This is by Lucas Gray, a Simpson’s and Family Guy animator. (Hat tip to Gawker)

[Minutes later:] I came across this at Gawker as well.

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Jon Lebkowsky in a discussion of Too Big to Know at The Well asked, “What new roles are emerging that weren’t there before?”

Here’s part of my answer (with a few typos fixed):

- Taxonomies, nomenclatures, classification. Having common ways to refer to things is really helpful. We can make up for them to at least some degree by cross-walking and mapping. It’s always going to be messy. The rise of unique IDs and namespaces is helping a great deal.

- Filters. We used to not worry about filters because all we could get was the filtered product. Now we have to worry about them all the time. But we also now filter forward rather than filter out: When the site TheBrowser.com puts together a front page with 10 items on it from around the Web, all the other items that didn’t make it onto the front page are still fully available; TheBrowser.com has merely shortened the number of clicks it takes to get to its ten.

- Consensus. We used to think that we “all” agreed on some things. We had authorities we “all” trusted. Now we have communities of belief. Links and conversation can help us get past the fragmentation that makes us stupid, but not past all fragmentation.

But we should keep in mind that we’ve lost these old formations to a large degree because they don’t scale, and because they presented themselves to us under false pretenses: they were never as baked into the world as they seemed.

It’s our knowledge now.

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More or less as a public service, here’s a message I just received. I am apparently on the GOP media list, which is fine with me. (I’ve removed her phone number.)

If you’re wondering, according to their Web site, the Network of Enlightened Women is the

nation’s premier organization for culturally conservative women. Started as a book club at the University of Virginia in 2004, NeW cultivates a community of conservative women and expands intellectual diversity on college campuses through its focus on education. NeW members meet regularly to discuss issues relating to politics, gender and conservative principles. NeW has expanded to over 20 college campuses nationwide.

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Except Randall Munroe thinks going miscellaneous means giving up, rather than embracing the new organizational possibilities of blah blah blah.

(I am, of course, an awestruck fan of XKCD.)

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Two sets of amazing photos:

Wikimedia Commons has announced its best photos of the year.

Here’s one I like. It’s by Simon Pierre Barrette.

Also, the New York Hall of Science is exhibiting the winners of the international The Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition. These are amerrrzing photos of microscopic subjects. Totally amahhzning. See them here.

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I saw my friend Michael O’Connor Clarke just about a month ago, after too many years of being cheered by his tweets, rather than by his in-personage. We were at the Mesh conference where Michael gave a paste in the face to traditional marketing in his normal insightful, laugh out loud fashion. He had to run home — he and his wife had tickets to Cirq du Soleil — so we caught up in a hurried conversation, which we were able to prolong because he offered to drop me off at the airport shuttle. He was, in his usual way, funny, frank, warm, and self-deprecating…terms not always associated with someone so driven by values and ideals.

This evening I’ve learned he has esophageal cancer. I cannot do better at expressing how I feel about Michael and about this news than my friend Doc has.

Michael is a devoted father of four, so some friends have started a fund for him . Please consider giving.

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…at least on the web it tends to be. That in any case is the contention of my latest column in KMworld.

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Neelie Kroes, VP of the European Commission, has issued her statement on Net Neutrality. In my view, she correctly assesses the importance of Net Neutrality, but wrongly gauges the ability of a free market to deliver it. As a result, her policy is (in my view) seriously misguided. But so close!

Neelie writes:

When it comes to the issue of “net neutrality” I want to ensure that Internet users can always choose full Internet access – that is, access to a robust, best-efforts Internet with all the applications you wish.

I would have preferred a phrase about all apps and data delivered free of discrimination by the carriers. In any case, based on a new study by BEREC (European regulators’ body), she feels that now enough of the market has a choice of carriers that regulation is not needed.

As my friend JC de Martin wrote on a mailing list [slightly edited]:

I am afraid that this is a bad decision on at least four counts:

1. it overestimates the ability of the average consumers not only to obtain the relevant information, but also
to fully understand its implications;

2. it underestimates the very substantial pain of switching ISPs;

3. in rural areas, or smaller cities, the ISP offer is quite limited;

4. ISPs are not all equal: very soon European consumers will have to face a choice between a fast ISP with “limited Internet” and a slower ISP with “full Internet”: which one will they choose?

If access to an open Net is as important as Neelie believes it is, then it ought not be left up to the vagaries of the market to deliver it, and we ought not be complacent about a situation in which some people cannot afford access to it.

So close :(

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For me, “impacted” refers to an unpleasant dental condition, and cannot be used as a verb. So, given my grammatical self-righteousness on this point, I was chastened to read a column written by William Safire sometime in 1989-1991 (in his anthology In Love with Norma Loquendi) criticizing the use of “conflict” as a verb. He cites a psyhotherapist who says, “Conflicted as a verb is fairly recent.” It had not occurred to me that I need to make an ass of myself about that word as well.

On the other hand, Safire points out that in the sentence “He felt conflicted,” “conflicted” is a predicate adjective — “a past participle used as an adjective after a linking verb” — and thus isn’t being used as a verb. But it is a verb in the sentence “Therapists have to work on resolving what conflicts the patient.”

Since I don’t understand predicate adjectives well enough to be sure I’m right when I denounce someone for misusing a term in a way that no one cares about and does not matter, I will simply have to amp up my sneering tone in order to raise the stakes on pushing back against my criticism.

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Or maybe it’s a dictionary. Or an encyclopedia. In any case, The Mind is a Metaphor you can look up metaphors by keyword and facet the results by date, genre, nationality, gender, etc. (Note that these are facets of the speaker, not of the metaphor.)

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