First off, a big thank you to all those who have signed up to sponsor ribbonfarm in 2012 so far. The total has already hit $2550, about 25% more than last year’s total. This has opened up many more interesting possibilities for activities online and offline, compared to last year. Stay tuned for more on that front.

Here is the roundup of new posts since January. The last roundup can be found here, and from there, if you so desire, you can backtrack through the entire history of this blog, roundup-by-roundup, through approximately 300 posts. I wouldn’t recommend doing that, since there’s more crud in the archives than I like to admit, and because a better option is brewing.

1. 2012 Reading List, January – June
2. Seeking Density in the Gonzo Theater
3. The World is Small and Life is Long
4. Peak Attention and the Colonization of Subcultures
5. How to Name Things
6. The Greater Ribbonfarm Cultural Region
7. Refactor Camp 2012: Generativity and Captivity
8. Glimpses of a Cryptic God
9. Just Add Water
10. Hall’s Law: The Nineteenth Century Prequel to Moore’s Law
11. Reviewing Refactor Camp 2012
12. Can Hydras Eat Unknown-Unknowns for Lunch?
13. How Do You Run Away from Home?
14. Lawyer Mind, Judge Mind
15. Hacking the Non-Disposable Planet
16. Go Deep, Young Man: 2012 Call for Sponsorships
17. Rediscovering Literacy
18. Welcome to the Future Nauseous
19. Discussion Note: Sartre’s Nausea vs. Future Nausea (guest post)

Not counting administrative/meta posts and the sole guest post, I’ve managed 13 real posts so far this year. There has also been plenty of excellent discussion. I am pretty happy with these dozen posts, since a lot of themes that have been evolving over several years appear to be cohering in interesting ways. This was one of the reasons I was able to draw a conceptual map of ribbonfarm and its neighborhood (item 6) and write several pieces that I think capture the learnings from the writing/thinking process I’ve been developing (2, 5, 9 and 16).

Speaking of cohering themes, I am posting this regular biannual round-up a month earlier than usual. This is because I am planning something a little special for June, in the run-up to the fifth anniversary of this blog on July 4th (I started the blog on July 4th 2007).

In June, there will be no new content. Instead, I plan to go back through five years worth of archives and create 4-5 themed summaries of all the good posts, along with some (hopefully helpful) commentary.

For the significant number of people who have started reading this blog relatively recently, this should be helpful, since I back-link extensively through my older stuff (though I only rarely do true series posts, my posts generally make more sense in the context of older ones). Since many new readers attempt to read through the entire archives (otherwise known as the Ribbonfarm Absurdity Marathon), I am hoping to cut down the time necessary for this brave catch-up attempt by somewhere between 50 to 70%. This will probably mean some tough elimination decisions.

It is going to be pretty challenging to partition over 300 posts, averaging 2000-3000 words, with a ton of  cross-referencing, into 4-5 decoupled and linearly sequenced series, but it’s about time. This blog is becoming too much of an illegible slum even for my own slobby, unshaven tastes, so a few guided tours wouldn’t hurt. It won’t be pretty, but I hope machetes will no longer be necessary once I am done.

For those in the US, here’s wishing you a Happy Memorial Day and a good start to your summer.

It’s that time of the year again. Last year, sponsorships amounted to about $2000 (not counting  the “buy me a coffee” micro-payments, which added another $400). This year, they’ve already crossed the $500 mark without me doing a call.

Sponsorship and “coffee” money represent a fairly small fraction of my income, but on a dumb-money to smart-money spectrum, it is the smartest money I make.  I’d trade two dollars of any other kind of income for a dollar of sponsorship income any day. The “smart” in the smart money is the unadultrated goodwill it carries. Though there are no strings attached, I feel a strong urge to reinvest sponsorship income back into the blog and related activities rather than using it to pay the bills. In a way, the money comes with the opposite of a moral hazard attached.

So if you were considering sponsoring this year, consider this your cue and sponsor away.

When I did the call last year, I shared a line (the only line, actually) from my fledgling business philosophy: go where the wild thoughts are.

This year, I’ve added another line: go deep, young man.  At 37, I think I get to call myself young man for at least another three years.

Read on for more, if you are interested in my evolving philosophy of blogging. If you are a blogger yourself, chances are you won’t learn much. I am increasingly realizing that my approach to blogging says more about me than about blogging. If you’re not a blogger, this is your annual peek behind the scenes.

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There is a fascinating set of ideas that has been swirling around in the global zeitgeist for the past decade, around the quote that will keep Donald Rumsfeld in the history books long after his political career is forgotten. I am referring, of course, to the famous unknown-unknowns quote from 2002. Here it is:

[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.

