For my generation, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and the war in general now represent the equivalent of a cultural "game over" or "reset" button. Through a combination of conscious policy and unconscious culture, the painful memories and images of the war have lost their context, surfacing only as twisted echoes in our subculture. The result, for better and worse, is that, 60 years after Hiroshima, we dwell more on the future than the past.

Joi Ito has an editorial in the New York Times today about the 60th anniversary of the atomic bomb being dropped.

(Yes, I'm going to start blogging about things other than Mike again..)

An Anniversary to Forget - New York Times

Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbanization, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.

Environmentalism, meet realism. I agree with the author's assertions here. Time has clarified a number of things, but the environmental movement has not necessarily moved to embrace any of it.

I must admit to being unaware that population growth had leveled off..

Environmental Heresies

Culture is a unique and fascinating aspect of the human species. How did it emerge and how does it develop?

Richard Dawkins suggested culture evolves and that memes are cultural replicators, subject to variation and selection in the same way as genes are in the biological world. Thus human culture is the product of a mindless evolutionary algorithm. Does this imply, as some have argued, that we are mere meme machines and that the conscious self is an illusion?

This highly readable and accessible book extends Dawkins's theory, presenting for the first time a fully developed concept of cultural DNA. Distin argues that culture's development can be seen as the result of memetic evolution and as the product of human creativity. Memetic evolution is perfectly compatible with the view of humans as conscious and intelligent.

This book should find a wide readership amongst philosophers, psychologists, sociologists and non-academic readers.

I also found a discussion thread which begins with a review of the book and includes replies from the author.

The Selfish Meme

BME:  How did you decide what exactly to cut off?
GILLIAN:  That was obvious — it had to be our ring fingers. We were both just out of rough relationships, and wanted to both reclaim and be rid of those fingers... this has a permanence to it as well. You can take a ring off your ring finger, but you can never put your ring finger back on once you take it off. It’s something that will last forever — it’s a physical testament to how much I actually do love him.
CLIVE: And if we ever break up we’ll just tell people it’s a permanent shocker.
Think about it...
BME: Did either of you have an interest in amputation before this?
GILLIAN: No, and to be honest I never thought I would do one, but I think it’s one of those things that’s hard to understand until you feel it. It just sort of happened, and it feels right.
CLIVE: Like our love.

Diamonds are out. The deBeers control of the market for tetra-carbon be damned, people are coming up with new and more insane ways to show their commitment to each other.

I put my ring finger in Clive’s mouth and he put his ring finger in my mouth with our teeth resting right on the last joint. We looked in each other’s eyes, nodded, and bit down as hard as we could. It was a little disappointing because we couldn’t actually get all the way through, but we did pop the joint open and tear it a little. We cut the rest, just some skin and the tendon, the normal way.

Don't miss the pictures.

Update: This had been an April Fool's joke. Good one..

Love at First Bite

Globalization and the information revolution are creating new community relationships that build upon, democratize, and magnify existing social frameworks.

The network allows ideas to compete and confers a competitive advantage on those most able to share, trade, and receive the most relevant information.

State Department officials may look gleefully at other foreign ministries and note that the United States is far ahead of its perceived counterparts in responding to globalization and the information revolution. These officials, however, do not recognize that competition is not coming from other states, but from other forms of organization altogether.

Power today is as much about promoting ideas and norms of behavior as it is about projecting military might.

By disaggregating the state foreign policy function into its component parts, it is possible to identify where greater integration into networks is feasible and desirable, and where the hierarchical structures of accountability can and should remain intact.

The very term "foreign policy" attempts to differentiate between "domestic" and "foreign" in ways that make less sense in a globalized network environment. Foreign policy is not foreign. It is global -- both domestic and foreign simultaneously.

The primary impediment to networked engagement is the culture of insularity and secrecy that pervades US foreign policy institutions.

Accountability should not be purchased at the cost of ignorance.

Understanding control as the ability to influence values and standards in a decentralized system, not as the need to maintain absolute authority over every component of the policy process, will pose a fundamental challenge to governments. The networked global environment of the information revolution, however, not only distributes control, but also punishes those who attempt to hoard information and rewards those who share it. In the Information Age, you have to give up control in order to get it back, but it returns in a different form. Old control was about hierarchy, monopoly, and aggregation. New control is about flexibility, decentralization, and networked specialization.

Open dialogue and the sharing of ideas should be goals in themselves. The United States must support and facilitate such dialogue, even when it is critical of the United States.

Conscious efforts must be made to shift government institutional culture from a focus on secrecy, information hoarding, and hierarchy to a system of openness, innovation, and information sharing.

Governments must change the way they do business to make their best voices heard in a networked world.

Network Diplomacy

Were you inspired by a school teacher? Did you thank them?

We are heading into an age in which jobs are likely to be invented and made obsolete faster and faster. The chances of today's college kids working in the same jobs for the same companies for their whole careers are about zero. In such an age, the greatest survival skill you can have is the ability to learn how to learn. The best way to learn how to learn is to love to learn, and the best way to love to learn is to have great teachers who inspire.

Like all the best essayists, Tom Friedman can transform even the most obvious message into a compelling story.

Behind Every Grad ...

This project attempts to take the first steps toward such an exploratory data environment for e-mail corpora, using the Enron e-mail corpus as a motivating data set. The interface--currently named "enronic"--unifies information visualization techniques with various algorithms for processing the e-mail corpus, including social network inference, message categorization, and community analysis. Though still in a developmental phase, enronic shows promise as a platform for more tightly coupling manual and automated data analysis.

Exploring Enron - Visualizing ANLP Results

Well, the Bush-Nazi comparisons are deja-done, so of course now we have to move on. Seen on the MARC commuter train (between Baltimore and DC) today, this picture pretty much sums up the new "National Security:"

Report any unusual activities or packages to the nearest conductor.

Articulatory Loop - Read, Repeat, Remember

French voters are trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day. Good luck.

Indians are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top.

Tom also notes that Paul Krugman is on vacation. I am unsure if he means from the New York Times or economic reality.

Get ready, Tom Friedman columns will shortly be the new warez.

A Race to the Top, Or, An Obit For Old Europe

The statement, which follows a visit to Caracas by Iranian President Mohammed Khatami in March, was intended to be noticed — and it was. The question is why he would have said it.

Confused? Don't worry. George Friedman explains it all.

Venezuelan Red Flag