“We’ve read enough books.”
Seven thousand years in 90 minutes
“A few hundred thousand years ago in early human (or hominid) prehistory, growth was so slow that it took on the order of one million years for human productive capacity to increase sufficiently to sustain an additional one million individuals living at subsistence level. By 5000 bc, following the Agricultural Revolution, the rate of growth had increased to the point where the same amount of growth took just two centuries. Today, following the Industrial Revolution, the world economy grows on average by that amount every ninety minutes.
… It is impressive that an amount of economic growth that took 200 years seven thousand years ago takes just ninety minutes now, and that the world population growth that took two centuries then takes one and a half weeks now.”
Facts, precedents, and the courts
“Listening to senators and an appellate judge extol the virtue of adhering to precedent, one would reasonably conclude that most fact patterns are identical, and finding applicable precedent a simple matter of reading the law. If that were true, we could indeed rely on algorithms to mine case law and apply the law.
In reality, however, the facts of a case rarely fit nicely into precedent. In fact, no two cases are exactly alike, and when the facts of a case fit into a particular precedent, there’s not much for lawyers to dispute or judges to decide. Reading any given case gives a clear understanding that a controversy may require a judge to wade through dozens of precedents in making a decision. Not surprisingly, judges applying the same precedents come to conflicting conclusions in the circuit courts; that’s how disputes get to the Supreme Court.”
A number this large
“Mathematically, IPv4 can only support about 232 or 4.3 billion connections. IPv6, on the other hand, can handle 2128 or 34O,282,366,92O,938,463,463,374,6O7,431,768,211,456, connections.
The implications of a number this large are mind-boggling. There are only 1019 grains of sand on all the beaches of the world. That means IPv6 would allow each grain of sand to have a trillion IP addresses. In fact, there are so many possible with IPv6 that every single atom on our planet could receive a unique address and we would ‘still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths.’”
“With a forest, you have to think in terms of 200 or 300 years. I learned to accept that I can’t do everything. Nobody can.”
Everything else is optional
“…All PCs are niche devices: for most people, particularly outside the U.S., a smartphone is all they need or care to buy. The world today is the exact opposite of the world a mere decade ago, where we bought dedicated devices to plug into our digital hub PCs; the smartphone (and cloud) is the hub, and everything else is optional.”
October 27, 2016. https://stratechery.com/2016/surface-studio-nintendo-switch-and-the-potential-of-niche/
“There are questions that we can answer here that we can’t answer anywhere else.”
Mars, episode 4, at 44:01
Levy continues: “When the wind is howling. When it is -20° or -30° it's enough to start me thinking about having frostbite or hypothermia. Despite being dangerous and extremely cold and having hazards all around you there are questions that we can answer here that we can't answer anywhere else.”
17 examples of museum-ish social media for Alexandra Korey
Alexandra - - here are some thoughts re: your question about examples of museum social media. (Posted here for easier sharing/linking and in case someone else was interested.)
Not a comprehensive list and not exclusively 2016, but perhaps useful/provocative. Note that I’m mostly interested in (and focusing on) examples that come from outside museums themselves.
1. Re: participation at scale, across the whole sector - - #askacurator, @museumselfieday, #ilovemuseums - - via @mardixon (and see museumselfie info/paper here by Alli Burness http://museumselfies.tumblr.com/)
2. Re: giving control of the brand/trust relationship to users. @sweden - - http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-pleasing-irreverence-of-sweden
3. Re: Civics/Governance in public institutions (demonstrating what is possible), “The Spanish Town That Runs On Twitter” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/09/technology/the-spanish-town-that-runs-on-twitter.html
4. Re: opening up to public interest in science, process, inquiry - - How to Tweet Like a Robot on Mars - - http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/how-to-tweet-like-a-robot-on-mars/381114/
5. Re: the relationship between global/local and not taking oneself too seriously, Orkney Library - - https://www.buzzfeed.com/alanwhite/real-talk-who-doesnt-dress-as-whitesnake-once-a-week [Note: Tumblr thinks the link is spam or evil, but it’s not, and it’s a good article. Copy/paste the URL into your browser.]
