parker higgins

I’m not much for drawing, but I’m working on a set of minimalist representations of San Francisco icons for a project right now. I’ll post more about that project later. For now, here’s my rough take on the Golden Gate Bridge.

My written one-to-one communication patterns can be grouped into three major categories: longform, synchronous shortform, and asynchronous shortform. For the most part I use email, IMs, and SMS, respectively, for those purposes.

Bruce Schneier has a great cautionary quote about technology and its tendency to be subverted:

It can be hard to point a finger at exactly what is so offensive about the way the copyright lobby pushes its agenda. The rhetoric is sometimes charged, but I don’t think the problem lies in the moral foundation of intellectual monopolies (although some people certainly object to them on ethical grounds). I also don’t think it’s a fundamental business problem. Some have argued that nobody cares about content creators’ fixed costs, and that their fixation on that number is misguided, but I think that premise falls apart a bit at the margins: when fans feel a connection to a creator, they do care about her fixed costs, and want to help her make the record or book or film.

I’m really intrigued by the idea of sonic tourism — going to places to experience the acoustic landscape there. There have been a few efforts to document sound destinations, including the wonderful Sound Tourism, but nothing that feels comprehensive.

If you fall into the intersection of people who have looked at this website before yesterday and people who are looking at it after today, you may notice that I’ve given it a bit of a spitshine.

Every once in a while, my Iron Blogger group decides to take on a common topic. At our meet-up this week, a handful of us agreed to take on last week’s Sherry Turkle op-ed in the New York Times. It’s called “The Flight from Conversation,” and it seems to cover some of the same territory as her book “Alone Together”: namely, that we’re allowing gadgets to get in the way of interpersonal communication, favoring “sips” of online contact over a “big gulp of real conversation.”

It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone.

My great-grandfather was born into a world where there was no recorded music. It’s very, very difficult to conceive of a world in which there is no possibility of audio recording at all. Some people were extremely upset by the first Edison recordings. It nauseated them, terrified them. It sounded like the devil, they said, this evil unnatural technology that offered the potential of hearing the dead speak. We don’t think about that when we’re driving somewhere and turn on the radio. We take it for granted.

I’ve been following the discussion about Creative Commons BY-NC-SA v4.0d1. This release is an important one for many reasons; one is the sense that v4.0 is expected to remain in place even longer than the 5+ years v3.0 has been final.