Monthly Archive for June, 2008

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Annonymity and Secrets Online: Postsecret on Facebook

Published by Taylor on June 8, 2008 in Facebook, Privacy and Social Networks. View Comments

I’ve been reading Postsecret regularly for a few years now. I always get excited when a new batch of secrets pops up in my Google Reader window on Sundays. For those who don’t know, Postsecret is a community art project of sorts consisting of anonymous postcards mailed to the curator (for lack of a better term), Frank Warren. Warren picks out about 20 postcards from the week’s mail and posts scanned images onto the Postsecret site every Sunday. The postcards detail secrets ranging from hysterical to neurotic; tragic to troubling. Warren has produced a series of books filled with Postsecret postcards, and regularly speaks at college campuses about the unique project.

Recently, Warren started a Facebook page for the Postsecret project. Every week, he posts a photo album full of new secrets (beyond what’s posted on the blog), and (unlike on the Postsecret blog, where commenting is disabled) many Facebook users comment on the postcards.

This week on Facebook, Warren posted a single secret–one anonymous contributor’s list of “Secrets I Have Never Told To Men I Know.” He then challenged Facebook users: “What are your secrets? Write your list here [...]” Many comments followed, and things got pretty interesting.

One of the constant characteristics of Postsecret has always been the anonymity of submitted secrets. Part of why Postsecret is compelling is that readers generally know nothing about the source of wild or painful secrets. And yet, on Facebook, many readers chose to share secrets with their name and affiliation (High School/University, or location) in the open. I was surprised by what I read in the 2,100+ comments (2,141 as I’m writing this) that accompanied the original secret.

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Bomomo, Yo

Published by Jarred on June 4, 2008 in Art and Contests. View Comments

Bomomo is a really fun, addictive tool created by Philip Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped. It’s an interesting mix of Spirograph, Etch-a-Sketch, and MS Paint… all in a web app. It only works in Firefox for now, but IE users can perhaps look forward to a version for them soon.

Bomomo is pretty self-explanatory, but basically you choose a tool, move your mouse around, and click/hold to paint. Here’s an example of what I came up with about a minute of effort and, obviously, minimal artistic talent. Click on it for a full-resolution view:

Obviously, y’all can do better. To see how creative some of you are, we’re going to run a fun little competition. Create an awesome sketch on Bomono, save it (you’ll see how, it’s the little disk), and e-mail it to us here. Depending on the number we receive, we’ll post either all the entries or just the “best of”, and then get some voting going.

So download Firefox if you don’t use it already, head to Bomomo, and get creative!

The Pace of Human Progress

Published by Jarred on June 4, 2008 in Computing, Health, Humanism and Science. View Comments

Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity

Man… that would be a great name for a band, wouldn’t it? Alas, Mr. Kurzweil – to my knowledge – is not sick nasty at the guitar. He did, however, invent “the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments.”

According to his biography, Ray Kurzweil “has been described as ‘the restless genius’ by the Wall Street Journal, and ‘the ultimate thinking machine’ by Forbes.” He’s part entrepreneur, part inventor, part futurist. He’s been receiving lots of press recently. Why? Because Mr. Kurzweil believes in the coming of the Singularity.

What is the Singularity? According to Kurzweil’s website, it’s:

an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity. In this new world, there will be no clear distinction between human and machine, real reality and virtual reality. We will be able to assume different bodies and take on a range of personae at will. In practical terms, human aging and illness will be reversed; pollution will be stopped; world hunger and poverty will be solved. Nanotechnology will make it possible to create virtually any physical product using inexpensive information processes and will ultimately turn even death into a soluble problem.

Before you dismiss Kurzweil as having watched The Matrix a few too many times, you should understand the logic behind his seemingly preposterous claims.

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Science Matters

Published by Jarred on June 3, 2008 in Asides. View Comments

Brian Greene calls attention to the transformative, inspirational effect that science can have on our lives if we only take the time to explore and understand it. Money quote: “The wonder of the cosmos transcends everything that divides us.” Check it out. – J

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Density, Congestion, and Car Culture

Published by Taylor on June 2, 2008 in Environment, Infrastructure and Sustainability. View Comments

One of my new favorite blogs is Ryan Avent’s site The Bellows. In a post about biking and mass transit in DC, Avent makes a striking statement about density:

Imagine [...] a world where the city established dedicated bus and bike lanes, free from automobile traffic. Imagine that drivers who did want to come into the city had to pay a daily toll, and that the proceeds of that toll went toward increased bus, streetcar, and rail capacity in the city and out into the burbs. Does it not seem that everyone, drivers included, would get where they were going a lot faster? That those without cars would enjoy greater mobility, and that the metro area as a whole would spend a lot less on gas?

Automobiles just weren’t made for the kind of urban density one finds in the District, and it’s incredibly inefficient to just give the streets over to them. At some point, a city reaches a threshold at which it needs to say that cars are welcome, but they’re going to defer to people using other modes of transportation, because we simply can’t afford to accommodate the parking and road space occupied by thousands of single-passenger motor vehicles.

I would love to bike to work, though doing so would necessitate some sort of showers at my office and–in the relatively small city where I live–a death wish as I combat obscene amounts of traffic, no bike lanes, etc.

This is of course an issue of city planning priorities and resources, an unchecked car culture (where 15 minutes waiting in traffic still, for many folks, beats a city bus or a bike ride up a hill), and a host of other factors (like pre-existing narrow streets with scant room for a bike lane). But it’s also, fundamentally, an issue of density.

I have no real wisdom to offer on this subject, but I wanted to highlight Avent’s comments and pose a few questions: What’s the solution for small or mid-size cities that lack the requisite density for these measures to really work? Is that density threshold lower than I imagine? Instead of transportation alternatives, should we be equally concerned with expanding incentives for tele-commuting and satellite work locations?

Image used under a Creative Commons License courtesy of Flickr user bfick.