Rumsfeld put his finger on a major itch that set off widespread scratching. This scratching, which is about the collective human condition in the face of fundamental uncertainties, shows no sign of slowing down a decade later. But the conversation has taken an interesting turn that I want to call out.

Out of all this scratching, four broad narratives have emerged that can be arranged on a 2×2 with analytic/synthetic on one axis and optimistic/pessimistic on the other.  Three are rehashes of older narratives. But the fourth — the Hydra narrative — is new. I have labeled it the Hydra narrative after Taleb’s metaphor in his explanation of anti-fragility: you cut one head off, two emerge in its place (his book on the subject is due out in October).

The general idea behind the Hydra narrative in a broad sense (not just what Taleb has said/will say in October) is that hydras eat all unknown unknowns (not just Taleb’s famous black swans) for lunch. I have heard at least three different versions of this proposition in the last year. The narrative inspires social system designs that feed on uncertainty rather than being destroyed by it. Geoffrey West’s ideas about superlinearity are the empirical part of an attempt to construct an existence proof showing that such systems are actually possible.

My own favorite starting point for thinking about these things, as some of you would have guessed, is James Scott’s idea of illegibility, which is poised diplomatically at the origin, equally amenable to being incorporated in any of the narratives. It is equally capable of informing either skepticism or faith in any of the narratives, and can be employed towards both analysis and synthesis.

I haven’t made up my mind about the question in the title of the post, but am on alert for new ideas relating to it, from Taleb and others.  So this is something of an early-warning post.

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I’ve been procrastinating on this post for a couple of weeks, wondering what the heck to say about my first attempt at a serious Ribbonfarm event: Refactor Camp 2012, on March 3rd, at the San Francisco Zoo.

Throughout 2011, I did a whole lot of physical-world stuff, meeting people all over the country, sleeping on couches and in spare bedrooms, and organizing a handful of field trips (I think I met at least a hundred people, if not more). But Refactor Camp felt different somehow.

Every interesting thing in my life has been the result of scratching at some weird itch. Every screwed-up thing has been the result of ignoring such itches and attempting to follow some mature-sounding social script instead.

Last year, through my travels and field trips,  I was intrigued to discover that itch-scratchers are disproportionately represented in the readership here on Ribbonfarm. Which is how many of us ended up on the Sausalito docks listening to Sam Penrose talking about outlaw living on houseboats. Or how I ended up inside the storm drains under Las Vegas with Laura Wood.

Reflecting on all this led me to wonder: What would happen if you put a bunch of itchy-scratchy types in a room together? Let’s find out.

I am pleased to announce that on Saturday March 3rd, at the San Francisco Zoo, between 10 AM and 3 PM, along with a few itchy-scratchy co-conspirators, I will be hosting and partially sponsoring the first ever barcamp related to the themes of this blog: Refactor Camp 2012.

All itchy-scratchy types are invited. Use the promotional code EARLYBIRD to register before 10 PM, Thursday Feb 16th, and get $10 off the $40 general registration. You can get one of the limited student reservations if you are a registered student somewhere ($10), or one of the sponsor tickets ($100) if you want to help cover the costs, since I am subsidizing it a bit. Our meeting space is limited to about 40 people max.

The event will run from 10 AM to 3 PM, in one of the meeting rooms at the zoo (with WiFi), and will include lunch, all-day coffee and admission to the zoo.

So sign up now. And then come back and continue reading to find out why a zoo, why the theme is “generativity and captivity” and what any of this has to do with scratching itches and refactoring perceptions.

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I finally managed to check an item off my to-do list that’s been bugging me for months. There is now a a glossary of terms from Tempo on this site.  You can always get to it directly via a link on the top menu.

It’s one of those annoying little housekeeping tasks that was tedious to do, but now that I am done, it should prove very helpful. In the past, I’ve limited my use of terms from the book in blog posts to avoid losing people through either confusion or repetition. Now I can just link to the definitions. If you write about anything related to the book and need a convenient reference, feel free to link to the specific definition.

I hope to refine and extend the glossary and do longer encyclopedia style entries on some of them, linking off the short entry. While the glossary is mostly for Tempo-specific neologisms, I also have a few borrowed concepts that I use a lot. I plan to judiciously add more of those. There is a good chance that the second edition of the book will actually start with an expanded glossary, representing space I want to explore. I’ll probably do a post on every major new concept I incorporate into the second edition.

Please let me know if I missed any key concepts from the book, or if you have suggestions for borrowed terms that pass the “sufficiently close” test. If it doesn’t pass, I may still link to an external reference on an under-construction references page.

