Month: June 2007
worlds without decay and congestion
Digital objects typically persist just as long as the virtual world around them. Digital space can double every year or two with advances in digital hardware. Creative users acting in a virtual world can make it a lonely place:
More and more empty houses and castles and the like are lovingly constructed as monuments that few will ever see, and each becomes another wall between users, diluting their presence more and more.
… even if people do manage to find each other, the unbounded complexity of user-created data puts a low ceiling on the number of people who can get together, and thus limits the social dynamics that can emerge.
The upshot is that worlds that depend on user-created content a) suffer from progressively worse dilution of the user population; and b) limit the number of people who can get together when they do find each other. This is not a strong recipe for building effective, long-lasting community. [Terra Nova]
That’s much different from the real world:
The importance of geography is also evident across 8,000 years of history in the area now called Japan. The most densely settled regions in the Jomon period (6,000 to 300 BCE) were also the most densely settled regions in 1998. Consider as well the effects of U.S. bombing of Japan in World War II. The nuclear bomb that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima, Japan’s eighth largest city, killed 80,000 persons (20.8% of the city’s population) and destroyed two-thirds of the built up area of the city. Kyoto, Japan’s fifth largest city, was not bombed at all because of its cultural significance. The nuclear destruction of Hiroshima did not have an enduring effect on its attractiveness as a place to live. By 1975, the ratio of Hiroshima’ population to Kyoto’s was about the same as it was before the bombing. The relative attractiveness of places to persons is a remarkably stable aspect of life. [Galbi, 2002; source references there]
In the real world, place is a powerful structure organizing long-lasting communities. Moreover, renewing and preserving the built environment is a central concern in civic life.
While digital spaces organize digital objects in Euclidean neighborhoods (e.g. 184 W. 64’th St, NY), the web organizes digital objects in link neighborhoods. Link neighborhoods are much more flexible and dynamic than Euclidean neighborhoods. Link neighborhoods can evolve as communities of contemporary interest. Search engines can generate new link neighborhoods with regard for activity (modification date) and popularity (page rank or other ranking systems). Digital space, in contrast, is much more cheaply abandoned than re-organized.
Virtual worlds that encourage participants to create digital objects in a Euclidean digital space need to develop better ways to decay built objects and re-organizing space, or they will become lonely places.
CSC Invitational bicycle races
Scoping other major media, purple motes offers a special report on the 10’th Annual CSC Invitational bicycle races. The racing took place on a tight one kilometer course right here in the middle of Arlington, Virginia. Mark McCormack, former USPRO National Champion and 2006 CSC Invitational Winner, described the race:
It’s savagely hard. You have to close the gaps, you have to have the right positioning, it is incredibly technically challenging with all the turns and there is always wind that blows you over between turn 2 and 3. [CSC Press]
It’s NASCAR with no pollution and a lot more muscle.
In the elite amateur men’s race, former Lanterne Rouge rider and crowd favorite Todd Hipp (Battley Harley-Davidson) took third. A former Marine Corp swimmer who pulled boats onto the enemy’s shore, Hipp has switched tactics on land. He looks to his Harley teammates to pull him close to the line, and then he launches a ferocious sprint to get there first. But today, Hipp didn’t have the legs, and had to settle for third.
In the women’s pro race, Laura Van Gilder (Cheerwine) won to become the only three-time CSC winner. Van Gilder got away early with Rebecca Larson (Aaron’s Corporate Furnishings). The pair left the field in the distance for the rest of the rest. On the final lap:
Larson [refused] to come around Van Gilder despite slowing to a crawl. With no other choice save a trackstand, Van Gilder led out the sprint just after the final corner. Larson drew nearly even with just meters to the line, but didn’t have the extra punch to topple the two-time CSC Invitational champion. [VeloNews]
Congratulations to Van Gilder. Some of the guys I ride with also refuse to come around.
The CSC Invitational included for the first time the U.S. Handcycling Criterium Championship. Seth Arseneau, a former U.S. army soldier, finished first. His teammate, Oscar “Oz” Sanchez, a former Marine, finished third. The guys are fantastic athletes who give cycle racing another whole dimension. A great addition to the CSC Invitational.
