Facebook time

10 responses to “Facebook time”

1. 

   Todd Huffman

   Jan 28, 2008 at 5:14 pm

   One QC person?

   Interesting.

   What do the other 299 employees do?

   Reply
2. 

   biotron

   Jan 28, 2008 at 5:35 pm

   interesting links :

   http://www.sophos.com/security/best-practice/facebook.html

   http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook

   there’s no doubt the site is a roaring success. i have my concerns.

   nb – i don’t always believe everything, verbatim, that i read in the Guardian or any other media…

   Reply
3. 

   avlxyz

   Jan 28, 2008 at 11:11 pm

   Facebook is both fantastic and scary!
   You are constantly kept informed of your friends actions via the mini-feed which is great, and a biit voyueristic. The flip-side is of course that you are broadcasting all your actions to the all your friends!

   The simplicity of sharing this information is what makes it powerful. Perhaps as facebook evolves, it should allow you to group your friends into close friends and family with security profiles for each group, but then, that’s not so simple any more 🙂
   Still, it works for flickr.

   Reply
4. 

   schoschie

   Jan 28, 2008 at 11:27 pm

   I dunno. I think Facebook becomes extremely bloated to the point of being irritating once you’ve installed all those little applications you are coerced into doing from all the friend requests you get. Everytime I have a look at my Facebook page, I am so overwhelmed by all the stuff that’s going on, I just give up. Mabye I’m already too old. Or maybe I have less time to spare than the average user.

   This is in stark contrast to sites like Flickr. I’ve hardly ever felt overwhelmed on Flickr.

   Apart from that, the sheer userbase is fascinating. What other institution handles sixty million people with only 450 employees?

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5. 

   PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE

   Jan 29, 2008 at 12:54 am

   Talking about FaceBook. I get to meet Matt Cohler in Munich last week with Esther . I like the idea of her new project. 23AndMe . Connecting genetic with social networking… And Matt seems to had some good ideas (or just trying to sell his product…not sure =P) about that too.

   But as Schoschie point out.I agree FB have too much little applications….taking too much "space and time". And MySpace is worse with spam and the "chaotic visual thing"… YOU ARE NOT TO OLD !!!! …or am i too ? =P
   Thanks for the links Biotron

   Don t know if you saw it Steve. But Craig Venter, Richard Dawkins and John Brockman, gave a wonderful talk on : Life: a gene-centric view (video) MUST SEE !!!!!

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6. 

   biotron

   Jan 29, 2008 at 2:20 am

   now you’re talking, PhOtO! great links 🙂 – check John Brockman compulsively fiddling with his gadgetphone… he looks a bit like Norman Mailer if you squint a little…

   i’ll savour the chance to watch this when i get a little free time tomorrow night.

   good points avlxyz and schoschie – i just ignore the constant distractions of Facebook, even if some apps were fun to begin with… there is not enough time in the day. thankfully, you can turn off certain notifications / turn on certain privacy settings – i can’t be bothered analysing the varied, potentially disturbing / possible psychological reasons why some acquaintance of mine removed "naked penguin wrestling" from their list of interests at 2:36pm this Saturday.

   my heart sinks when i see i have a "new Funwall post", or have received "Zombie hotness defenestration kudos chutzpah flower goldfish cybertrinket bonus tokens" from my own mother or similar. it’s enough to turn any old tolerant, fun-loving webnerd into an intolerant, fun-hating luddite.

   myspace is certainly much worse, although at least there is a wealth of interesting music on there, if you can get past the atrocious interface, endless stream of glitches and deafening egotism of it all.

   and it isn’t just the Beaker muppet culture ("ME ME ME ME ME"), there is a deeper issue of boring homogenisation going on here in these social networking sites. so many transactions are cheapened, like a weird parody of genuine social interaction, viewable from countless perspectives (no doubt scientifically interesting and providing fascinating data) and ultimately occupying vast swathes of time that (IMHO) could be productively put into other pursuits.

   as one of my friends, who does use the site, put it :

   "modern life will be rubbish if Facebook has its way."

   there are countless people in "my network" who would rather be stuck "in my network" online, than coming to meet me face-to-face for a game of croquet on the beautifully-trimmed rinks outside the Kelvingrove Art Galleries, the mad fools! we could have been al fresco all along, laughing at the man talking into thin air and gesticulating furiously at nothing in particular, exquisitely isolated in the wide open parkland, blithely ignorant of the fact that people are looking at him with complete befuddlement, despite their strong familiarity with Bluetooth headsets.

   incidentally, what’s the word on the Scrabble™ suing issue?

   i would absolutely agree with schoschie that Flickr still manages to avoid "overwhelming" – you can dip in and out at will, just about keep up with your friends, contacts and interests, comment when you feel like it, with none of the baggage that you feel encumbered by on Facebook or a good many other sites.

   *raises enormous glass of fizz to Flickr, and all contacts and users therein*

   Reply
7. 

   jurvetson

   Jan 29, 2008 at 6:32 pm

   Cheers!

