What the hell is Twitter, anyway?

For a while, I thought it was like Pyroto Mountain, which it is in some ways. But more useful.

But I have a couple friends who just don't "get it". They really do not see the value of social networks like twitter and Facebook. So of course I'm trying to explain to them why they're interesting. And this is what I came up with. I'm curious what anyone else thinks about it (if anything):

If the internet can be considered a global mind (which I believe it can, though not in a conscious sense - yet), then twitter is its short-term memory and attention span. Through real-time content search and keyword aggregation, crowd-sourced memes which persist for temporal periods consisting of minutes to hours to days are discovered by influencers and distributed by followers. In addition, the facility persists for followers to discover or create memes which will be retweeted or distributed by influencers. In essence, it's a Heirarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) composed of chunks of human attention.

The constant tweets go by, banal, boring, interesting, or deeply meaningful, and humans dip their metaphorical toes of attention in the stream and if they like the temperature (i.e. the meme) they tell someone about it. Actually, maybe they don't tell any or maybe they tell a whole ton, depending upon who is paying attention to their output stream of tweets (signals / excitations). The network is created on the fly and adapts in real time as people follow and unfollow each other. There are streams of right-wing memes and left-wing memes and funny memes and D&D memes and cystic fibrosis memes and oprah memes and sci-fi memes and sports memes and happy and sad memes and everything else pretty much you can possibly think of and they are all excited chains of nodes in a massively dynamic network that is constantly self-organizing. I like this because - well, come on - it's just pretty damn Neuromancer
-level cool.

But twitter is also a reputation economy because the nodes in this network are conscious (i.e. us folks). Pretty much what builds your twitter rep is (1) credibility, (2) snark, (3) freshness, (4) reciprocity, and (5) reach. So it can be self-reinforcing because of (5), as - just like in any network - the value of a single node increases proportionally with the size of the network (paraphrasing Metcalfe's Law). I like twitter because I appreciate those values.

Also, it's a marketplace of ideas. By the time a meme is trending on twitter, that means that thousands of people (possible tens of thousands or more) have made the conscious decision that this particular piece of information is important enough to remember for at least a little while and to have a discussion about.

And this is something that I really do love about twitter - the connectedness. I have met real people through it. Communicated real ideas. Made friends. Found clients. And had fun. Being part of a network isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Follow me if you want: @jayturley

I'm not dead. I swear.

You just have to love Naomi Wolf

Here she talks about the police state developing right here in the USA.

The future

Imagined.

Real.

Terrifying, really.

I know I don't blog much anymore

But I've been busy... honest. It's tough raising a kid these days. And I've been doing some reading that I would like to both document and share with anyone who happens upon these pages.

The things that have blown my mind recently are all scientific and/or metaphysical papers. I don't know. Seems like I've been on a science bender recently. Just thinking, I suppose. It's good to exercise the mind.

But in any case, the stuff I've come across is below. The time invested in reading the links is well worth it many times over. Oh-- sorry about all the .pdfs.

1. The first item of interest has to do with a certain astrophysicist of note: Max Tegmark. See, he had this article in Scientific American, which (I was very annoyed to find out) was not available on the freeweb. So I hit up his site and came across two papers that were extremely interesting. The first was Parallel Universes, which discusses the multiverse. This implicates the universe is composed of mathematics -which is eloquently put forth in Shut Up and Calculate - which coincidentally happens to be the "Director's Cut" of the above-mentioned SciAm article. (So there! Hah! Thank you arXiv.org) Additional material including thoughful criticism is found in the utterly fantastic On Math, Matter and Mind, which is a wonderful three-way discussion of the relationship between the titular subjects.
2. So as I'm exploring the material above, the Internet offers up the fact that there is a metaphysics called Modal Realism, championed by one David Lewis in On the Plurality of Worlds (which I'm buying tonight). Funny thing is, it meshes perfectly with Tegmark's parallel universe theory. Then the Internet comes through yet again with Damon Woolsey's Modal Realism primer, and then the absolute kicker, his dissertation, A Fundamental Theory of Genuine Modal Realism, which corrects what Woolsey sees as some flaws with Lewis's version. And is terrifyingly enjoyable to boot.
   
