Due to a continuing family medical issue, I’m not going to be updating my blog until after at least May 6. Maybe later. Tune back in then.
Although this is a kind of fun time travel idea. This guy, Rigby, has pledged that if he has access to time travel in his lifetime, he will come back from the future and appear at the Empire State Building at 4pm on August 3, 2002. To prove he has traveled back from the future, he got that date tattooed on his arm. Get it?
So if you go to the Empire State Building on August 3, 2002, and there’s just a 20-something dude standing there with the date tattooed on his arm, we can assume this guy never has access to time travel in his lifetime. (Or so he says…more on this in a moment.)
However, if you go to the Empire State Building on August 3, 2002, and there’s a 20-something dude standing there with the date tattoed on his harm and a somewhat familiar-looking 82-year old guy with the same tattoo walks up and greets him, then this is The Future Rigby who has traveled back to that date to say “Hey.”
Rigby is pretty eager about the idea that even if his octegenarian self doesn’t show up to meet the 2002 version of himself in August, “I will be able to say WITH 100% CERTAINTY that I will NEVER EVER have access to time travel in my lifetime. In effect, I will be the FIRST PERSON in history to say, with 100% CERTAINTY, something about the future that has not yet occurred.”
Putting aside all the time travel paradoxes and violations of the laws of physics and whatnot, this 100% certainty stuff is utter nonsense. Maybe Old Rigby has access, but doesn’t hold up his end of the bargain. Maybe Old Rigby has access, but time travel only goes backward as far as yesterday. Maybe Old Rigby has access, but en route to 2002, the Time Police pull him over around 2014 for violation of the Federal Time Protection Act of 2045 and use a loophole in time to condemn him to watch Olsen Twins videos for eternity while never aging.
Granted, if it happens, it’ll be pretty cool. But, if not, all Rigby can be sure of is that something didn’t happen. Big frickin’ deal. Lots of things don’t happen every day. There’s a causal fallacy of logic at work here, but don’t get me started on all the logical fallacies involved in time travel.
Better idea: I’d love to find a game old codger to get the same tattoo and walk up to Rigby on August 3 and say, “Hey, Me!” Heh heh. In fact, if Old Rigby does show up to meet Young Rigby, someone better have a DNA test lined up to prove that they’re the same person. Otherwise, Rigby might be pulling the scam I just proposed.
I’m not sure I’d expect IBM’s usability columnist to like the MacOS X interface, but this guy really doesn’t like it. To quote: “This is abysmal. Disgraceful. Wrong. Stupid. Beyond comprehension.” [link via WebWord]
Thin clients. Network PCs. Internet Appliances. We’ve heard it all before, but apparently someone in the Sun Microsystems PR department has convinced some Australian IT magazine that an environment where “both teacher and students access information via browser-type devices, or appliances, which are just windows to content” is a good idea. Even has the requisite “We can computers as simple as using a phone” blurb.
When are the hardware companies going to get it through their noggin that people do more with computers than access content? Crikey, it’s not a $2000 web browser, mate. Why would I cough up several hundred dollars for an “internet appliance” when I can cough up a little bit more and get word processing, spreadsheets, internet telephony, and The Sims, all in one package?
Does news really travel to Australia this slowly?
This article is very high-level and general; it doesn’t get very far into examples of actual practice. There are also lots of typos that result in incorrect or broken URLs — scanned in from a text copy maybe? It’s off a K12 journalism class’ site, but was published in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. Oops. Can you say “copyright violation”? Wonder how that plays in journalism class… [link via Alterego]
I find Blogs at the Heart of Cultural Change much more interesting. It’s a summary and discussion by Educare of a talk MIT professor Henry Jenkin’s talk at Middlebury College. Jenkins has written about fandom affects cultural change. Today online fan communities are feeding into the creative processes of TV and film developers and weblogs are becoming part of this. Weblogs “are currently the most vital place where we find the clearest intersection of digital culture, media, and the citizen; it’s also where we go for information synthesis, analysis, news and information–for a variety of topics.”
This morning’s Washington Post has two articles on the rise of Internet-based indepedent media and the now obligatory are-blogs-real-journalism? article.
This past weekend’s anti-war-globalization-capitalism-etc protests here in DC were the triggering events for these articles. The weekend protests were tame, but 40 protesters managed to get arrested this morning.
Even though I know a couple of the organizers of Mobilization for Global Justice, and I know they’re real about what they’re protesting, I can’t help but feel that these protests are ultimately irrelevant and, in-fact, counter-productive. Dredlocked granola-punk anarchists with street-theater puppetry don’t sway legislators and multinational corporations. Does this generate any positive media attention for their actual ideas (if you can even dredge the ideas out of the stone soup of issues they’re “protesting”)?
So I spent some time white it was raining yesterday afternoon, attempting to re-design this site in valid cascading style-sheets. Actually, it was going quite well, with a fluid three-column layout (yep, you’re gonna get an extra column — aren’t you excited?!?) . . . with one catch. Anybody know how to get a text element to fluidly resize so it consumes 100% of the available space? E.g., look at the “ten reasons why” header above. It takes up 100% of the width of the text column, but that’s because it’s fixed in a table. With CSS, can I set a text element to always take up 100% of the width. I tried ‘text-align: justify’ but that doesn’t force-justify a single line. Which is basically what I want.
Of course, this assumes I roughly maintain the existing design of the site, which certainly is a solid gold site design. Maybe I should just toss the whole thing and start afresh. . .
Why not, if this kid can patent swinging sideways? Sheesh.
Blogs & Education: Some traction for the idea from American Society of Training and Development’s online magazine, Learning Circuits.
Or at least for people who aren’t techies. This SCORM Content Development Course is from the Joint ADL Lab in Orlando.