Evolution, through the eyes of a metaphorically inclined computer programmer:

Old age is a feature, not a bug. With less turn-over it would be difficult to life as a whole to adapt to changing environment. It has drawbacks as knowledge lost by the dead individual. Advanced life forms overcome that with culture. Earlier simpler life forms probably lacked the aging feature, and were superseded by others who had it.

Thank you, Wiley, for passing that along. Your ability to stay current with the Slashdot comments is both a mystery and an inspiration.

A bit of a silly conversation started on Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog the other day when he mentioned the fact that he's a Dallas Cowboys fan.

I commented, asking for an explanation, and, today, he responded, sparking a beauty of a comment thread.

After trying to imagine growing up without lovable home teams and reading TNC's explanation, I respect his love for the Cowboys.  I don't like it.  But I'm ok with it.  I think it's real, and I think real love for a team is something to celebrate.

Which reminds me of something one of my cousins said as we wandered around the ballpark before going in for Game 4 of the World Series.

Everyone was wearing red and chanting and singing for the Phils, and one of us noted the fact that it couldn't possibly be like it was in Philly in Tampa Bay.  Fans were probably way into it, but some of those fans were Phils fans, and that makes for a totally different dynamic.  There's tension there.  Home vs. Away.  Red vs. Blue.

In Philly there wasn't tension.  We were all Home, all Red, all Good Guys.  No Bad Guys would have come close to that pregame party.

And then came the observation.

We shouldn't be celebrating our exclusivity.  We should love the fact that there's no anger in the pregame crowd, but we should welcome Tampa Bay fans.  We should be excited to have rival fans in the house.  We should party together before the game.  We should make fun of each other during the game.  And we should party together again after the game.

We should be able to celebrate our losses as wins for other fans.

And that's a pretty powerful thought.  Mature.  Idealistic.  Symbolic of way more than professional sports.  And powerful.

Not an easy one to put into practice, however.  Certainly not in Philadelphia.  And certainly not when it pertains to the Dallas Cowboys.  But worth keeping in mind regardless.

Jenny the Bloggess is hilarious and probably totally ridiculously gorgeous in real life, so my plan is sweep her off her feet with love comments and convince her to marry me.

I made my first attempt last Thursday when she posted a transcribed conversation in which her husband called her the world's greatest grampa (with an m) and refused to buy her a new curly straw...

Please dump Victor and marry me. I'll give you hats and straws and burritos AND zebra stripe gum. If you're not sick of zebra stripe gum, of course, which I guess you would be if you smell it all day long. But that would imply that you smell your feet all day long, which I don't mean to imply, because I'm pretty sure you'd never do anything weird like that. Though it isn't weird if you do it, because I can imagine that if my feet smelled as good as yours, I might strategically slip out of my shoes and let the zebra smells waft more often. But I wouldn't really know how these things work because my feet smell like feet (I think), and I don't even know what zebra stripe gum is. Which I should never have admitted because if my friend Danny is right that he'll never marry a girl that's never heard of A Tribe Called Quest, then there's no way you'll marry a guy that's never heard of what's probably the best gum ever invented. Man. Bummer. Tell Victor he wins for today. But I'll try again…

No response.  Yet.  Which is ok.  I don't expect one.  Yet. 

I will continue commenting.  And hoping and dreaming.

Her most recent post is about ground squirrels and spelling mistakes, however.  Not the most romantic subject.  Which makes it tough to comment effectively. Which is a worry.  But I realize that these things take patience.  So I'm going to go to sleep and think about it and see how I feel in the morning.

Don't think I've ever used a pop-country song as a title or as a metaphor before, so this is kind of a big moment I guess...

No Impact Man seems to want to give up his journaling and replace it with a multi-voiced editorial page, and that bums me out. 

I like journals better.  I've said (written) it before.  And I said (wrote) it again today, in a comment on No Impact Man's post:

No Impact Man lamented today that his daughter is acquiring a taste for shopping.  He reckons little kids ought to be playing with barnyard animals instead. 