   Biotron: very funny, insightful, and poetic. Your mom is right; you are zombie hot.

   @PhotonQ: Esther has posted some Dyson family results from 23andMe. So far, I find the genetic archaeology of IBM/NatGeo more interesting than the early family health teasers, but over time, all of that should improve.

   And thanks, I had not seen that DLD video; it’s fantastic. At the beginning (minute 2:10), you see Technorati Chair Peter Hirshberg still in video-logging mode… I think his arm is stuck.

   Venter: “We are very much affecting evolution on our planet. We need to start doing it in a very deliberate fashion.” (24:45)

   “Biology is the ultimate nanotechnology and it can now be digitally designed and reconstructed.”

   Dawkins: “Genetics has become a branch of information technology. It is pure information; it’s digital information; it’s precisely the kind of information that can be translated digit-for-digit, byte-for-byte into any other kind of information.” (12:00)

   More DLD quotes on EDGE

   Reply
8. 

   PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE

   Jan 29, 2008 at 7:28 pm

   One more for the road :

   BROCKMAN: Evolution is now man-made. It’s cultural rather than Darwinian—open source.

   Happy to know you liked it ; ) On my way to the plane i came across a publicity. A perfect picture of the event =)

   

   As Esther point out in her presentation. 23AndMe start from "nothing" and will become more a more useful with time..the growing number of participants and new scientific discoveries.

   Reply
9. 

   biotron

   Feb 1, 2008 at 3:42 pm

   Lest there be any confusion over the issue, my mother was never on Facebook, so we can scotch any malicious theories regarding the appropriateness of classifying one’s son as “zombie hot”, and instead laugh with gay abandon at the ridiculous behaviour of the Cottontop Tamarin – and count our blessings that these Franz Listz-alikes do not yet have access to Facebook, or Myspace, or indeed Flickr.

   * aside : who do these little blighters remind you of? *
   answers on a postcard… &c

   The video was indeed fantastic, thanks! The dynamic between the two was really fascinating to watch. Some observations, and please forgive my armchair approach to the subject :

   – Dawkins’ obsession with whether or not he could be heard, and if his microphone was on, escalated to become a sort of unwitting, demonstrative fig-leaf for, what IMHO was, the dawning realisation that he might suddenly “get” the enormous implications of what Venter was talking about re : molecular taxonomy. Dawkins’ body language is fascinating – you can almost see him learning – to the point where, at 48:12, he even changes his question markedly.

   – in that respect, having the phrase “schoolboy howler” – originally aimed at his perception of Freeman Dyson’s failure to interpret Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” maxim correctly – turned against him in the context of naïveté about difficulties with molecular taxonomy, was a real shocker… and it took some strength for him to openly state he was, in principle, prepared to “change his mind”.

   – Dawkins, even after eloquently explaining that we should be quite used to “cross-contamination”, that the “whole of the biosphere is a gigantic collection of criss-crossing, interacting DNA”, “copy and pasting” information in a promiscuous fashion, appears to hold the relative isolation of clustered trends of DNA – choosing to “earn its living” in the gene-pools of given species – in high regard. Venter would put this down to the illusory prejudice of “visual acuity”.

   – Dawkins, in elucidating Dyson’s “Darwinian interlude”, refers to the “stylised, ritualised, courtly” means of 50-50 genetic exchange through species procreation; three words which could be applied to traditional systems of classification, and their demarcation of lasting, rigid boundaries – with any such scheme being a useful but ultimately massively reductive generalisation, failing to take account of the dynamic, continually-evolving living process.

   – the discussion opens with the idea of the “indivisibility” of the organism (as quoted in Charles Singer’s “Short History of Biology” from 1930) and the relativity of its functions, before Dawkins destroys it, and yet Venter’s lucid descriptions of the staggeringly dense, rich and varied concentrations of continually-interacting DNA in bacteria and viruses in our lungs and across our biosphere (and beyond, in that fantastic little panspermia segment) almost signal a validation of the idea, viewed from a wider perspective. In that sense, what constitutes a discrete organism breaks down and even material interactions between planets, solar systems and galaxies erode the idea of a discrete biosphere, starting to invoke Gardner’s “Selfish Biocosm” (thanks – still mildly dizzy from the earlier blog link…) which is “cunningly structured in such a way as to coax the emergence of life and intelligence from inanimate matter.” The basic components may have been isolated, but the permeability of “organisms” and promiscuity of DNA continues apace…

   – Venter makes a great point about GMO protests being narrowly focused, compared to the transferral of billions of organisms from ships’ ballast-water into non-indigenous areas. Then, Dawkins refers to the “unnatural” introduction of species into non-indigenous areas as “criminal”, which to me seems to cling to a quaint, moral idea of what is “natural”, based upon the outward preservation of those (“anomalous” as Venter would say) “gigantic DNA clubs”, ie the gene-pools of larger species.

