apple juice

I watched the TED talk “Beware The Filter Bubble” by Eli Pariser recently. His basic premise is that with all of the algorithmic filtering and recommending that is happening on the internet, your online world is being narrowed in a way that prevents you from learning about alternative views and ideas.

He makes a very good argument for preserving your options and don’t narrow yourself too much, because if you do, you’ll end up in a “Filter Bubble”.

So I started thinking about ways that I had self-imposed a bubble, and one of the places I came up with was Facebook. I have 300-odd “friends” on Facebook. That’s way more than I can keep track of, and it seemed to me that recently I wasn’t seeing some people I care about. In addition, I knew there were few people I had blocked from appearing in the status feed, for various reasons.

As it turns out, I had blocked over 80 people from appearing, and there was a setting in facebook to show me “news and updates from people I interact with most often”. A little experiment ensued, where I unblocked all 80, and chanced the setting to “all my friends”.

The new situation is not much better… way too much noise from people I haven’t interacted with in years and years. Nothing against them, I just can’t handle it. And then I miss stuff from people I do interact with regularly. (Which sometimes leads to odd conversations where we sort of rehash each others’ updates from Facebook)

So, I’m thinking of de-friending a whole swath of people. I’m trying to come up with a snappy break point for doing so. Have I had dinner with this person in the past year? Would I have dinner with this person? Would I travel with this person? Would I go to a show with this person? I’m not sure what the break point is yet, but I’m working on it. Which leads me to Google Plus.

I’m on Google Plus now, and while there aren’t many of my friends and relatives on there yet, it’s clear that they’ve thought through one big issue that I have with Facebook: I don’t want to share everything with everyone. Facebook makes it hard to selectively post to people. Google Plus makes this easy (or easier, at least).

So we’ll see. Email is still pretty good at targeting just the people you want to talk to. But I’ve heard no one uses email anymore…

This place is hard core. Just keep on plugging away even when it is -10F out.

From a rather interesting article (Why Elizabeth Edwards Left God Out of Her Last Goodbye) about Elizabeth Edwards’ faith:

“Such openness to doubt and, in particular, to the persistence of suffering runs counter to powerful currents of American Christianity that stress the blessings (mostly material) that will flow to those who believe (and donate), as well as to the premium so many Christians place on voicing a confident and undiluted conviction, no matter what the reality.”

Amen to that.

And bollocks to the writer of the “American Power”  blog who thinks its cool to criticize a dying woman’s last words.

“Still, at her death bed and giving what most folks are calling a final goodbye, Elizabeth Edwards couldn’t find it somewhere down deep to ask for His blessings as she prepares for the hereafter? I guess that nihilism I’ve been discussing reaches up higher into the hard-left precincts than I thought.”

From the comments on the second article, a quote…

“I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.”

– Ghandi

 

The U.S. State Department:

The United States is pleased to announce that it will host UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day event in 2011, from May 1 – May 3 in Washington, D.C. UNESCO is the only UN agency with the mandate to promote freedom of expression and its corollary, freedom of the press.

(Via Daring Fireball)

The Big American Leak – NYTimes.com

“. . . going through the WikiLeaks cables has made for some fascinating reading. What’s between the lines in those cables, though, is another matter. It is a rather sobering message. America is leaking power.”

Health Care Costs as a percent of GDP vs Year with US Presidential Terms, originally uploaded by jameyer.

Hmm, strange… in 1980 and in 2000 there was a dramatic increase…

I get a fair amount of my internet oddities and goodness from kottke.org — you should check him out.

And this recent post of a post about meat eating is very interesting…

From the Guardian, a review of a book called Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie. In it, Fairlie argues that meat production isn’t actually that inefficient when done properly and veganism as an ethical response leaves something to be desired.

“But these idiocies, Fairlie shows, are not arguments against all meat eating, but arguments against the current farming model. He demonstrates that we’ve been using the wrong comparison to judge the efficiency of meat production. Instead of citing a simple conversion rate of feed into meat, we should be comparing the amount of land required to grow meat with the land needed to grow plant products of the same nutritional value to humans. The results are radically different.

If pigs are fed on residues and waste, and cattle on straw, stovers and grass from fallows and rangelands — food for which humans don’t compete — meat becomes a very efficient means of food production. Even though it is tilted by the profligate use of grain in rich countries, the global average conversion ratio of useful plant food to useful meat is not the 5:1 or 10:1 cited by almost everyone, but less than 2:1. If we stopped feeding edible grain to animals, we could still produce around half the current global meat supply with no loss to human nutrition: in fact it’s a significant net gain.”

(Via kottke.org.)