Or something.  Anything.  As long as it's not TV or the mall.  No binge consumption for little kids.  It's a bad cultural habit.

Step Brothers leapt to mind, and I commented:

I got some great comments on my post the other day about Clay Shirky, Wikipedia, and the Cognitive Surplus.

One asked about niche communities and whether there'll ever be another Wikipedia-scale open source research project.

I responded once last night, but it was late, and I didn't have full brain function, so I just responded again.  It's too long and ridiculous a comment for me to leave sitting lonely deep in a thread, and the metaphorical element gets silly, so I'll pull it out and throw it up here...

One more thought about the Balkanization of online communities.

I think there's a key difference between what Wal-Mart and CNN (and Yahoo!) offer and what online communities offer.

Wal-Mart, CNN, and Yahoo! offer (primarily anyway) goods or info for us to CONSUME. 

Online communities offer consumables as well, but, compared to superstores and big box media, they offer huge opportunity for their users to PRODUCE.

Wikipedia is an unusual case.  It's consumed at the 500lb gorilla level, but it's produced by consumers.

I think it achieves its high consumption levels in large part due to the breadth of its offerings, but I think it's important to remember that there aren't that many people that contribute heaps to Wikipedia. Its long tail of contributions is unusually long and thus hugely valuable, but its core contribution community isn't so big to make it unreplicable.

And I think it's also important to remember that no niche contribution community will need to be nearly as big as Wikipedia's.

And important to remember that having very specific barrels into which we can drop our knowledge might be a very good thing for knowledge quality:

Maybe I'm a trapeze genius. I know everything there is to know about trapezes. I hope there exists a small but totally passionate trapeze community that can stimulate and challenge me as I open source my trapeze wisdom. If you throw me in with a bunch of clowns and lion tamers, I might get discouraged by their inability to speak my language, and my trapeze knowledge might never find heirs.

But maybe this rant is irrelevant. Maybe what you really want to know is how we might weave lots of small communities into big, broad info sources for consumption? How we might harness the niche communities to create another Wikipedia or five?

I think we take the trapeze wisdom and dump it into Wikipedia, for one.

And I think we also set up some well designed info aggregators, info organizers, and info synthesizers.

Collect knowledge in the niche barrels, let the people that care most and understand best turn the knowledge to wisdom, and feed the wisdom into broad reaching, cross-referenced enlightenment disseminators.

Maybe?

My friends at Wokai are thinking about putting together a 2 min promotional video.  They watched what The Girl Effect produced, and they're inspired.

I don't eat much fish anymore.  Unless I kill it myself, with a speargun.  And, yes, I know, that's weird, but I'll get into it another time.  For the moment, all I want to say is that even though I don't eat much fish, I do still have fond memories of fish eating.

For example, the night we had a celebratory Yanjing Browns basketball championship dinner at 独们冲 (not sure, actually, if there was a championship to celebrate, but we did win quite a few tourneys between 2004 and 2007, so it's possible; regardless, the point is that it was a bunch of happy, hungry, rowdy basketball players rolling into 独门冲), a night that rushed back into my mind after reading this chinabites blog post:

http://blog.chinabites.com/2008/07/23/spicy-roasted-fish/

I commented:

I think there's another Du Men Chong on the Dongzhimen side of Gui Jie. I vaguely remember going there once. Vaguely because whoever had arranged the meal explained as we sat down that spicy roasted fish wasn't spicy roasted fish unless everyone was dripping sweat while eating it. We found out moments later that the fish itself would have done the sweatiness job easily, but our host insisted that we get a jump on things by pounding a few rounds of 二锅头. And by "a few" I mean I don't remember how many. I think the spicy fish was pretty tasty, though maybe it wouldn't have been the same if my soaked and dripping head wasn't spinning and swaying in a grain alcohol fog.

I miss Beijing.