Hindenburg's Uncertainty Principle

Transparency

Some politicians have more important things
 to deal with than crushing leakers.

The Obama administration is laying the smackdown on whistleblowers in the most X-treme manner seen in 40 years. 

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller is patiently suggesting that the government do a better job of keeping its secrets so the NYT can stop bumming the gov't out by reporting on them. 

USAID suspended a giant international development contract, causing a multinational NGO to implode, with almost no explanation of why.

Is transparency a pipe dream?

Positively speaking, though, with the amount of TV I'm watching to distract myself from the above stated horrors, my brain should be devoid of nutrition in a matter of weeks, leaving me invulnerable to 2012's impending zombie apocalypse.

;-)

The Sum of my Curiosities, or Why Social Q&A is Awesome.

Lots of people mostly like to talk about subjects they know a lot about. I do too. Who doesn't? It's comfy to stay within our own realms of knowledge.
And also dull. You might teach someone else something by talking about things you know. But what will you learn?

I want my conversations, and therefore my relationships, to be based on what I want to know, not what I know already. I am much more excited about the questions that I have than the answers that I have.

According to a recent study I did by looking at the internet for five seconds, there are a jillion question and answer websites. Many, many people are trying to commingle Q&A style interaction with social networking technology. My two favorite such sites, Kommons and Quora, are doing a great job of making shared curiosity a basis for relationships in social media spaces like Twitter and Facebook.

Myspace and Facebook were/are all about molding an online identity. You curate the events of your life in pictures and text, so that you can show people who you were, are, and are becoming. Whether you portray yourself accurately, or carefully redact parts of your life to present a tamer self for your online audience is (mostly) up to you. Either way, most of what you post is about the past.

Question based social networking is much more forward looking, and therefore thrilling, in my eyes. Kommons allows you to "follow" questions that have been posted by other users, thereby grouping you with those users solely on the basis of a shared curiosity. By choosing questions to follow, you curate an identity for yourself, not based on what has been, but what you want to be. You and someone else have the same question. You're trying to grow your knowledge in the same direction.

Quora (whose budget, it must be mentioned, is tens of thousands of times that of Kommons) goes a step further and lets you follow people and topics as well as questions. This is one more step towards making mutual curiosity the basis for deeper relationships.



Discourse based on experience will always be valuable in its own way, and mutual curiosity has always been a basis for relationships. I am excited about online explorations of how to make all of it easier.

People often define themselves by the sum of their experiences.
I'd rather be defined by the sum of my curiosities.
Not what I do know, but what I will know. Not what I have been, but what I will be.

Tools Matter

My Macbook Pro quit its job this week, and during the few days between when it stopped working and when I took it to the repair place, I felt a surprising sense of relief...that the computer was out of my life for a while.

When I first got this computer, it was shipped to my dad's office so it wouldn't be stolen off our porch or something. I remember feeling euphoric and breathy when I finally got my hands on it, and rode the elevator back down to the office block's main floor thinking of all the projects I was going to do with it. I could make music with it. Electronic music. (I had failed to master an instrument.) I could make music videos and web sites. I could finally learn to animate. Now that I could compute anywhere I'd basically be living my creative dream during every waking hour.

Fast forward almost five years, to last week, the day before my computer stopped working. I watched six episodes of Gossip Girl on DVD that day, on my laptop. The endless creative possibilities offered by my laptop had been overruled by some horrible, sexified Stepford teens on teevee. When my computer broke, the weight of all that "creative potential," (and all that teevee that needed watchin',) was magically lifted. I was able to look around and ponder what I should really do, with what I had, where I was.

New creative tools always give me goose bumps.

"With this, I'll make something awesome!" I always tell myself.

...and then, whatever-unit-of-time later...I find myself staggering under the guilt of not having actually done as much as I had imagined I would.

I have misconceived the relationship between tools and creativity. Tools can't make me create. By being creative, I make space in my life for tools.

Inevitably, after pretending for too long that I'll become a productive, creative genius if I buy the right...markers...sketchpad...software...computer...I have to dig myself out from under my pile of tools and their weighty potentials and decide, without the help of inanimate objects, what I should actually do.

The above cartoon's caption comes from a Twitter exchange I had with Hugh MacLeod. I was gushing about these pens that I really want (which he draws his cartoons with), and I said "Tools Matter."

He said, "Yeah... Until they don't."

Creative processes get easier with tools. But the real creative spirit can use any raw material to make something great.

I am constantly forgetting and relearning this.

Platonic Form

Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid) just tweeted "People think 'success' exists out there in the ether, like some Platonic form. It doesn't."

