had deprived them of normal, socially approved outlets for their control-freakdom, it tended to come out in other, invariably more sinister, ways.

Applying this to the case of Apple Computer will be left as an exercise for the reader, and not a very difficult exercise.

from In the Beginning was the Command Line available at:

http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.shtml
and
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

Magnetism:
Electromagnetism:
An electric motor in 10 minutes
Fun with High Voltage
A 10 minute railgun
A 30 second motor
Listening to magnetism
Electrochemistry:
A plastic hydrogen bomb
Building your own solar battery
Building a Hydrogen Fuel Cell
Homemade Batteries
Collecting Chemical Elements
Radio:
A quick and simple radio
Building a radio in 10 minutes
Build a portable crystal radio
A radio out of household items
A simple AM transmitter
The Three-Penny Radio
Thermodynamics:
Aerodynamics:
A Bernoulli levitation ball
A Homemade Vacuum Pump
A Classic Propellor Toy
Light and optics:
Simple laser communicator
Make a solar hotdog cooker
A solar powered marshmallow roaster
Biology:
Extracting DNA in your kitchen
Mathematics:
Kaleidocycles
A Geodesic Dome
A Homemade Microgram Balance
Computers and Electronics:
A Computer Controlled Transmitter
A Free Space Laser Data Transmitter
Fun With Solderless Breadboards
A Simple 1 Watt Amplifier

 * A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database
 * More Python and C# idioms: Finding the difference between two lists
 * To: elmcity, From: @curator, Message: start
 * Restructuring expert attention to revive the lost 
   art of personal customer service
 * Allman Brothers, Oct 14: Huntington or Nashville? 
   A parable about syndication and provenance.
 * Talking with Daniel Debow about using Rypple 
   to open the Johari Window
 * More visualization of Nobel Peace Prize winners in Freebase

• http://www.public.coe.edu/~theller/soj/now/betsey.htm
• I like it because:
• It includes a trip to a worlds fair by train, including hitching a ride
• I know it's 1876
• The principals are like some wonderful women I know
• Reference to Maine's marine/trade heritage
• Spoiler alert:
• Betsy gets a bit of cash from a vistor. She sallies forth, walking to the station but before she get there she hitches a ride on a frieght. At the Philadelphia Centennial she befriends everyone, buys gifts for here friends and comes home.
• This looks like a great site for all things Sarah Orne Jewett

"Instead of lots of people saying, “You know, somebody should … ” there were lots of people saying, “So I did this, this, and this” - Postman pondering Orwellian (control) v Huxlean futures (indifference), media not as means of communication but shaping our conversations - indifference - what do you plan to do (in 1984? nothing) - what's new? What's the difference between classroom and American idol auditions - (dis)engagement? "escaping from the anonymity of modern life" (Henry Canby in 1926!) - Being on the assembly line, existing in suburbia, connected only by roads - a brief history of 'whatever', meh, here we are now, entertain us - generations - narcissism and search for identity (in culture that doesn't give it) - knowing ourselves through relations, new media enabling new conversations, new way of knowing - a new language, remixing Charlie (ouch!): masks, constructing identity - tension between values of individuality and community - we speak video - lets do whatever it takes

Dileep refers to "Bolles' book" I find this work provides a very rich metaphor for my experience of perception and belief.

* is Unix

Jacob Kaplan-Moss

October 7, 2009

JSON ... it's the intersection of all modern programming languages. All languages have some sense of data, and structures of data. They all have simple values like number strings, and booleans. They all have some sense of a sequence of values. ... Every language has some sense of a collection of named values; it might be an object, or a record, or a struct, or a hash, or a property list, or something. All languages have these, these are universal ideas.

... But they all have the same idea about what the data looks like, and JSON has the thing that's common to everything. By being at the intersection, it turns out to be the thing that everybody can agree on, so it's really easy to pass data back and forth.

Prior data interchange formats tended to try to be the union of all the languages, and that turns out to be horrendously complex, and very difficult to deal with. JSON, by being so simple, actually became really easy to use.