Pretty accurate, especially about the coffee
Sometimes, you just have to jump on a meme, and the Imagini VisualDNA at least looks pretty cool, and the process of choosing photos is sort of fun. Here's mine:
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Sometimes, you just have to jump on a meme, and the Imagini VisualDNA at least looks pretty cool, and the process of choosing photos is sort of fun. Here's mine:
It's odd enough that anyone decided to track which cities eat the most Ho Hos per capita, and it's random that Pittsburgh tops the list, but the best thing about the Post-Gazette coverage of this "story" was apparently the lack of application of common sense or basic math literacy, allowing the orignal story to claim that the average Pittsburgher eats over 1.5 Ho Hos a day. It's a little sad that this slipped through the editing process given how clearly ridiculous that statistic is. I particularly like the computation in the correction that, if their original statistics were correct, Pittsburghers together would be responsible for over half of the worldwide Ho Ho consumption.
I've seen this type of side-by-side comparison done for models, but this commparison of ads of fast food with photos of the real fast food as it is served is - well, okay, not very shocking at all - nobody expects fast food to look anything like the ads. But it's still interesting to see quite how different the reality can be from what they are selling. [via Boing Boing]
Over the past couple of days I've come across a few things that I absolutely do not need, and absolutely covet - mostly because I am a huge geek:
This article describes an experiment where onne of the world's top violinists plays for change in a subway station. The purpose is to determine if people recognize the quality of the performance out of context (spoiler: for the most part, no) but there is some interesting discussion of what this says about the current tempo of our lives and the ways in which we appreciate art. It would be really interesting to do the same experiment at the end of the day when the context is still the same but people are under less of a strict schedule, in general.
A couple of weeks ago, I was at a Free Software Foundation member's meeting at MIT, and during the lunch break I overheard an interesting conversation. I cluster of five stereotypical geeks (male, bearded, pony-tailed, etc.) were talking. One of thm was regailing his friends ith a story of a clueless woman he had the misfortune of listening to talk about her computer usage. This woman was talking to a friend about typesetting a paper using LaTeX - it was later determined that she worked in some capacity in a physics lab. She described how it was good for equations and the friend asked if it was expensive. The woman thought and said that because they were part of the lab it was free, but that if you just had to buy it it was really expensive. She then thought a little more and noted that she knew someone who had it on their Mac and it was free, but she thought it didn't seem as good and was probably a knockoff. The group laughed and generally concurred that this woman was painfully clueless and generally ought not be allowed computers at all.
This little story sums up the main problem I saw with the current efforts of the FSF to move beyond building free software to taking on the social activism problem of spreading the adoption of free software. This is the theme of the year for the organization and the main topic of the opening talk of the day by the FSF executive director. The question was raised of how to get people past the preconception that they cannot use free software. The suggestion was made that people set up laptops running GNU/Linux and let people try it to perform various tasks and see that they can use free software. And just a couple of hoursr later these guys were ridiculing someone they had met who had already crossed that barrier and was using free software, but just hadn't realized it. I suspect that these guys are representative of the FSF core contingency, but they are also prototypical geeks with the attendant distain for those who are not as technologically knowledgeable as they are.
And this is the root of the problem. Free softwarehas become good enough that it has been widely adopted within the technical community. The next hurdle is to push its adoption in the general user community. And this means embracing the preconceptions and lack of knowledge of the general user community and working with kindness and enthusiasm to educate those users to the degree necessary - and no more. Free software advocates need to learn how to communicate with those who know little about technology and do not want to know more. Their computer is a tool, and if changing their tool means having to learn more about how it works, they will not make the change.
This attitude is observable throughout much of the FSF materials. Their "Bad Vista" effort was a brilliiant idea - capitalize on the huge Windows Vista marketing program to draw attention to the free software alternatives. When the media was looking for "the other side of the story" when covering the Vista release, it gave them something to talk about. And this project was somewhat successful. We even saw that a Google search on "Vista" returned the badvista.org sitet as the fifth link. This was touted as a victory - that someone deciding whether to upgrade to Vista or not will search on "Vista" and find this page and learn about the alternatives.
But if you go look at the Bad Vista webpage, I do not believe the average user will spend more than a second on the page before deciding it is not relevant to their interests. Even the blurb on the Google results page makes it unlikely the user will click through:
The BadVista campaign is an advocate for the freedom of computer users, opposing adoption of Microsoft Windows Vista and promoting free (as in freedom) ...
That is, the free software advocates need to be willing to argue the reasons that motivate others, not the reasons that motivate them. And they need to be williing to embrace members into the community who may not agree with all of the groups' tenets, or to take them to the same degree. They have to accept members who will use a free OS but still like having an iPod, and who may even want to dual boot to still play their favorite video game.
This, of course, is a problem with any advocacy group. Environmentalists need to embrace the people who will recycle and buy fuel efficient cars but still want to be able to drive. Anti-war activists need to accept those who oppose the current war but are not pure pacifists. These groups also suffer from the same heirarchy of devotion to the cause that the free software movement does. The unique problem of free software is that it is more feasible to adopt a 100% free software stance and hold the line, and the hardline advocates have been doing this. It is time, if they are really serious about taking the next step, for them to open their arms to a wider spectrum of supporters.