Wordle is a bril­liantly flex­ible applet for cre­ating text clouds. It has sud­denly become very impor­tant for me to wear one of my papers as a tshirt. Or per­haps to write a paper worth wearing as a tshirt.

Here is Historical con­text for endoge­nous the­o­ries of eco­log­ical diver­sity:

I have a group project writing an agent-​​based pro­gram to sim­u­late the for­aging behav­iour of ants. The NetLogo imple­men­ta­tion of this idea makes it look easy. Turns it out it’s not. Which has lead to lots of inter­esting ques­tions about ants.

Incidentally, the project is being written using the RePast agent based mod­eling libraries for java. Now, I haven’t looked at the code of the NetLogo sample imple­men­ta­tion since I started writing this thing, because we’re not sup­posed to. But I did look at it last semester, and I seem to remember you could fit the code on a tshirt, using a fairly hefty font, if you were so inclined. You could not fit the equiv­a­lent java code on a tshirt. You could not fit it on a muumuu. If nothing else, this project is con­vincing me that as soon as we’re let loose, I’ll be switching to NetLogo. RePast may not be as clumsy or random as a blaster, but NetLogo is just like way faster. Bring on the clumsy and random.

In an effort to answer some of my ques­tions about how real ants have solved their RePast pro­gram­ming issues, I got a copy of Ants at Work by Deborah Gordon out of the library. I was shocked and mildy irri­tated to see that no one has checked out this copy — the only one in the UMich system — before me. WTF? I first read AaW when I was con­tem­plating a project for my final year field course in under­grad, and it sticks in my memory as one of the most inter­esting books I have read. Dr. Gordon studies how it is that indi­vidual ants, obeying no rules out­side of their own tiny heads, somehow come together to form the per­sis­tent yet adapt­able super­or­ganism that is an ant colony. She uses methods ranging from painting indi­vidual ants to dig­ging up colonies with back­hoes. It was my first intro­duc­tion to the idea of emer­gence, before I (or appar­ently Dr. Gordon) had ever heard the word.

I can’t believe nobody else has read it around here. What’s wrong with these people? It’s so much more portable than The Ants, and costs ¹⁄₂₀^th as much, even if you don’t include the cost of the hand cart.

Also, there is a rac­coon sleeping in the garbage bin to the east of the Shapiro library doors.

After an immensley long pause I have finally put a bunch of photos from the summer Little Smokey plant up. Available here if you want them.

Not very many this year really. Sort of a qui­eter, more reserved bunch than pre­vious years. Reflective of the gen­eral sad­ness of the passing of an era. Which isn’t very appro­priate, con­sid­ering we went out with a blazing fury.

Maybe more will follow. Also, I have emailed Sherwin to remind him that one or both of us needs to do some­thing about the Ryan’s crew tshirt. Expect action on that, oh, any day now.

Dr. Suzuki is on a big media blitz these days, pro­moting his new auto­bi­og­raphy. There’s high pro­file inter­views on BC and national CBC radio. As they’ve pointed out in the lead-​​ins to the inter­views, according to the Official and Canonical List of the Greatest Canadians (Male), at #5 David Suzuki is appar­ently the greatest living Canadian. Holy crap.

Somewhere along the line there’s been a sea change in Dave’s pro­file. Back in the day (in this case, back-​​in-​​the-​​day on the scale of my short life), David Suzuki was a under­re­garded geek. Being a Suzuki fan was a very slightly sub­ver­sive thing biology nerds did in an effort to con­struct an alter­na­tive glamour around their own geek­i­ness. Subtle, inside jokes about Dave made in main­stream com­pany gen­er­ally turned out to be just too insider for any sort of response beyond blank looks. Somewhere in the last couple or five years, David has emerged from his crusty bearded cocoon as some kind of national media figure. I sup­pose he’s been very inten­tion­ally devel­oping a media pro­file for years, but since 2000 he’s passed some threshold, gained some kind of crit­ical mass, and become a more or less main­stream icon within Canada. Well, that’s great. Welcome to the nature show. Those who have long loved him for his slightly bel­ligerent, bug-​​eyed sense of effu­sive pos­i­tivist wonder in the face of the muli­tudi­nous mys­teries of the nat­ural world are happy to share. For the full effect, you really need to start watching the Nature of Things on a fairly reg­ular schedule, prefer­ably starting at an early and impres­sion­able age. That way your mental out­look will be opti­mally molded towards awe and respect for the nat­ural world. If your main impres­sions of the Great Man come from the cur­rent media circus you are cer­tainly free to par­take in the Canadian-​​style cult of per­son­ality which is growing up around him, but I promise it’s a much more ful­filling expe­ri­ence if your impres­sions of him are shaped mostly inci­den­tally to the slices of nature he presents to you through his TV pro­gram­ming. His doesn’t lack for inter­esting per­son­ality traits to endear or mock, but really I think the body of work he has con­tributed to through his career is every bit as compelling.

