Bumble bees want to be nice. And they are. They won’t sting you if you just look at them. The only times they sting you are when you try to grab them. Or, when you step on them. Or, when you put them in your mouth. So, don’t catch them or walk on them. Or try to eat them. ‘Cause you’ll be stinged. They like when people look at them. And they like looking at us.

Or so says a three year old.

An accidental metaphor? For everything?

Thank you, Lauren, for listening carefully and taking notes.

Barry Schwartz made a presentation at the TED conference a few weeks ago about wise janitors.

Rules and incentives and virtue and dignity and wise janitors.

Made me think of Willie.

The Invention of Basketball is track 1 on Inside the Mind of Bill Cosby.

Just got this from my sister.  She says it reminds her of Mimi, our granny, who died last January.  It's from The Velveteen Rabbit.

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

Wisdom and inspiration come from unexpected places.  Glad Giuls is always on the lookout.

Senior year in high school, someone got ahold of a Twin Peaks box set.  Every episode.  From the pilot right down to the end of the second season, when everyone knew the axe was falling, and things took a turn for the unintelligible. 

For a month, a handful of us watched every night we could, sometimes multiple episodes at a time.

I remember it being a brilliantly strange and addictively terrifying show, the cause of both uncontrollable laughter and recurring nightmares.

And I remember deciding that if Agent Cooper used a voice recorder to take notes, so should I.

Almost ten years later, last week, before I drove north to be best man for one of those high school classmates, Micaela the intern delivered the machinery I'd ordered.  I admired it for a moment, loaded it with two AAA batteries, fiddled with the buttons to make sure I understood the controls, and decided I was about to have the most productive weekend of my life.  I'd help one of my very favorite people keep his almost mother in law sane, and I'd pour into the recorder enough important work related thoughts to let me vault back into action as soon as I stepped back in the office.

Well, I am back in action, and, as far as I can tell, I'm still on my feet and scrambling steadily, but I can't say I owe many thanks to my voice recording skills. 

Go ahead and judge for yourself, but I think I have quite a bit to learn about using the recorder professionally and not just as a toy.

Here's a sampling:

-If I get pulled over, and I'm suspected for having been talking on my cell phone, are the cops allowed to look at my cell phone records and be like: dude you were fucking talking on your phone the last two hours!?  Or is that sort of illegal?  Because I would be in trouble if it was legal.  I am a problem when it comes to talking on the cell phone, which means I need to get that thing, that little earbud thing.  And I wonder what happened to the one I got before.  Anyway, I wonder.  About the law.

-Why is it that dreams, even sometimes when they're super intense and you feel the intensity, why is it so difficult to bring back the memory? Maybe because the thought is something not actually experienced but only imagined?

-When a clock says it's 11:11, but it's wrong, is it still good luck to kiss that clock?  My sense is yes, but maybe not as good as the 11:11 that is on time or at least approximately on time.  I'm thinking about this car clock right now, which I think is about 18 minutes slow, which is a pretty silly clock situation if you ask me.

-Sitting here listening to extra innings in the Phillies' game, which is a total bonus on my car ride home.  We're going into the bottom of the 11th, and I'm listening here to the ads, and I'm getting excited and feeling my muscles tense up in this ridiculous baseball situation and screaming, to no one, and pumping my fist, COME ON PHILS!  Ridiculous.  But.  I love the Phils.  What can I say.

-I should, I think, maybe, in my weird craziness, write down, in my Posterous blog or wherever, the fact that I recognize that everything I'm writing or everything I'm putting out there might be totally crazy.  I recognize that there's a possibility that I am full of shit.  But I'm doing it anyway, despite that recognition, out of the possibility, A, that I'm not full of shit, and, B, that, even if I'm full of shit, there are probably some nuggets in my full of shitness...and nuggets and shit become a very dangerous metaphor...anyway, maybe despite our craziness, or potentially because of our craziness, we are able to offer these other things to the world.  And I want to say this.  I want to throw it out there and say: Maybe I'm nuts.  Maybe I am totally totally nuts.  But.  Maybe not, and, maybe, even if I am, it's still kind of good to get these thoughts out there, because there might be something in here that's good, thats useful, that's not crazy.  And so I'm doing it.  Because I want to.  Or because I want to preserve that. 

So.  There you go. Figured it'd be appropriate to end with that last one.  A window into a mind that had been driving all day with a tape recorder sitting in the passenger seat. 

A little embarrassing.  But that's cool.  Radical transparency.  And an illustration of the fact that I haven't come anywhere close to achieving Agent Cooper style tape recorder productivity.

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?

When considering candidates for elected office, I think it's weird that we consider military heroism an asset. 

I think we should celebrate war heroes, respect them, give them medals, throw parties for them, and tap their military wisdom when military wisdom is needed.

I do not, however, think a fancy military record correlates with ability to govern.

Look at the heads of state in Africa.  War heroes.  Revolutionaries.  People that liberated their countries from horrible oppression. 

And shitty governors.  Shitty economy builders.  Greedy, egotistical, entitled nationalists. 

People that have succeeded and deserve recognition, but people that have succeeded in a sphere that is totally different from government.  A sphere in which quick, suboptimal decisions must be made all the time.  A sphere in which moral compromise happens by necessity every day.  A sphere that sharpens reflexes but deadens hearts.

And I think we can elect better governors than that.  People that are thoughtful and practical and humane.

Give me open minded problem solvers, not proud patriots.

I worry that George Washington's exceptional rule breaking (and our intense reverence for the Founding Fathers) keeps Americans from realizing the danger in electing war heroes.