I do so much reading about how to succeed, and by succeed, I mean make goals and then reach them within some reasonable timeframe (if there is such a thing as reasonable.) Ultimately, none of the reading helps at all, unless, in a moment when I am on the fence, it pushes me to make a decision...to translate an amorphous 'goal' in my mind into a schedule, a set of activities, and a plan. Whether I reach the actual goal in the end doesn't necessarily determine whether I have succeeded. But there is no possibility of success at all unless I drag it out of the "Platonic form" state, and into reality.

Thanks for the continued inspiration Hugh.

P.S. As of this posting, Hugh's tweet is only about half an hour old. Am I quick on the draw (and on the pun) or what?

Woman Friendly Condoms that Help Africa

My ad concept for L. condoms.

Here's a cool thing:

Peace Dividend Trust's excellent Elmira Bayrasli recently blogged for Forbes about a woman named Talia Frenkel who is starting a new condom company, called "L.," marketing to women. They aren't female condoms, but the marketing isn't aimed solely at men either, and the condoms won't include certain ingredients (glycerin, paraben) that can irritate women's skin.

Frenkel is also employing the widely disrespected (among aid workers) Tom's Shoes model. For every "L." condom you buy, one will be given away in certain African countries where there's a ton of HIV and not that many condoms. Buy one, give one (BOGO).

As we recover from The Big Kerfuffle* in which the NFL and World Vision defiled the developing world's dignity by sending them American football merchandise, its nice to hear about a product that might fit with the occasionally misused BOGO model.

(To be fair, the NFL/World Vision weren't doing BOGO, they were using a Gift in Kind model, which also gets a lot of deserved smack-talk. Also, Tom's Shoes didn't invent BOGO.)

So why will BOGO for condoms be less of a scam than BOGO for shoes?

Because shoes can be made anywhere. The countries that receive donated Tom's Shoes definitely have their own cobblers, and when the cobbler's customers start getting free shoes from Tom's, the cobbler's out of a job. This violates the number one principle-that-Aid-Workers-copied-off-of-Doctors'-papers: Do No Harm.  If BOGO programs like Tom's Shoes are giving away things that could be made in-country by locals, they're not helping.

But condoms can't be made everywhere, and they definitely don't work as an individual or family enterprise like shoe cobbling and hair-cutting do. Sending condoms abroad with a buy-one-give-one program might mildly curb the profits of stores that sell condoms. But no stores sell only condoms, whereas many cobblers only make and repair shoes for a living. Plus, it sounds like some countries just run out of condoms and can't get replacements for months on end sometimes.

Side note: 700,000 condoms got heisted out of a shipping container last week! There's a huge condom black market, which includes counterfeiters that make shoddy merchandise.

Places with condom factories should help out places without condom factories, especially if those places without condom factories also have a huge AIDS problem.

So, this looks like a good idea to me.  Plus, as Forbes pointed out, L. brand condoms won't evoke the Trojan war at all. And lets face it, isn't it a little rape-suggesty to have a condom brand alluding to a device that was used to sneak soldiers inside the enemy walls so they could come out at night and brutalize everyone?

*Note: The Big Kerfuffle is how the NFL/World Vision t-shirt controversy was described over on Tales from The Hood. I liked it. So I used it too :-)

Updated to include links to the author of the post that inspired this post (Elmira Bayrasli) and to Peace Dividend Trust.

You don't need more time...

The words in this cartoon are from a blog post by Seth Godin. The title of the post was "You don't need more time..." and the entire text was "...you just need to decide." 10 words to describe a colossal quandary that vexes me (and I assume everyone else).

Many times I've wished for more time to figure out "what I want to do with my life." I'm young, I'm educated and I've been brought up by my family and my country to think that I can do whatever I want to do, and that I can try out lots of stuff and change course midstream as often as I like. When I graduated from high school, I wished I had one more year so I could beef up my cred and get a scholarship to a hot east coast hipster party haven. When I graduated from college I wished I had more time to figure out how to get a job &c. &c. 

I was offered positions in three countries when I applied to volunteer abroad with Mennonite Central Committee. I agonized for days over which one to choose.  The position I chose fell through and the other two were filled by other people. My initial agonizing had no effect on what eventually happened.
When my current position came to the table, I deliberated for about fifteen minutes, and haven't looked back.

I used to worry that the older I got, the less options I would have.
Now I understand that the number of options available to me will only increase with time. But even with an infinite amount of time, there will never be a moment of pure knowledge, delivered from outside me, about what I should do.

There's no way to find objective "knowledge" about what we should do, there are only decisions.

Decisions take time...but not tons of time. After we decide, we can get to the fun stuff.

This cartoon is a double tribute to Seth Godin and Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid), two people that regularly put stuff on the internet that makes me think better thoughts.

I consider this post a sequel to my previous Hugh MacLeod-esque cartoon.