So there’s my back­handed attempt to lay claim to the David Suzuki legacy for those of us biology geeks who feel like the rest of the world is showing up late to the party and without much respect for the orginal cos­tume theme. Regardless, if you’re going to have a national hero, you could do a lot worse than Dave. He’s got some­thing for everyone: nature for the nature nuts, sci­ence for the sci­en­tistas, fire and brim­stone envi­ron­men­talism for the con­ser­va­tion­ists and politicos, a subtle under­cur­rent of spir­i­tu­ality for the meta-​​minded. And in each of those cases, the stuff he brings is good stuff. There’s no ques­tion that the TV shows he nar­rated helped shape the course of my life. That time in a packed Whistler auda­to­rium when he picked me out of the front row atten­dees to lock eyes for the “I am you. You are me.” part of his speech was some­thing of a full-​​circle moment for me. More than you know Dr. Suzuki, more than you know. And now as he becomes a national figure, per­haps He is Canada, and Canadians are Him. Especially if they buy the tshirt.

Hah! This if fun: The Prejudice Map

Canada faired well. If there’s one thing we excel at, it’s making other people feel warm and fuzzy about us as a gen­eral con­cept. My favourite was Russia. According to the Prejudice Map (e.g., according to Google, e.g. according to the internet), Russians are know for “bru­tality, pas­sion, being tough nego­tia­tors and soul­full­ness”. Quite a mix.

Like I saw on a tshirt the other day, stereo­typing saves time. And this saves you time when stereotyping.

So I’m actu­ally plan­ning to get some tshirts printed up. And after this, I guess I won’t be using American Apparel shirts. But I wanted to get their side of the story, so I sent this email. We’ll see what they have to say.

Dear American Apparel,

Hugh

American Apparel makes t shirts, hoodies et al. They very much focus their mar­keting around the fact that they don’t use sweat­shop labour, but rather all of their man­u­fac­turing is done in the US. I have more than one friend who uses American Apparel tshirts for their tshirt-​​requiring-​​projects on those grounds.

I guess I always assumed that “sweat­shop free, made in the USA” meant “union made”. I guess they never actu­ally said that, and I guess I was wrong.

More dis­turbing than their lack of a union is that they are accused of engaging in active union-​​busting tac­tics:

Hopefully this story will get around and they will have to defend themselves.

Every aspect of the pro­duc­tion of our gar­ments, from the knit­ting of the fabric to the pho­tog­raphy of the product, is done in-​​house. By con­sol­i­dating this entire process, we are able to pursue effi­cien­cies that other com­pa­nies cannot because of their over­re­liance on outsourcing.

In that case, they can hardly give the “we didn’t know what our sub­con­trac­tors were up to” defense.

after all that, I gave into the tem­pa­tion and posted away myself. since nobody’s going to read it (I’m like #123124 on the list of posters), I’m putting it here too, where lots and lots and lots of people will read it.

for ref­er­ence, the article that gen­er­ated all the heat was this blog post knocking Xeni Jardin’s posting of the “cre­ative com­mies” copy­left flag I blogged about ear­lier.

ok, here’s what I said:

• first, the cre­ative com­mies meme was done in fun and on the spur of the moment, obvi­ously. if we start stressing about being spon­ta­neous and fun, even if it is in a public place like a blog, then we will all get bored and go home. copy­right reform will not ben­efit. or worse, we will all be boring. no amount of copy­right reform is worth that.

  sec­ondly, while I greatly appre­ciate Charlie Stross’s com­ments on the neces­sity for some min­imal level of pro­fes­sion­alism in the PR approach of copy­right reformists, I think he is ignoring or at least under­val­ueing the pos­si­bility that we will not suc­ceed by out-​​suiting the suited on the suits-​​only stage. this is a move­ment that stands to gain a lot by informal, friend to friend, col­league to col­league growth. pos­sibly, by the time we are debating it on stage, the debates will only be a for­mality, given that we will have the weight of public opinion and behav­iour at our backs regard­less. perhaps.

  third, the fact that Rush Limbaugh points to this meme as evi­dence of our lit­eral com­mu­nism doesn’t greatly worry me. I have no hope of con­verting his audience.

  fourth (wow, that’s a lot), if enough main­stream folk point in Rush’s manner, then the cumu­la­tive effect might be to grad­u­ally shift those folks out of the main­stream in the opinion of the public, as attacking our social ben­efit propo­si­tion by pointing at our tshirts doesn’t look so hot as a debating strategy to anyone with sense. I am assuming the public has sense, and I’m not sure that I’m wrong.

