Literature | How would Jack Kerouac cope with Microsoft Word? Not very well, a blogger imagines, for “the birth of the computer has led, largely, to the death of the genuine stream of consciousness novel.” It “allows us to delete, shift sections around and continually edit, in the way that Kerouac, writing on his lengthy scrolls [for “On the Road"], could not.” [Guardian]

VII

Recommender systems can increase the experience of diversity. By drawing attention to items individuals have not found by themselves, they can lead to new experiences. But individual diversity is different from overall diversity. Some systems can increase both individual and overall diversity. Other systems increase individual diversity but, at the same time, prompt consumers to be increasingly similar to each other. Their selections then come from an increasingly narrow range of items....

XI

The word “community” is widely used in conjunction with recommender systems, but they do little to build communities. Their use is essentially an individual, isolated act. Groups and networks are as important in the creation and experience of culture as individuals. Recommender systems will play a role in how culture is experienced, but they are not necessarily a strong force pushing us either towards or away from a healthy culture.

XII

Recommender systems only filter culture, in various ways; the point is to create environments in which culture can prosper.

Very few infrastructure details begin with the idea that they will last 1,000 years. Strange as it sounds it is very likely that some basic software running inside computers  today will be running in computers 500 years from now. We see that conservation in cells, where very primitive metabolic cycles present in archaic cells are still operating in cells today. All the fancy “recent” improvements run upon them. One could imagine that in 5 centuries, parts of unix will be found operating in servers.  But it is clear that no one would be more surprised than the creators of unix. Most creations, including software, are written in less than optimal conditions. Creators always have the idea that they will go back later to fix the many known imperfections. Of course they are never fixed because the shipped rev is “good enough” — and so the temporary good enough becomes a permanent good enough.

I recently came across these amazing data driven globes from Yale’s G-Econ group.  The one above represents population density, but their tool allows for all kinds of data to drive the topology from average rainfall to distance from coastlines.