   – is it a gross oversimplification to say that while Dawkins views horizontal gene-transfer as “making a comeback” in the way humans are influencing evolution today, his adherence to the continuing success and apparent tenacity of the “Darwinian interlude” prevents him from more fully realising the role that horizontal transfer is always playing? Is he underestimating the sheer rate and pace of evolutionary change, not just in terms of the “free spirits” of viruses and bacteria that he refers to, but more importantly in the composition of larger species’ genomes, subject to their total reliance upon and co-existence with smaller organisms essential to their survival?

   – Venter responds to Dawkins’ pointed question about molecular taxonomy by saying that “we see evidence of every branch of life in every genome” and that what you see “depends upon which gene you choose”; the “problem with molecular taxonomy” is that a targeted search for particular genes will yield results pertaining only to that search, disregarding the “community” inherent in the organism’s genome. Am I right in taking that to be the rough equivalent of searching for specific phrases in any body of text, that once found, may align the main body to a particular type of specialist discourse, but where the body itself is the product of a proliferating variety of influences and memes, and the almost inexplicable sum of its parts? In that sense, one might say that you can’t deny the unique identity of the main body of text, or the tendency for vast tomes to incorporate all manner of competing ideologies, inferences and formulations, even if the refutation of certain components – and support of others – is critical to understanding the text as a wider whole.

   Someone fetch Walt Whitman!

   – perhaps it helps not to have such a solid grasp of genetics or genomics (he says hopefully) because when Venter speaks about taxonomists studying part of the 30% of virally-transferred gene sequences (themselves consisting of individual genes, each with their own differing evolutionary trees) within the human genome, it doesn’t seem like such an outrageous concept to grasp that identifiable “letters”, “words” or “phrases” can be both dependent upon and exist independently of the host “text”. I know precious little about “spandrels”, or “group selection”, but I like to read Derrida and Barthes on the toilet. *

   Reference to Borges’ “Library of Babel” here may not be helpful.

   – the continual use of “open source” in the discussion becomes quite muddy. IMHO it is quite one thing to talk about “open source” in the sense of “horizontal” transfer of a genome from one bacterium to another, and quite another to talk about the “open source” nature of humanity’s shaping of the evolutionary process seen in the continual, transparent exchange of information across international borders.

   – such questions over “open source”, international boundaries, drifting ownership, intellectual property and watermarking are very interesting when viewed alongside Venter’s own career history. Celera’s initial desire to acquire patent protection on particular genes, with the aim of subscription fees, led directly to a greater urgency to publish the sequence. Having been burned by the potential of his success, the buzzwords now seem to be the “targeted”, “directed”, “controlled” design of the evolutionary process, with philanthropic solutions to climate change and energy crisis, and valuable data sharing from the Sorcerer II GOS expedition. But how “open source” is a successful businessman, leading his field of scientific enquiry, allowed to be?! The part where he mentions signature watermarking of chromosomes, using amino acid triplet codons, would seem to suggest the answer = “not absolutely”… 🙂 What are the potential implications for ownership, access and encryption with the use of this method in future?

   – there is something very weird, poetic and inevitable about the trajectory of Venter’s life after the well-published fact of his failed suicide bid in Vietnam… I mean, from standing (or rather, swimming) to the verge of his imminent extinction as a porous, vulnerable, composite organism, he has now “driven” his unique “self” to a strange ly-poised situation of simultaneous self-effacement and egotism, by publishing his own genome. Having emerged as a pioneer for one of those very “bizarre extremes of evolution” (his own words, viz. “homo sapiens”) who, having failed to take his own life, and having failed to secure a patent on the sequence of components which constitute his “being”, now stands on the verge of taking on and playing life “at its own game”. You couldn’t write a better script. His boat is called “Sorceror II”. Priceless! The potential medium for his death has become an almost boundless resource for his – and our – understanding of life on earth. I’ve just read that he calls himself "a superenzyme". What a story, and what a guy…

   “My plan was to carry on swimming until I was exhausted and then sink,” he says. “More than a mile out, as I saw venomous sea snakes, I had doubts. But I still swam on – until a shark began prodding me in a ‘bump and bite’ attack. For a moment I was angry that the shark had disrupted my plan. Then I became consumed with fear. What the f*ck was I doing? I wanted to live, more than I had ever done in the previous 21 years of my life. I turned and swam for the shore.”

   My question now is : at that exact moment, which might be considered the “fulcrum” of Venter’s existence, did the shark pass on some sort of behaviour-influencing parasite? Far be it from me to belittle the enormity of this experience, or reduce the matter to wild speculation, but I can’t help thinking of an earlier discussion about Cordyceps fungi, T. Gondii, the lancet fluke and poisonous gophers :

   flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/354411627

   In other slightly-related news, and please excuse me if you’ve already heard about this, a friend just drew my attention to an incredible story, where a liver transplant patient took on not only the blood group of the donor (changing from O-negative to O-positive) but also the immune system, which has now almost completely regenerated after stem cells from the donor liver penetrated the bone marrow :

   abc.com.au/news/stories/2008/01/24/2145289.htm

   Whoa!

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10. 

    jurvetson

    Dec 6, 2008 at 6:04 am

    All you yellow folk make me smile…

    

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