Tuesday, February 19, 2008
highly recommended: nova: ape genius. just caught this on pbs. takeaway:
- control of emotions is critical to accomplishment;
- so is the ability / desire to teach.
interesting, that last part: if the teaching skill is taught (metaknowledge), then the developmental acceleration can really begin. as for the emotional intelligence thing, humans have a long way to go in that regard. our sentimentality (positive or negative) is not a differentiator, but a common bond. hate kills - but so does love.
one more notch towards the recognition that we need to rethink all of our assumed definitions.
as for this nova episode itself, there are some goosebump moments. felt like i was watching the dawn of human evolution - because i was.
almost forgot a thought i had: if we gave the apes ritalin or something, would they learn better ? would we end up creating a biochemically supported slave species ? morlocks & eloi, a brave new world:
"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."
way back when, i had in mind some thoughts regarding exposing one's browsing stream, along with other personal io streams. of course, i never did anything about it. but i was playing in google, noticed (again) their web history feature, and figured what the heck, may as well just leverage that. i hadn't been using this to date, so it starts from scratch.
i also figured i'd run it through feedburner so that i could get some minimal stats, just in case. i disabled anything detailed, since that interfered with other stuff i wanted to do.
the only real snag i ran into was that the google feed items have <guid/> elements, and feedburner just assumes that those take precedence over the <link/> elements - not a good assumption in this case. so i had to delete those.
i like those little "headline animator" thingies that feedburner has (above). too bad individual links aren't present. but i've also rendered that feed now in the sidebar here, and that should be good enough. want more ? use your favorite feed reader.
my first shot at this was to send it through newsgator's online reader, then set things up so i could scrape the last 100 links, but what i'm doing now is a lot cleaner, even though google only provides the latest 24 history items in their feed. no, i'm not going to accumulate stuff on the back end. if you want an accumulating history, it'll be up to your feed reader settings.
i've got a five minute cache on this end. that, combined with the feedburner delay, should give me enough time to catch any, uh, "erroneous" clicks. things that stray a bit. you know what i mean.
privacy issues ? well, what was it they say about "character": it's what you do while no one is looking. tell the reality tv folks that. i'll have to keep an eye on my own habits for a while, see if it's as boring as i think, or if anything incriminating interesting crops up.
it's my own personal zeitgeist:
zeit·geist | Pronunciation: 'tsIt-"gIst, 'zIt | Function: noun | Etymology: German, from Zeit (time) + Geist (spirit) | Date: 1884 | Meaning: the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era.
have fun !