first day of guqin camp
at the Royal Academy of Music
London

I met a man from Portland, Jim Binkley, who wrote a new book, and was John Thompson's roommate in Taipei in the 1970s. He came to London just to take part in the Asian Music Circuit's 5th annual summer school at the Royal Academy of Music.

Zeng Chengwei is our teacher. Charlie Huang wore his famous hanfu. His newest is on its way from China. We are urgently awaiting its premiere.

Qin circles have strange, brilliantly plumed birds. I was planning on taking photos of the wildlife, but my Kodak decided to give me fits. Our yaji (野集?) was well documented by others, including friends like Julian Joseph from Youlan and NAGA.

Labels: guqin, London, music, 古琴

mapping the self:
new social/search maps cluster the clutter
online (everywhere, really)

The Firefox experience keeps getting better. For every add-on that encroaches on my browsing space, the world it opens is ten times more mind expanding--or 10x fun, at least. Greasemonkey smiles, Firefox does real-time spell check. Twitter tweets. My latest addition is the StumbleUpon toolbar. The Mozilla people recommended it as a kind of channel surfing tool that tracks your browsing and makes recommendations for you. It recommended the TouchGraph site, which maps your Facebook contacts and (with only 12 nodes in the free online version) google searches.

Facebook contacts:

Here are all my 155 facebook contacts, as mapped by touchgraph. IR/PS classmates are in pink. UCSD conocidos are in purple. High school classmates in baby blue. Umich associates in lime green. Umich co-opers in salmon pink. And then there are the many, many outliers.

This mapping project thread at work, trying to find a way to represent visually the many connections in my the CSR world. This led us to TheyRule.net, a sinister, conspiratorial take on power relations.

Meta and Visual Search Tools

Visimo on the left provides a no-frills cluster search. It's unfortunately owned by the "clusty" search engine, a name which makes me shiver.

A more interesting display comes from the campy KartOO site, which has a little elfish dude wave his flash wand over your connections. See screen capture below. You can click on individual nodes for closer peeks at your digital footprints.

Toward a Self-Reflective Topography of Self?

I'm all about computers learning our behavior, provided I can interface with them on an equal footing ("consult on the basis of equality" as one Chinese dictionary phrase keeps running through my head).

Eventual enhancement of our mammalian brains will probably be necessary to keep up. I suppose by that point, the self will just be a network anyway.

Perhaps this is the beginning of the visual language system McKenna articulated into being.

Until then--since my sense of self is scattered among my hundreds of contacts on all continents--it's nice that our silicon nervous system puts Humpty back together again.

Or, ultimately, does this exercise just betrays my onanistic penchant for googling myself? I have such a different opinion on digital littering than I do analogue littering. =) Time for work.

Kartoo's map of the self:


For further mapping, check out my del.icio.us entries for "selfmapping" and see where the thoughts lead from there. I'm waiting for a del.icio.us tool to see what my self-selected web interests look like visually.

Labels: cluster, mapping, self, visual language, web

I like big things
with melodramatic music and fast-moving parts
like the port in Dalian, China

Check out this Dalian China port promo video. Globalization at China speed...with Enya lending some majesty to the images of northeast China's oil infrastructure.

Labels: China, globalization, video

The truth about climate change?
Our worst scenarios are too optimistic
says new NASA report

[This is from our friends at China Dialogue, originally published in the Guardian.]

Fossil fuel-free in 20 years?
George Monbiot
July 12, 2007
Prospects for renewable power are promising. But it means nothing, argues George Monbiot, if the public interest is drowned by corporate power.

Reading a scientific paper on the train recently, I found, to my amazement, that my hands were shaking. This has never happened to me before, but nor have I ever read anything like it. Published by a team led by James Hansen at NASA, it suggests that the grim reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) could be absurdly optimistic.

The IPCC predicts that sea levels could rise by as much as 59 centimetres this century. Hansen's paper argues that the slow melting of ice sheets that the panel expects doesn't fit the data. The geological record suggests that ice at the poles does not melt in a gradual and linear fashion, but flips suddenly from one state to another. When temperatures increased to between two and three degrees above today's level 3.5 million years ago, sea levels rose not by 59 centimetres but by 25 metres. The ice responded immediately to changes in temperature.

Read the rest here.

Labels: alternative energy, climate change, NASA, sustainable development

Impeach Cheney
Now


Not a great video, but it gets the point across. Sign the petition before it's too late.

Labels: impeachment

On July 1st, the UK banned smoking indoors. Here's a funny poem on a pub blackboard.

Whether you do or don't
The time has Come,
To Say goodbye.
To Smoky pubs + watery eyes.
Your clothes won't smell
Neither your hair.
But bring your Jumper,
So you don't freeze out there
*from 1st July*

(It's also abnormally chilly for early July).