a wiki about communities both online and offline: Management, teaching, conflicts, mediation, and some tech talk about tools used for online communities are on topic. (Virtual Community) (more)

Venkatesh Rao ponders whether Nassim Taleb's Hydras will get us through Donald Rumsfeld's Unknown Unknown-s. He considers (Spore-like) Resilience, Survivalism, Transition Town, PermaCulture, Sustainability, and Preparedness to be Pessimistic, and (Hydra-like) Thrivability, Anti-Fragility (see 2010-11-10-TalebAntifragility), Abundance, and Generativity (Generative) to be Optimistic. What is new is the idea that we might be on the brink of a successful theory of Social Engineering. The great hope is that we might somehow be able to put together ideas about anti-fragility, immortal cities and resilience to solve the problems that defeated the similarly-inspired authoritarian high-modernist (a term due to Scott) social engineers of a century ago. The old failure, in the Hydra narratives, is framed as both a moral failure (a case of hubris and hamartia), and a technical failure: (they didn’t understand “bottom-up, organic, open-systems, network thinking.”) It is important to note that no believer in the resurrected social engineering narrative has any clue what ”bottom-up, organic, open-systems network thinking” actually means... It is merely secularized religiosity and a yearning for a moral calculus to confirm an analysis-by-faith.

shorthand for Hack Your Life With A Private Wiki Notebook Getting Things Done And Other Systems (more)

Review of Four Futures: Life After Capitalism – will robots bring utopia or terror? ISBN:1781688133 (more)

IMACS runs After School programs in math (using Formal Logic) and Computer Science (using Scheme and Logo!) - but no location near me. (Even for Elementary School!) (more)

Disaster of 2020. (COVID-19) The 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic is an ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).[4] The outbreak was first identified in Wuhan, Hubei, China, in December 2019, and was recognised as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020.[5] As of 23 March, more than 374,000 cases of COVID-19 have been reported in over 190 countries and territories, resulting in more than 16,300 deaths and over 101,000 recoveries.[2][3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic

Taylor Pearson: How to Unlock Your Creative Potential in 2019. In the same way that the middle manager was the archetype of a successful career in the 20th century, I believe that the blockchain individual (2017-10-10-PearsonTheBlockchainMan) will be the archetype of the successful career in the 21st century. (more)

Michael Fogleman: Implementing A Second Brain in Emacs and Org-Mode (more)

Timothy Cook Draper (born June 11, 1958) is an American venture capitalist investor, and founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ),[2] Draper University, Draper Venture Network, Draper Associates[3], and Draper Goren Holm. His most prominent investments include Baidu, Hotmail, Skype, Tesla, SpaceX, AngelList, SolarCity, Ring (company), Twitter, DocuSign, Coinbase, Robinhood (company), Ancestry.com, Twitch, Cruise Automation, and Focus Media. In July 2014, Draper received wide coverage[4] for his purchase at a US Marshals Service auction of seized bitcoins from the Silk Road marketplace website. Draper is a major proponent of Bitcoin and decentralization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Draper

Theranos (/ˈθɛrənoʊs/) was a privately held health technology corporation.[2] It was initially touted as a breakthrough technology company, with claims of having devised blood tests that needed only very small amounts of blood and could be performed very rapidly using small automated devices the company had developed. However, the claims later proved to be false.[3][4][5] Founded in 2003 by then-19-year-old Elizabeth Holmes,[6] Theranos raised more than US$700 million from venture capitalists and private investors,[7] resulting in a $10 billion valuation at its peak in 2013 and 2014.[8][9] Theranos was hyped to its investors and in the media as a breakthrough in the blood-testing market, where the U.S. diagnostic-lab industry posts annual sales of over $70 billion. Theranos claimed its technology was revolutionary and that its tests required only about 1/100 to 1/1,000 of the amount of blood that would ordinarily be needed and cost far less than existing tests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos (more)

cf Malcolm Gladwell, Gell-Mann Amnesia (more)

Restaurant model of encouraging people to take their food home (or get food delivery) instead of taking up a table/service

Douglas Rushkoff on the cause of the Credit Crisis 2008 and how to deal with it. Financial speculation saved by BigGov Bail-Out. Wealth Inequality. And remember: this whole mortgage fiasco is just a little preview of what happens next year when the Credit Card industry faces the very same self-imposed "crunch."... Over the past few months I've spoken to top strategists at some of the biggest banks in the world, and they share my perception of the scenario. Most of them are "holding cash" as their main investment strategy, spread out over a few of the major currencies. Those making money are doing so by short-selling shares of other companies in the same finance industry that they supposedly work for... Foreign investment trusts may come in and buy our biggest banks and turn us into global citizens through the very World Bank policies we were hoping would turn all of them into US vassals. (more)

John Robb on how to help scrip (LETS) through the Adoption Life Cycle, to improve community Resilience.

Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal: The Victors Write The ‘Scrips. This essay was originally written for, but was not included in, the forthcoming book, Stealing Fire... So as we compare past and present to look for patterns, and understand how the current revolution in altered states (PsychoActive) might play out, it’s critical to remember the deeper structural dynamics in play. And that ability to control not just the narrative, but also the techniques of ecstasy we can access, has profound implications for building any social movement. The victors, as is well known, almost always write the history. But they also write the ‘scrips. And that second point matters more today than it ever has. (hah, that's "prescriptions", not scrip)

Dan Hon s08e06: Back on the wagon. The Consumer Reports (for the Brits, the equivalent of Which?) has a Digital Lab, which just launched a set of paid, non-resident fellowships to “study the effects of connected products and services”. The post also references The Digital Standard, “an ambitious, open, and collaborative effort to create a digital privacy and security standard to help guide the future design of consumer software, digital platforms and services, and Internet-connected products.” (more)

Warren Ellis: Broadcasting House: 1. Broadcasting House: on broadcasting through a “blogge,” an olde way of communicating on the electric paper (more)

Miguel Prieto: A Hacker's Second Brain. In a matter of weeks, my database became an interconnected transcription of everything I had written previously in notebooks, journals, and scattered index cards. It is marvelous to see how Roam's connected chaos is the kind of order where ideas live and interact. Then something clicked, public Roam databases have the potential to become an astounding resource for deeply understanding any topic.

Tim King: Welcome to the Note Taking Apocalypse. I’m an organiser. I like to keep the words I write collected in specially labelled drawers, for the time that I need to quickly find a specific piece of text I wrote months ago without having to hunt through multiple folders (or god forbid hard drives). (more)

for typing, like a TypeWriter (more)