Ideas Posts

• 03.01.04 SMTP (Ideas, Social Software)

  The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is by no means perfect—its lack of authentication is a prime reason why spam is such a problem—but I think it got one thing right: it has the right topology for building a person-to-person communications system.… MORE

• 01.05.02 DXM, Big Fun, And My Favorite Hypertext (Ideas, Web)

  By way of introducing my favorite hypertext, I have to digress a bit. Last March [2001] I had a particularly nasty flu for about three weeks, which ended up as a wretched dry cough. I couldn’t go one minute without coughing, and I had a horrible sharp pain in my ribs caused by a sprained chest muscle. One night I was lying on the couch (so I wouldn’t keep Diana up all night) trying in … MORE

• 08.24.95 Jens The Consumer (Ideas, Me, Music)

  The problem of leisure
  What to do for pleasure
  Ideal love a new purchase
  A market of the senses—Gang Of Four, “Natural’s Not In It”

  “He realizes everything he does is second-hand, a waking dream, a dream someone else has dreamed for him—when he walks into a pub and greets friends with a line he’s half-consciously lifted from last night’s sit-com, he’s an advertisement. He hears himself and he feels tricked, … MORE

• 08.23.95 Piling Up Sheets / the face in the soup bowl (Ideas)

  I decided I would only work on this page after ten PM, when I think differently. When I’m tired but alert, and everyone around me is asleep, and it’s dark and quiet.

  The cognitive scientist and AI researcher David Gelernter has a model of consciousness that has focus as its parameter: varying focus produces mental states from rigorous logical thought (when focus is at its highest) all the way down to dreaming (when focus is at … MORE