Now that I have this out of the way, I plan to do more posts building explicitly on concepts in the book. Specific requests are welcome.

Hopefully the glossary should be enough for me to not lose readers who haven’t read/finished the book and keep the blog posts stand-alone.

The last time I froze and posted my short-term reading list on August 12, people seemed to appreciate it. Going by my Amazon Affiliate data and random conversations with some of you on Google+ and Facebook, it looks like at least a few dozen people bought one or more of the books and read along, in a sort of invisible de facto book club. So I figured I’d make it a routine feature.

I personally finished 6.75 of the 8 books I posted (one book got swapped out for an alternate) by December 31. That’s a reading rate of just under a book every 3 weeks. Which means I should be able to get through about 8.7 books by the end of June.

Here’s my book list that I plan to get through by June 30, beyond the backlog of  1.25, which leaves me with an allowance of 7.45. I’ll round that up to 8. Here’s the list.

1. Notes on the Synthesis of Form: A seminal book on design, recommended by Dorian Taylor and Xianhang Zhang.
2. Cognition in the Wild: Another seminal book on decision-making in real-world settings, also recommended by Dorian Taylor
3. Shop Class as Soul Craft: A book on the philosophy of making stuff, and the value of working with your hands. Recommended by Art Felgate, Daniel Lemire and a couple of other people.
4. Invisible Giant: Cargill and its Transnational Strategies OR Merchants of Grain: The Power and Profits of the Five Giant Companies at the Center of the World’s Food Supply (haven’t picked yet): Books on the global food industry, recommended by Megan Lubaszska.
5. The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution: From my own list.
6. Why Beauty is Truth: the history of symmetry: From my unread pile.
7. Design in Nature: how the constructal law governs evolution in biology, physics, technology and social organization: bit of a wildcard, due to be released January 24th. Recommended by John Hagel.
8. Infrastructure: a field guide to the industrial landscape: a recommendation off Quora. Seems like fun mind-candy, targeted more at the “How Things Work” kids’ market than adults, but still…

Infrastructure and Making

Two themes seem to pop out here: infrastructure and making.

My exploration of the world of infrastructure, which has been going on casually for a couple of years (I’ve written quite a bit about things like shipping and garbage) is heading into a mature drill-down-and-integrate phase. It seems increasingly likely that my next book will be related to this stuff in some way.

If that theme is maturing and getting serious, a new theme is taking root: design, building stuff, making things. What people are calling the Maker Revolution. I see some red flags of save-the-world cultishness here, but it seems like a good time to think about the subject. Two readers, Nick Pinkston and Justin Mares, who are just coming off their Cloudfab project, have been energetically trying to persuade me (and apparently everybody else they talk to) to take this theme seriously.

If nothing else, I’ll learn enough to poke fun at the solemn save-the-world makers.

Do You Want a Forum?

On and off over the years, people have asked for a ribbonfarm discussion forum. I’ve been reluctant to set one up, since it would be more maintenance work, but now that WordPress has some strong support for the feature, it’s gotten easier.

The face-to-face field trip events last year, Google+ and Facebook have been good for small and informal sidebar conversations with some of you, but there’s something to be said for a less cluttered space for conversations that are not explicitly linked to a blog post, and accessible to all.

If I do this, it will be free, but I may do some light-touch gatekeeping so administration doesn’t take over my life.

If you are interested, let me know by email or post a comment, along with any suggestions. If there’s enough interest (at least a couple of dozen people), I’ll set one up.

Turning this de facto invisible book club into a de jure visible one seems to be a good first use case for a forum.

 

 

It’s time for a roundup of all the posts in this first year of the Tempo book blog and a review of the performance/impact of the book itself. I wrote the book with the expectation that I’d evolve it through multiple editions and spin-off  activities over at least a decade, so the book blog has been especially important in my thinking and planning.

This is where I hope to test out ideas to add to future editions, maintain a sort of notebook of ongoing research, and prepare an online home for the book for when the paper book finally becomes a relic.

If the book endures, I expect editions beyond about 2015 to be purely digital, with paper copies being mostly souvenirs. Books seem to be heading inexorably towards continuously-updated-and-versioned digital entities. I predict that beyond the 2nd or 3rd edition, I’ll end up converting the book into a sort of a la carte online thing with mechanisms for readers to keep up with updates and new material.  I’ll probably still keep producing paper versions even if there is no real market, because the dead-tree finality of a paper edition serves to enforce a kind of extreme discipline on the writing process.

Anyway, here is a report on the year’s happenings, a preview of 2012, and a list of blog entries for those who want to catch up.

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