6. Re: cross-sector movement by museum staff - - #museumsRespondToFerguson. https://twitter.com/hashtag/museumsrespondtoFerguson?src=hash
7. Re: unusual and engaging telling of history - - @ReliveApollo11, real-time tweeting of ground/mission communication transcripts from original Apollo moon mission, from National Air and Space Museum (and in particular the numerous and poignant replies from the public)
8. Re: beautiful and surprising concepts, though not *exactly* social media, “Birdwatching” at the Rijksmuseum - - a meetup of birdwatching enthusiasts to tag/catalog images of birds in the Rijks collections. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/vogelen and http://www.wis.ewi.tudelft.nl/research/wude/digital-birdwatching-at-the-rijksmuseum/
9. Re: working with communities - - the beautiful way that Dr Meghan Ferriter supports and encourages the Smithsonian Transcription Center community.
10. Re: museum collections speaking for themselves: Museum Bots - - https://twitter.com/backspace/lists/museum-bots/members
11. Re: initiatives supported by users/fans on their own - - #bookstagram on Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/bookstagram/?hl=en and http://bookriot.com/2013/06/07/a-brief-guide-to-bookstagram/
12. And Instagram in general…
13. And YouTube in general…
14: Re: Collecting/curating *outside* of official channels. Pinterest - - https://www.pinterest.com/search/?q=museum&referrer=sitelinks_searchbox
15. Re: soliciting stories/content from the public, The Museum of Broken Relationships. https://brokenships.com/
16. Re: artists speaking for themselves - - @aiww - - the artist on Twitter. “Twitter is the people’s tool, the tool of the ordinary people, people who have no other resources.” (A little more on http://usingdata.tumblr.com/post/88281521008/twitter-is-the-peoples-tool-the-tool-of-the)
17. …And an enormous shoutout/kudos to all the museums out there who are just being good - - good to their audiences and communities - - on social media. It’s not a sexy story, but it’s a great one, and maybe the one that matters the most.
Failure, with great precision
“This measurement ruled out our whole inflation-based story with 99.999…% confidence, where there are a hundred million trillion trillion trillion nines after the decimal point. Not good.”
“Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening all at once. Space is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening to you.”
Best pizza in the block
Everything you need to know about global vs. local scale, in one image. (Dave Berg, Mad Magazine, 1956)
TEDx Tysons
My talk about the UN Live Museum for Humanity at TEDxTysons.
The Hubble volume
“The Hubble volume is the sphere of space visible to the Hubble telescope—i.e. everything that’s not receding from us at a rate greater than the speed of light due to the expansion of the universe. The Hubble volume is an unfathomably large 1031 cubic light years.”
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html
The old system is dead
“We are a new generation of artists, makers, supporters, and consumers who believe that the old system through which we exchanged content and money is dead. Not dying: dead.”
"He doesn't win because he's a better fighter…"
“He doesn’t win because he’s a better fighter. He wins because he doesn’t give up.” At 7:30, from the marvelous Every Frame a Painting
“When you’ve had a monopoly for a hundred years and you’ve never seen change, change may seem like death to you.”
“The new planet we live on is inherently more expensive than the old one. The wind blows harder; more rain falls; the sea rises. It would cost more to settle it if we were just arriving from outer space…”
McKibben continues: "“…but the price tag comes because we built it up so thoroughly during our ten thousand years and now must defend the investment.”
To share a common life
“Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share in a common life. … For this is how we learn to negotiate and abide our differences, and how we come to care for the common good.”
What do you do when you realize you are addressing the wrong problem?
“…Too often, the stance of the designer is oriented almost solely towards problem-solving. Too often, that’s what they’re trained for. The issue here is something rarely considered at school: what do you do when you realize you are addressing the wrong problem, your bounded remit having been the outcome of the wrong question in the first place? This happens frequently in design work in practice, and yet stuck at the wrong end of the value-chain, simply problem solving, it is difficult to interrogate or alter the original question. you simply have to solve within the brief you’ve been set; you can’t challenge its premise.”
“When something goes wrong, it can usually be traced back to the beginning, from the acceptance of false premises.”