Month: January 2009

Genghis Blues

The story of a blind blues musician’s journey to Tuva to compete in a national throat singing competition.

awesome

“This was the highlight of my recent trip to Vladivostok, Russia, where the film GENGHIS BLUES won the Governor’s Prize at the Pacific Meridian Film Festival. It features Tuvan throat-singer ONDAR and the voice of [Nobel laureate and physicist] Richard Feynman. I hope you enjoy it.”

awesome! it even pimps the lonely planet transsiberian railways guide book 🙂

Passages

1.2b years from now, in a galaxy 20m light-years from the Milky Way

This story combines every worst-case assumption from the Rare Earth theory with a nearly total absence of new high-tech modalities. Even if we are alone in the Universe, trapped by the speed of light, and beset by catastrophe, there will be stories to tell.

Wikipedia Feedback Loop

It’s hard to imagine that Wikipedia articles are actually the very best source of information for all of the many 1000s of topics on which they now appear as the top Google search result. What’s much more likely is that the Web, through its links, and Google, through its search algorithms, have inadvertently set into motion a very strong feedback loop that amplifies popularity and, in the end, leads us all, lemminglike, down the same well-trod path – the path of least resistance. You might call this the triumph of the wisdom of the crowd. I would suggest that it would be more accurately described as the triumph of the wisdom of the mob. The former sounds benign; the latter, less so.

wikipedia’s information architecture plus positive feedback loop mean that is is ever more the #1 result for common terms.