3. Then, as if my mind wasn't blown enough by this point... along comes this great piece: The universe: a cryogenic habitat for microbial life, which points out that all the dust floating around in the universe is pretty much bacteria. Yep. Life everywhere. Going everywhere.
   
4. Oh, and then in all this rooting around, out popped Global Workspace Theory, brought to us by Bernard J. Baars' A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness, which is both comprehensive and defensible. I've loved this kind of stuff ever since I studied cognitive science and cognitive psychology back in college.
   
5. Also interesting are the Brights, trying to do for atheism with "bright" what "gay" did for homosexuality, Daniel Dennett's powerful demand that science investigate religion: Breaking The Spell, and Marc Hauser's compelling case for evolved morals in Moral Minds.
   
6. And then be sure not to miss the highly recommended hulu.com's Space Rip channel and of course, Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.
7. Finally, I'd like to give mad props to the incredible open source frameworks jQuery and CodeIgniter. I'm using them to make some pretty incredible things.
   

Game Theory and The Pool of Eligible Bachelors

A short and sweet article today on Slate discussing how game theory applies to the problem of the shrinking pool of eligible bachelors as women age. Essentially, the women who think the most of themselves are most likely to hold out for the perfect match, which of course puts them in the position of having to choose a "perfect" match from the men who couldn't manage to get married, who were married, or who have no intention of marrying.

So, in this case, being picky backfires. Oddly enough. ;-)

I luvs me some Internets!

Doing some research for a speech I was giving, I ran across this very interesting scholarly work on the history of Hispanics in Scottsdale. The author hit the nail on the head, especially at the end when he talks about Scottsdale as a model for viewing what will happen as our society becomes increasingly economically stratified.

Settle!

In The Atlantic, a really depressing article about women "settling" for a decent men, even though they aren't the men of their dreams. I've been talking a lot with both male and female friends about this same thing.

See, women in their twenties, and sometimes even in their thirties, keep looking for the perfect man. And as they grow older, they become even more discriminating, adding item after item to their checklist of must-have qualities. Yet, at the same time, they are aging, and can no longer depend upon their success in the genetic lottery to attract men simply by virtue of their looks. Their biological clocks are ticking, and yet they have rejected every man so far; the outlook for the have-it-all life they believe is their birthright becomes grimmer and grimmer.

So what should they do? Well, this article advises them to settle, i.e. just pick someone with whom you have a reasonable rappor. This is advised because the older you get, the worse you both will look, and the more important the emotional connection will be. And really, that "dream" person will never come along.

Okay, so women should not be so picky. Sure, as a middle-aged man, I've often wished that were the case. But what kind of advice is this from a man's point of view? Do I want to be with a woman who feels she is settling for me? A woman who will go through the rest of her life imagining there is someone better out there? A woman who believes that I am important to her only as a slot to fill in travelogue of life and an unpaid nanny later on (that is if she doesn't divorce me because she's bored, thus ending up with a wage slave ATM *and* an unpaid babysitter)? A woman who wants a teammate for the boring stuff in life while she finds passion outside of our relationship?

Um. No.

But the author does hit it right on at the very end. She suggests "settling" young. I agree.

But in an age when a woman can divorce a man because she is bored (no-fault divorce), get custody of the kids (80% of the time), get the house (restraining order), and still keep his money (child-support), I think more important than teaching women to settle is teaching them not to expect that they can have everything: the career, the degree, the kids, the family, etc.

Life is compromise, and unless you are very very lucky, talented, skilled, and driven, you are not going to be able to have it all. But teaching people that they are entitled to have it all creates a "princess" attitude, and then telling them they should settle adds superiority on top. A bad combination.

Research shows that you can maximize your happiness in a relationship by simply picking the first person who comes along - after you have dated several people - who you really like. Chances are, you're not going to meet someone better. But believing that you can find somone who matches your growing checklist of "I want"s is downright silly.