Ruminations on a bee. I love Matt Webb's blog entries. They're superdense, thought-provoking, serious and playful at the same time. He's a smart one, our Matt. Today's entry is awfully tasty.

esterday morning, hot sun and hot pavement, I found a dead bee. I can't remember the last time I saw a dead bee - not since I've lived in a city, I guess - and this one was still brightly coloured, fuzzy and fat. I poked it with a piece of leaf for a while. That knot of complexity! The desk my computer is on now looks vulgar in comparison, so vast, so selfish, squatting over a million bees-worth of space, and doing nothing: one piece of the desk is much like another, and the whole like any desk, anywhere. But this bee, white black and yellow, I bet every single element of it had purpose: every particle, every force, every relative position and potentiality of it, oh and more and wider than I have space here to say, all the way down to the substrate of the universe itself. Not like my desk, built on top of all these layers, in the highly stacked and abstracted world of people -- which is, in fact, just like London around me, there at the west end of Fleet Street, a human construction, a deeply nested virtual machine really, that's all it is -- there with our precarious artifact around me, I witnessed a bee, not built on top of reality but part of reality itself. Indivisible from it. A window to the true reality so far from me. "Auspicious event! Going to be a good day" I texted Es, excited. "Not for the bee" she replied. I'm not sure, it's still there, more real than any of us. Thank you, bee!

Link

Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 
3:56:50 AM      comment []   trackback []  



600,000 blogs for the downloading. Weblog Census is a Technorati/Blogdex/Daypop-style project that has indexed over 600,000 blogs from around the world, archiving all the posts its ever discovered. You can download all this data from the project site, and invent your own data-mining alogrithms to discover the topology of Blogistan.

Link

Discuss

(via Oblomovka) [Boing Boing Blog] 
3:53:28 AM      comment []   trackback []  



what real censorship looks like. Further Iranian Oppression. The "government" of Iran has evidently teamed up with Cuba in efforts to further suppress the growing democratic movement in Iran by jamming pro-democracy satellite broadcasts. Two un-elected governments combining forces to make sure that their will is enforced, not that of their citizens. [MetaFilter] 
3:42:36 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Blogs will fade away.

I woke up yesterday with these thought.

Blogs will fade away within two years.  What we know now as blogs will not be recognized by web users of tommorrow.  Website technologies and blogging technologies are on a converging path and will soon be indistinguishable from one another.

RSS will also disappear in favor of subscriptions.  People will take it for granted that webpages can be subscribed to.  Web browsers will be changed to support single-click webpage subscription.  No mess, no fuss.  Throw in client-side highlighting of changes as well.  No RSS, no Echo, just subscriptions.

[Don Park's Daily Habit] 
3:36:41 AM      comment []   trackback []  



vintage camera ads. hundreds of vintage camera-related advertisements. [MetaFilter] 
3:28:17 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Petition drive for a Google toolbar in Safari. A group of Mac users has started a petition asking the folks at Google for a Google Toolbar compatible with Apple's Safari Web browser. To learn more or to sign the petition, check the site for Gopple.org... [Mac Net Journal] 
3:16:50 AM      comment []   trackback []  



New pages for gzip and user agent id reports. I've taken my reports on Aggregators that support gzip and Aggregators that don't implement RFC 2616, Sec 3.8 product tokens and broken them out into separate pages, so the people won't have to go trawling through the blog to find them. [Ted Leung on the air] 
3:13:18 AM      comment []   trackback []