Things I couldn’t find elsewhere

Culture

What does a digital nation state look like?

Swedish news papers are launching digital versions on Apple’s iPad - and seem to be somewhat surprised that they’re now going to have to comply with a set of rules that are very different from what they’re usually operating under. Spotify’s music library reflects a specific set of values, morality and legal system no matter where the listeners are and what they expect. Citizens used to having rights according to their chosen nation state find that when they move more and more of their lives onto the digital arena those rights are replaced with Terms of Services that reflect corporate and cultural values.

Bigbrother · Culture · English · Fascism · Internet · Newworldorder · Pirateparty · Spotify · Transhumanism

2 minutes

Singularity Summit 2009 - report

(In Swedish at least for the time being. To view the tweets in English I wrote during the conference, use this search) Jag var på Singularity Summit 2009 i helgen som gick, och skiften.se publicerade mina någorlunda hastigt nedskrivna tankar om det efteråt. Klicka på länken för att läsa ;) edit: The videos of the presentations are now available

Consciousness · Culture · Science · Simulation · Swedish · Transhumanism · Uncategorized · Virtualreality

1 minute

Twitter, trees and culture

A pretty informal study made the global headlines a week back about how 40% of everything posted to Twitter amounts to just "pointless babble". That conclusion is seriously flawed, and likely stems from a misunderstanding on how humans communicate. Our consciousness has very low bandwidth. Exactly how low is hard to measure, but in The User Illusion author Tor Nørretranders argues it to be around 16 bits-or-so per second. Thus, when humans communicate we do so trying to guess as to how many bits we need to use to get our full message across to another person, and that requires us to share a lot of background information.

Book · Consciousness · Culture · English · Twitter

2 minutes

Negative tip

I have a problem. While the culture of giving something extra for good service, tipping, varies greatly between countries, I’ve so far found no solution to the problem of being given bad service. It doesn’t matter if the local culture practically mandates a tip or if it’s just considered to be something you do when you feel you’ve been given something "extra" - I’m unable to in a culturally satisfactory way show if I’m displepleased.

Culture · English · Tipping

2 minutes