Holes In Thoughts

Saturday, February 02, 2008

Hive Mind vs. Groupthink

In general, I like Microsoft Vista. They made a lot of changes that obviously needed to happen, added a bit of chrome, and generally it works for me. Now, I realize this is because my computer kicks ass: two dual-core 3GHz 64-bit processors, 4GB RAM, two RAID arrays totaling 1TB, and a pair of 512MB video cards connected to a pair of flat monitors.

Yeah, I know.

The trouble with Vista, though, is often that it's new: compatibility and configuration are a bit harder. I had this problem when I couldn't figure out why my video card wouldn't display higher than 1024x768 (I prefer 1280x1024). Thankfully, there was this little article on softpedia, describing the symptoms exactly and how to get around it.

Apart from the incredible convenience of the article, it's remarkable how specific the article is. This is an example of how the Internet allows for group thinking that isn't hampered by "groupthink." The first time I saw this potential was way back in 2001 when the movie A.I. had the first really successful alternate reality game (later named by its participants The Beast). The game was impossibly difficult for any one person - it required people to work together. Unfortunately for the developers, their own puzzles (which required knowledge of dozens of languages, expertise in chemistry, physics, philosophy, programming, and other sciences) would be solved within minutes by the thousands of people who worked on the solutions. Inevitably, someone in the Cloudmakers (as the participants named themselves; the website is down but the link goes to the Wayback Machine cache from 2002) knew how to solve the problem.

I love this concept: the Internet allows communication between people. People are generally inherently capable. MIT created "Fab Labs" that were able to create most anything (3-d printer, circuitboard printers, etc.). 3 students at MIT are doing their theses on the work of six year old villagers in Africa, who had better basic designs than the engineers in the U.S. Harnessing the total knowledge of a huge group of people is something that, if it can be done efficiently (i.e., with a minimum of groupthink), would be as massive a step forward as the Industrial Revolution.

I'm pretty glad to be alive sometimes.

This dissemination of information isn't limited to merely solving technical problems or riddles. It has also been suggested by Scott Adams (who writes Dilbert) that if a massive e-mail pen pal initiative among all nations would make it vastly more difficult to go to war:

"You might support your government in a war against a country full of people you don’t know. But would you support a war that has a good chance of killing your e-mail friend Phlubanakawahaha and his entire family?"

Also, if that family helped design your super-cool phone/lamp/radiator, you might think twice if you wanted to upgrade anytime soon.

Labels: blog, cartoons, computers, government, idiots, information, Internet, life, people, politics, power, random, reason, technology, war

posted by Steve @ 5:46 AM 0 comments

Friday, December 21, 2007

Ooh, Baby It's A Wired World

In the last few years, the file 'tag' has become very important - what's now called metadata. I don't know what the original file tag was; you could say that libraries were the first to extensively catalogue metadata, in that metadata is information about information. But certainly the most important one was the ID3, which was originally created for the MP3 sound file.

Way back when I downloaded my first MP3 file, in 1995, I had to create elaborate folder structures to sort out the organization. ID3 was a godsend. But then again, it was also a godsend when I got a 28.8 modem for my 486 66MHz, though I had to close all my windows in Windows 95 since the computer literally couldn't handle playing an Mp3. Simpler times, I guess. This was when Wing Commander II was very hot stuff.

Now that metadata has matured to the point where it is included in practically all file types, that information is being used to properly catalog, organize, and make sense of literally trillions of files. Some really cool stuff is being done with it.

Flickr organizes more than two billion images, and Facebook organizes four billion. Who knows what MySpace has. To put that into context, if you put those two billion Flickr photos into 200-photo, 1' wide folios, they'd stretch the same distance as a road trip from my home in Tucson to Milwaukee, or perhaps to Edmonton, Canada. For all of those sites put together, you're talking a third of the circumference of the planet.

Another site that's doing exciting with mass data collection is Last.fm, which collects data about the listening habits of many millions of people, though in my opinion they've not done as much as they could with the vast amount of data they've collected.

I mention all this because I've just posted the pictures I took at onto Flickr. I still have to tag and rate about 5,000 pictures in my archive, though of course I have no intention of posting all of them to Flickr.

I have already organized about 99% of my music collection, which primarily came from Maloney's when I was paid $2 an hour to organize their collection (of course, I also got to keep the collection, so it more than worked out for me). Unfortunately, Winamp really screwed me over in the data cataloging department: I'd been rating songs as I played them for about two years when it crashed (not being able to handle the 50,000 songs), and I lost the data. Rating music and pictures is tremendously handy when you have a lot of songs rated, because you can just pick a genre and minimum rating and hit "random." It's so wonderful because not only do you not have to DJ for yourself, but if you've been rating songs for a few years, you will hear songs you haven't heard in a long while.

I also still have many of my archived CDs to go through - and I guess if using Adobe Bridge is something I should do, I'll have to tag all those as well. I'm not convinced of its usefulness, though: I've had a system of directories going for quite a while now and even though I have about 90,000 (!) files in my photography, design, and music folders, I can find whatever I need in short order. So why bother tagging them all? Perhaps the best thing is to tag as I go, and figure that I'll have tagged anything I actually use over the course of, what, five years?

I keep telling myself that having all of this information organized will make me a bit more sane, and will make my general workflow faster. I suspect that the incredible amount of time it takes to organize all of it will take years to earn back in saved time later, but there's also an additional benefit of knowing it's all there. I've lost some good photos to trashed archive CDs, and hard drive failures. Ultimately, I justify all this work because of the peace of mind it brings me.

In any case, I'm very glad that I have a RAID configuration for my system with my new computer. I would just cry if I lost all this work I've done.

Labels: computers, games, information, mp3, music

posted by Steve @ 2:14 AM 0 comments

About Me

Name: Steve
Home: Tucson, Arizona, United States
About Me: I like to think about things, and I occasionally like to write what I think.
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