A short trip through the world of dis­trib­uted cre­ation in the infor­ma­tion age, in ser­vice of, well, the world of dis­trib­uted creation…

(in order to avoid unec­es­sary stress and social ten­sion, I will reveal that this trip ends in the cre­ation of a cheap tshirt you can buy)

1. Bill Gates paints intel­lec­tual reform advo­cates as being “new modern-​​day sort of com­mu­nists” in an inter­view pub­lished online.

2. Xeni Jardin finds this tit­il­lating (as she often finds things) and posts about it over at boing​boing​.net.
3. This guy writes in to boing­boing to say “Obviously, what we need is a large red flag with a gold copy­left in the upper left, replacing the hammer and sickle.” Xeni ren­ders such a graphic and posts it.
4. This guy adapts the idea, inte­grating a “vec­tor­iza­tion I did of the Aeroflot logo”. Did he happen to have vec­tor­ized the Aeroflot logo before or after this all came up?
5. Somebody likes that design, and fires up a cafe­press node to print tshirts with them to any­body who likes them.
6. Somebody else, who hap­pens to own a silkscreening com­pany, fig­ures he can make better cheaper tshirts on the same theme, so he’s gonna.

Total time, ==> ,

UNDER TWO DAYS.

All of which illus­trates, appro­pri­ately, the power of dis­trib­uted cre­ation. Creative Commies, I salute you! (and Bill Gates, wel­come to the process!)

The New York Times has a report on the administration’s con­sid­er­a­tion of explicit decep­tion to combat ter­rorism, even if it includes lieing to the more gen­eral public:

Pentagon Weighs Use of Deception in a Broad Arena

Regardless of the obvious short sit­ed­ness of having an insti­tu­tional lieing policy (“We cry wolf.”), there are some reminders here of the Republican administration’s ongoing desire to “sell” democ­racy and American ideals around the world.

Administration offi­cials say they are increas­ingly trou­bled that a nation that can so suc­cess­fully market its cars and colas around the world, even to for­eigners hos­tile to American poli­cies, is failing to sell its demo­c­ratic ideals, even as the insur­gents they are bat­tling are spreading false­hoods over mass media out­lets like the Arab news satel­lite channel Al Jazeera.

This goes back a few years now, to when Bush made some high level apoint­ments of ex-​​PR industry people to try and adver­tise Americanism around the world. I can’t imagine how this could pos­sibly work, so much so that I’m suprised that some people think it can. I think it reflects the idea that democ­racy and cap­i­talism are pretty much the same thing. That idea was explicity laid out in the National Security Strategy, wherein supris­ingly frank lan­guage sug­gested that democ­racy was a symptom of cap­atilism. With that as offi­cial policy, I guess it makes some strange sense to sell democ­racy with the the tools of capitilism.

But democ­racy is not a mate­rial good, and American democ­ractic ideals are not a brand. They are actions and processes. You can sell stuff, and modern branding theory has it that you best sell stuff by selling ideas, but that doesn’t mean you can sell democ­racy by selling ideas. If democ­racy is just an idea, and the idea emanates from people who have encoded pol­icys of lieing, then why in the world would you buy it? There are more fun things to put on a tshirt. This admin­is­tra­tion sees democ­racy as a tool to pacify ene­mies, an abstract notion that can opiate, but it’s not and it won’t work as such.

People take up democ­racy because it does things, it is good ben­e­fi­cial action and process. If you want to sell democ­racy, the way to do it is to have real democ­racy. It will work, democ­racy does work, that’s why it’s good, that’s why we like it. When it does, the results will speak for them­selves, as they have been.

Democracy requires truth to func­tion. If deci­sions are made by people gen­er­ally, and gov­ern­ment hordes truth and spreads lies, then good deci­sion can’t be made. Integrity of gov­ern­ment is a nec­es­sary pre­cursor for democ­racy. The cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion doesn’t seem to really believe in or under­stand democ­racy, so maybe it’s not suprising that they are trying to “sell” democ­racy at the same time as they are delib­er­ately under­mining the government’s integrity.

Further reading:

Lie To Us