My new favorite youtube video

motion graphics + npr personalities + bruce = awesome

Orca wave hunting

The Machine is (Changing) Us

View more documents from mwesch.

Is marriage too big to fail?

(pic from here)

Against the backdrop of the economic downturn, a very useful metaphor has emerged: zombie banks.

Unable to create value on their own, these banks are a financial suck.

Once they collapse, they depend on outside value - government money - to survive.

---

After reading this article, I'm wondering if marriage is the zombie institution of the cultural marketplace:

Why do we still insist on marriage? Sure, it made sense to agrarian families before 1900, when to farm the land, one needed two spouses, grandparents, and a raft of children. But now that we have white-collar work and washing machines, and our life expectancy has shot from 47 to 77, isn’t the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?

While the article reads somewhat cathartic and effusive and personal, it does pose some compelling questions.

Is marriage an effective institution when it comes to investing the cultural assets of our lives? or does it set us up for failure?

I really dunno.

People haven't seemed to give up on the institution writ large.

Yet the scenario sounds familiar: in spite of systemic failure, an institution manages to subsist on the edge of sustainability, with many external costs.

If marriage is a zombie institution within the cultural marketplace, what exactly are the forces keeping marriage solvent anyways? (Other than people making a lot of money off weddings of course...)

And does zombie marriage back us into the possibility that we are in the middle of a cultural downturn?

---

It will be interesting to see if raising children becomes more decoupled from marriage and romantic relationships in general.

Came across this article in CNN which resonates.

Diggin this...

(via Wooster Collective)

Human Pac Man

The escape from Crete

(pic from here)

Today on Twitter someone compared Michael Jackson to Icarus.

Icarus grew up in captivity. His father engineered the plan for his escape. And his mode of escape eventually led to his tragic demise.

The resonance is compelling:

At first there was a terror in the joy. The wide vacancy of the air dazed them-a glance downward made their brains reel. But when a great wind filled their wings, and Icarus felt himself sustained, like a halcyon bird in the hollow of a wave, like a child uplifted by his mother, he forgot everything in the world but joy. He forgot Crete and the other islands that he had passed over: he saw but vaguely that winged thing in the distance before him that was his father Daedalus. He longed for one draft of flight to quench the thirst of his captivity: he stretched out his arms to the sky and made toward the highest heavens.

Alas for him! Warmer and warmer grew the air. Those arms, that had seemed to uphold him, relaxed. His wings wavered, dropped. He fluttered his young hands vainly-he was falling-and in that terror he remembered. The heat of the sun had melted the wax from his wings; the feathers were falling, one by one, like snowflakes; and there was none to help.

He fell like a leaf tossed down by the wind, down, down, with one cry that overtook Daedalus far away. When he returned and sought high and low for the poor boy, he saw nothing but the birdlike feathers afloat on the water, and he knew that Icarus was drowned.

---

RIP MJ...

Human stigmergy

Stigmergy is a form of self organization involving organisms and the encoding of information into their environment:

Stigmergy is a mechanism of spontaneous, indirect coordination between agents or actions, where the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a subsequent action, by the same or a different agent.

Originally used to describe termite behavior, it has generally been the monopoly of social insects.

But this is changing.

Stigmergy scales up to human activities quite well.

One of the best examples of a stigmergic human practice is graffiti: the encoding of ephemeral messages into the environment as a kind of metadata about territory and identity...literally tagging.

The broken window theory is another example of stigmergy in an urban setting:

Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.

Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.

The internet is also the backdrop for a number of stigmergic practices:

The massive structure of information available in a wiki, or an open source software project such as the Linux kernel could be compared to a termite nest; one initial user leaves a seed of an idea (a mudball) which attracts other users who then build upon and modify this initial concept, eventually constructing an elaborate structure of connected thoughts.

Now that the internet is a shared environment for close to 1/4 the world population, stigmergy contextualizes online collaborative behavior very effectively.

I'm starting to think Kafka was onto something...

R.I.P. Ed McMahon

The dude had a full life...and apparently didn't take himself too seriously:



Didn't know this:

During World War II, McMahon was a fighter pilot in the United States Marine Corps serving as a flight instructor and test pilot. He was a decorated pilot (six Air Medals) and was discharged in 1946, remaining in the reserves.

After college, McMahon returned to active duty. He was sent to Korea in February 1952. He flew unarmed O-1E Bird Dogs on 85 tactical air control and artillery spotting missions. He remained in the Marine Corps Reserve, retiring with the rank of Colonel in 1966 and was then commissioned as a Brigadier General in the California Air National Guard.

Happy Father's Day Dad!

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!