Google Destroying Blogspot?

or just making my life more difficult. We blogspotters have been forced onto an interface that looks more like Wordpress, which as far as I can tell is clunkier and gives us less control. I've considered migrating to Wordpress before – I could host my blogs on my own server and have greater privacy, etc. – but rejected it because the blogspot user interface was superior. Google has chosen to trash that advantage.

Testing image control and positioning with the image right.

Ok, maybe I can get used to this, but where the h*ll do I enter labels? 

Rebecca Mackinnon: Consent of the Networked

If you don't read her book, at least watch this:

(Another irresistible re-blog from Boing Boing).

What Politics Has in Common with Pro Wrestling: Kayfabe

From Eric R. Weinstein at Edge:

Evolutionary biologists Richard Alexander and Robert Trivers have recently emphasized that it is deception rather than information that often plays the decisive role in systems of selective pressures. Yet most of our thinking continues to treat deception as something of a perturbation on the exchange of pure information, leaving us unprepared to contemplate a world in which fakery may reliably crowd out the genuine. In particular, humanity's future selective pressures appear likely to remain tied to economic theory which currently uses as its central construct a market model based on assumptions of perfect information.

If we are to take selection more seriously within humans, we may fairly ask what rigorous system would be capable of tying together an altered reality of layered falsehoods in which absolutely nothing can be assumed to be as it appears. Such a system, in continuous development for more than a century, is known to exist and now supports an intricate multi-billion dollar business empire of pure hokum. It is known to wrestling's insiders as "Kayfabe".

Because professional wrestling is a simulated sport, all competitors who face each other in the ring are actually close collaborators who must form a closed system (called "a promotion") sealed against outsiders. With external competitors generally excluded, antagonists are chosen from within the promotion and their ritualized battles are largely negotiated, choreographed, and rehearsed at a significantly decreased risk of injury or death. With outcomes predetermined under Kayfabe, betrayal in wrestling comes not from engaging in unsportsmanlike conduct, but by the surprise appearance of actual sporting behavior. Such unwelcome sportsmanship which "breaks Kayfabe" is called "shooting" to distinguish it from the expected scripted deception called "working."

Were Kayfabe to become part of our toolkit for the twenty-first century, we would undoubtedly have an easier time understanding a world in which investigative journalism seems to have vanished and bitter corporate rivals cooperate on everything from joint ventures to lobbying efforts. Perhaps confusing battles between "freshwater" Chicago macro economists and Ivy league "Saltwater" theorists could be best understood as happening within a single "orthodox promotion" given that both groups suffered no injury from failing (equally) to predict the recent financial crisis. . . .

More at the link. (Thanks, Randy!)

Mushrooms Could Save the World

. . . and not the way you might think.

Guess which image is of nerve cells and which is of the mycelium, a network of fungus that scientist Paul Stamets says blankets our planet? For the answer, check out his TED talk.

Stamets says the mycelium is sentient, that it serves as a conduit for a multidirectional transfer of nutrients among plants, that it re-routes when damaged like a natural internet, and that the Earth essentially invented the computer internet for its own benefit so that we (at least some of us), as the top organism, could work on allocating resources to protect the planet's biosphere. After hearing some of the details in his talk, you may actually start to believe him.

(The pic of nerves cells was manipulated solely to match the color of Stamets' slide.)

Finally Saw Grizzly Man

(here). Woke at 4 a.m.: people parts in bears; what a way to go. I wonder if Timmy had time to grow up during those last, agonizing seconds.

One of the joys and hazards of being human is that we can entertain our own dam' selves. We can have sex with ourselves; we can party by ourselves; we can project whole populations for ourselves to "interact" with; etc.