I have about 250 contributions to Wikipedia since October 2004. Mostly minor edits, like grammar changes.

I don't believe in free will. I believe in a vast spectrum from cheap to expensive will. You just choose how much psychic energy you want to spend. And even the process of making that choice can be expensive or cheap.

I'm not sure whether our reservoir of psychic energy is unlimited or finite. People under severe torture, for example, consistently don't crack. So that's +1 for the human spirit.

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, click here to download Party Tarot. $1.99. Please be sure to download it, rate it, and review it!

Girl Talk

The previous entry is a great example of how a medium's weaknesses become its strengths.

The fact that web videos have to be small and splotchy enable having three music videos arrayed together like that on one screen. TV doesn't do that. The best they have is Picture-in-Picture which nobody uses.

There is something really satisfying and empowering about going to YouTube, clicking on the HTML code, hitting Ctrl+C, then going to my blog and hitting Ctrl+V, repeated 3 times, and creating that.

I wish song hooks weren't called "hooks" because the word sounds like cheesy marketing-speak. Really I think hooks are a very huge part of the music-loving experience. Hooks are my index for songs I want to listen to. "I really want to hear a song that goes duh-duh-duh-duh-daaaaaa." Or something.

For lack of a better word, Matt & Kim have excellent "hooks." Better yet, they have three songs from one album with great hooks at the beginning of their songs.

Here they are:

MSNBC - people who kept daily food diaries lost twice as much weight or more as those who didn’t keep a tally of their meals.

It's eye opening. In fact, some people will be so shocked at how many calories are in their thrice-daily Coke that the "aha" moment will make going on an actual diet unnecessary. Being forced to be aware of what you're eating can often be enough to help people drop weight, says Wadden.

I wonder what other things we can fix by keeping daily records. An e-mail from the office saying how many minutes of YouTube you used that day? A 24-7 webcam that measured how often you smiled that day?

UPDATE: If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, click here to download Party Tarot. Please be sure to download it, rate it, and review it!

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I started developing iPhone applications. Well, I have some stuff to show for my work!

I created a Tarot reader for the iPhone. Here is a video of the application:

This started out as a personal Tarot reader, but then I brought it to a party and saw its true potential. People lined up to have me do their readings. And I invented things like having my listeners close their eyes and touch the iPhone to pick their cards. Here is a marketing image I put together that shows the kind of use-cases I'm imagining:

So if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, click here to download Party Tarot. It's starting out at $1.99.

It's going to be marketed under the name Nuclear Elements, my current solo freelance company. I got the card images from a 1909 public domain Rider-Waite-Smith Deck on Wikipedia

When I see technology coming down the pipe, I like to think about how it makes the global brain better. That becomes my measure of progress. What can we, collectively, do that we weren't able to do. How are we maturing.

I think of the cognitive capacities of the whole. For example, This American Life had an episode called Two Steps Back which aired in 2004 about an outstanding high school teacher who is leaving teaching because policies have changed. What's great about the Internet is that now we can have follow-up. That episode aired four years ago, but I can make it relevant right now. I can Google and see that other people are wondering, "so what happened to that teacher?" This is an important step in maturity for the overall hive mind. Memory isn't just archiving information. We've had libraries since the Library of Alexandria. What we're doing now in our "information age" is we're developing an active memory, where relevant histories can be continuously coughed up and indexed faster than it used to ever be.

This is what citizen journalism really adds to the world. It'll never replace old journalism, which to me is paid, direct observation. Old journalists are the eyes. Citizen journalists are the follow-up on what the eyes saw. The newspapers will only report flash points, but to get the follow-up, the blogosphere is just so much better in perseverance or obsession over the topics that were reported last week. The blogosphere keeps stories alive much better than anything out there.

Just noticed that the folder where I keep all my photos has more photos saved from other people's myspaces, facebooks, and other social sites than from my own digital camera.

I think it's interesting that Facebook is/was planning on eliminating the distinction between photos you upload and photos where you are tagged in.

This reduces my need to get a digital camera, as I can rely on the hive mind to produce enough event photos.