That's something John Smart said at Accelerating Change 2004. I didn't go, since I live in Australia, but I downloaded the podcast. They're all available from ITConversations, and essential if you're interested in where technology and humanity's headed.
Combine that with the wisdom gleaned from Tom Clancy's Executive Orders of
If you didn't write it down, it didn't happen.
and you have a great argument for starting a blog. So that's what I'm doing.
I'm sitting here sipping my cappucino
My train of thought was just sidetracked for a while there by some girls at the next table talking about frypans as wedding presents, and a girl who's getting married because she's pregnant.
There's just not enough time to pay enough attention to enough information streams. But that's the key to intelligence anyway - information destruction. What Doug Hofstadter calls focusing and filtering in Gödel, Escher, Bach. This is the greatest non-fiction book I've ever read. Thanks, Craig. Now read it yourself. I don't remember where 'information destruction' comes from, but filtering is a big focus of modern AI, and rightly so. You can't do much with masses of raw data. That's why we invented graphs.
So consolidate/coagulate/precipitate (not skim) the important information out, and dispose of the rest if you have limited memory, or archive it if you have an infinite store. I can't wait for lifelogging. You just need a decent interface (LUI) to access it and some really decent search and filtering capability to find what you want. I just had to go through the same thing finding where I got the John Smart quote - I couldn't remember which podcast it came from so I had to just listen to three of them. Very inefficient. It's great to listen to them again, but it's hard to pay attention to a podcast while you're typing. Once again, too many streams, too little time.
Anyway, you could run a constant stream now from a Vaio or something with a webcam and a wireless link, but you'd have to put some serious effort into cataloguing it if it was going to be useful as anything other than a curiosity. In any case, I recokon I'll get myself a camera/pda phone one of these days so I can blog some photos. At the moment I don't even have a digital camera. Sigh.
This is just a reminder to myself to read this book (recommended by John Smart).
Eric Caisson - Cosmic Evolution
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