I just listened to the most incredible radio piece I have ever heard. Even better than This American Life’s "The Canadians Among Us". It is a story, by American Radio Works, about an autistic woman who works for (the next words are not a typing mistake) the McDonald’s Corporation inspecting slaughterhouses and making them more humane. She knows how cows feel. She has learned from cows how to feel comfortable in this world and in gratitude has re-designed the process of killing cattle in the slaughterhouse. You need to listen to it now, here. It deeply impacts any thinking you might ever want to do about animals, the compassion that can be shared between animals and humans, embodiment, or Led Zeppelin.

joho and akma are talking about the web as a brain. I don't like this metaphor at all, partly because its like comparing the web to the interactions of quirks and quarks. We know almost nothing about either the brain or quirks and quarks. Still, their may be something to the comparison. Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg wrote an article in WIRED in 1995 on just this subject. The article compares Teilhard de Chardin's thoughts about the noosphere to the rise of new information technologies.

AKMA is interested in three things recently. Sermons and their repeatability, the director of american terrorism's new colour coded hype-building system, and the ability of wearable computers to determine context. These threads come together in dangerous combinations. After all, what is the colour coded hype-building system going to be good for if not to give programmers a cheat as they desperately try to teach computers to recognize context. If the contexts become colour coded then all the computer needs is a good digital camera and a pantone book. Perhaps the plagiarism of sermons isn't so bad; I would rather hear a good sermon twice than a bad sermon once. Perhaps sermons should be advertised by a colour coded system which would alert the hearer to the amount of repeated material.
Green - all new,
blue - joke repeated (i.e. that great baseball joke is in this sermon again),
yellow - unoriginal analysis but content is new (i.e. the whole Girardian analysis of violence thing will overwhelm the text again),
orange - massive plagiarism from another source (i.e. reading verbatim (or close to it) from AKMA's book),
red - its all been done before.

When I was doing more work on theology and new information technologies than I have time for now, I had a good discussion with the John McCarthy (my dissertation director) about the web and space. He found the ways in which computer games explode our notion of space interesting - supermario being an innocuous but good example. I think that the web has, or at least can have, some of the same thing going on. It is still mostly textual. But the little graphic bits we put on our sites at least hint towards a more richly varied navigation. My favorite metaphor would be a subway train. London's system would be a good one - you can get lost and whole parts of the city are unserved.

It seems like something that is going on with this blogging phenomenon is a desire to file away thoughts. I like this because it can be the containing of things put away for future use or the slow erosion of bits from something bigger. These are my filings - some are manilla, some are bright.