In the men’s pro race, Rashaan Bahati sprinted for the win at the end of the hot, fast, 100 km distance. Bahati was looking spent in the middle of the race. His teammate, Kayle LeoGrande, was coming off a tactical mistake that may have cost him a win earlier this May. On his blog, Bahati described his moves on the final lap:
Crossing the finish line with one lap to go, I had made up in my mind what I was going to do and I did it. Going into the second to last turn, we have a straightaway of about 200m and when I got there I started my sprint. Moved from 10th to 4th with Kayle 2 guys back. I went through the second to last corner so fast I think other riders stopped and looked to see if I would crash or not.
I’m in to the last turn and I’m 4th wheel…I’m thinking…well if Kayle is here, we could get 1st and 2nd. I started to sprint and I quickly moved into 2nd position right behind Ivan Stevic of (Toyota) who beat me in stage 3 of Tri-Peaks Stage race. 150m to go and I pop out to close the deal and my first 4-5 pedal strokes I came neck and neck with Ivan and from that point on, I knew I had it. LeoGrande finished 8th giving us 2 guys in the top ten. Not bad for a new team.
A brilliant performance by Bahati, Leogrande, and the Rock Racing team.
Thanks to all the participants and organizers for bringing the best of cycling to Arlington this past Saturday. For more exciting cycling action, head to the Crystal City Classic on June 16. Or come out and ride with the Lanterne Rouge.
Bob Hope Poem: vaudeville to radio, television, and movies
Hope, Leslie, later called Bob, was the fifth of seven children in an impoverished family. Arriving in Ohio at age five from across the Atlantic, Bob danced, sang, busked, and boxed. He rose on the vaudeville circuit from six-a-day shows to the two-a-day big-time. At age twenty-eight in 1931, he played New York’s Palace Theatre.
That was just about when the vaudeville business died from radio and talkies.
What would America be without vaudeville? Just minstrelsy, circuses, freakshows, and crude saloon fare. Vaudeville brought together Italian and German, Irish and Jew, woman and man. Vaudeville made the American public. Vaudeville performances were a public trust.
There was no more money in the vaudeville business.
Bob began to come up in Broadway musicals. Roberta (1932), Say When (1934), Ziegfeld Follies (1936), Red Hot and Blue (1936). Playing Huckleberry he met and soon married Dolores, who separated from him at his death. He achieved major success on the stage.
There was more money in the movie business.
Bob first sang his trademark song, Thanks for the Memory, in his first major film, The Big Broadcast of 1938, which would now be called The Big Broadcast III. Then Bob found success and Lamour in Road to Singapore, Road to Zanzibar, Road to Morocco, Road to Utopia, Road to Rio, Road to Bali.
Film series, like poetry, witness to the Hollywood business maxim that no one knows anything.
Bob diversified in radio. Hope first came to radio in 1933 in the brilliant NBC executive Bertha Brainard’s The Fleischmann Yeast Hour. In 1937, Bob came up with a twenty-six week radio contract for NBC’s Woodbury Soap Show. Then, from the spring of recovery in the late 1930s to the wave of prosperity in the 1950s, Bob Hope led the highly successful weekly series, The Pepsodent Radio Show.
Television killed the radio stars.
Bob had doubts about television’s commercial potential. He thought a television series wouldn’t work. Or maybe the price wasn’t right. His business plan for television was specials. His first special, broadcast on NBC in 1950, cost more to produce than any other show to that time. His second special appeared six weeks later. Within the next year he produced another five specials. From 1954 until 1972, a ninety-minute Bob Hope Christmas Special broadcasted every year. From 1958 to 1975, Bob Hope hosted the Oscar Awards broadcast every year. Hope made more than 270 television specials.
The most rewarding business is acting in the public interest.
Bob valued public service. From a visit in 1941 to the Army Air Force Field in Riverside, California (parts broadcast on Bob’s Pepsodent Radio Show), to a visit in late 1990 to U.S. soldiers preparing to fight in the Gulf War (parts broadcast on NBC), Bob voyaged around the globe to entertain U.S. solders. He also entertained every U.S. president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush and golfed with most of them, too.
For more than fifty years, Hope was a major money-maker supporting the public service of the fourth estate. In these deeply troubling times for traditional media, industry leaders might nostalgically recall Hope.
One foot, two feet
Can you count to five?
Class, pay attention!
The final’s this Friday!
“Tomorrow at the latest I’ll start working on a great book
In which my century will appear as it really was.”
hope bobs eternal