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Travelling, I’m reminded of the new trend of blasting music in public bathrooms (lavatories), such as in airports and coworking spaces. Perhaps unsurprisingly, our desire never to be bored or face our own thoughts makes a mockery of real joy and diversion.

We should seek, in recommendations, empathy, sensitivity and surprise, all of which are natural to people and errant in computers; yet, for some reason, we use computers to power our recommendation and curation systems.

Idle thought: in computing we have compute, storage, network. One might say that these are analogous to (individual/group): thinking/collaborating, saving/sharing, but we appear no standalone concept for communication (group) but with oneself.

Text is a special case of hypertext; media is a special case of hypermedia.

I have a Cannon Typestar 10II, a typewriter that lets the user type and edit a line in the machine’s memory before printing. But, it has no ports: you can’t use to with your computer to type or print. It is the physical equivalent of closed software and data structures.

Imagine a road between locations A and B, but that can followed only from A and is invisible when at B; imagine also that, when challenged, the engineers say:

“You mean back-roads? Yeah, these guys drive around tell us where some roads go but don’t give us the map. Cool right?”

Give me a sufficiently efficient pump and a 12-volt outlet, and I can lift my car.

Taleb: the casual investor who checks their portfolio too frequently will go berserk, worrying about minor price changes.

Lanier: if you prime a computer system to respond to quick changes in emotion, it will select for lust and anger (fast) over learning and friendship (slow).

Hardware idea: scanners/copiers should, after each job, emit a beep and display an on-screen message saying: “Don’t forget your original document!”.