Or 75,000 miles. Which, as big a distance as it may seem, is only a third of the way to the moon.

In other words, we very nearly got hit.

But the sky's not falling. At least not today.

2:12:15 PM    please comment []

I can't bring myself to write the rant that I want to about the girls who starve. Words like beauty, perfection, and control become the signifiers for a form of self-immolation that cloaks itself in a veil of power-language.

The ones who starve themselves want to break out of their isolation, and they are seeking community in a way they never could before: online and anonymously, where they can find others of their vanishing tribe and share the rituals and secrets of their own undoing. It makes me sad and angry, probably because I know how precious it is to feel accepted as one perceives oneself to be.

1:57:50 PM    please comment []

I'm thinking that this book, Linked: The New Science of Networks by Elbert-Laszlo Barabasi, should be sold in a matched set on Amazon with Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. We're going to see this convergence more and more often as time goes by ~ we're at the right place technological, socially, and economically to start thinking about networks in this way. The algorithmic, rules-based functioning of DNA is just the tip of the iceberg.

A New York Times article points to economics as another area where the exploration of network theory might be valuable. I'm going to propose that it's already started with applications from game theory (see John Nash, for example).

1:35:17 PM    please comment []