Advocates of Sturgeon's Law will appreciate the new, free Google TiSP service, where you're one flush away from a high-speed solution. [Link]

To offset the cost of providing the TiSP service, we use information gathered by discreet DNA sequencing of your personal bodily output to display online ads that are contextually relevant to your culinary preferences, current health status and likelihood of developing particular medical conditions going forward.

Update: this was later revised to magnitude 8.

Around four hours ago, there was an earthquake (7.6 magnitude) near the Solomon Islands, triggering a tsunami locally and a tsunami watch in Australia and other parts of the South Pacific. [Link]

The New York Times reviews one of the best films we saw at the SXSW Film Festival this year, the Danish film "After the Wedding," directed by Susanne Bier. It's a film of substantial emotional complexity and great humanity.

Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke posted a joint statement about ... what should we call it, Sierragate? They don't seem to disagree. (If you don't know what this is about, check out my earlier posts on the subect, on March 27 and 31.

Austin dorkbotistas and former polycots David Nunez and Maida Barbour are hosting Transparent Mike Night – tonight at Brentwood Tavern. [Link]

It's an exploration of open-source, DIY audio. Presenters, musicians, engineers, and artists are invited to take the stage, open-mike style, to talk about and perform seriously strange sounds.

This event will be an open mike format showcasing various local inventers who have created instruments, recording devices, mixing tools and other audio devices (anything to do with sound that hasn't ever been done quite that way before). The venue and the show are kid-friendly.

William F. Buckley seems to question why United States, though "easily the principal offender" in adding greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, should be expected to take steps toward mitigation if other countries (China and India) aren't doing the same.

As a practical matter, what have modern states undertaken with a view to diminishing greenhouse gases? The answer is: Not very much. What is being done gives off a kind of satisfaction, of the kind felt back then when prayers were recited as apostates were led to the stake to be burned. If you levied a 100 percent surtax on gasoline in the United States, you would certainly reduce the use of it, but the arbiter is there to say: What is a complementary sacrifice we can then expect from India and China? China will soon overtake the United States in the production of greenhouse gases.

He goes on to say that "it is estimated that if the United States had subscribed to Kyoto, it would have cost us $100 billion to $400 billion per year." Earlier in the same piece (after a straw man argument I'm not addressing here) he says

Critics are correct in insisting that human enterprises have an effect on climate. What they cannot at this point do is specify exactly how great the damage is, nor how much relief would be effected by specific acts of natural propitiation.

I think the summary point of this op ed is that, because we don't know the extent of climate-related disaster we face, we shouldn't make economic sacrifices ostensibly required to mitigate the problem. Though Buckley is too smart to claim (as others do) that global warming is "fiction," his argument favors the same sort of outcome as Bob Murray's. Murray, CEO of Murray Energy Corporation, said

"Some wealthy elitists in our country ... who cannot tell fact from fiction, can afford an Olympian detachment from the impacts of draconian climate change policy. For them, the jobs and dreams destroyed as a result will be nothing more than statistics and the cares of other people. These consequences are abstractions to them, but they are not to me, as I can name many of the thousands of the American citizens whose lives will be destroyed by these elitists' ill-conceived ‘global goofiness' campaigns."

This reminds me of "Jaws," where a massive great white shark is menacing a community whose mayor would rather ignore the danger in favor of the tourist trade. That's Bob Murray, and you can understand why he would radically ignore the danger. He's coming from a very emotional place, he can't really think clearly about a barely-perceived threat that he doesn't completely understand; all he can see clearly is the immediate economic side of the issue - if I close the beaches, the local economy will be devastated.

But you have to wonder about Buckley, who clearly knows better, yet subtly reinforces Murray's argument.

The real question, I suppose, is how many bodies must you find on the beach before you acknowledge that the shark is a greater threat than the economic disruption you get when you close the beaches?

Borrowers are lured into mortgages they can't really afford, structured so that foreclosure is a likely outcome. This has stimulated the housing market in the short term, but what effect will it have in the longer term? [Link]

The boom in this industry has been extraordinary. “From 1994 to 2005, the subprime loan market grew from $35 billion to $665 billion,” the Center for Responsible Lending notes in a report entitled “Losing Ground: Foreclosures in the Subprime Market and Their Cost to Homeowners.”

But so has the bust. “We estimate that one-third of families who received a subprime loan in 2005 and 2006 will ultimately lose their homes,” the report predicts.

While opening up the possibility of homeownership to people with lesser means or spottier credit is something that progressives have advocated for a long time, the way the private sector has done this has been criminal. “Because the subprime market is designed to serve borrowers who have credit problems, one might expect the industry to offer subprime loan products that do not magnify the risk of loan failure,” the report says. “In fact, the opposite is true.”

We may be more depressed because we're too "clean." [Link]

...it opens a new line of inquiry into why depression is becoming more common. Two other conditions that have increased in frequency recently are asthma and allergies, both of which are caused by the immune system attacking cells of the body it is supposed to protect. One explanation for the rise of these two conditions is the hygiene hypothesis. This suggests a lack of childhood exposure to harmless bugs is leading to improperly primed immune systems, which then go on to look for trouble where none exists.

In the case of depression, a similar explanation may pertain. If an ultra-hygienic environment is not stimulating the interaction between immune system and brain, some people may react badly to the consequent lack of serotonin. No one suggests this is the whole explanation for depression, but it may turn out to be part of it.

(Perhaps the real story here is that we've too successfully sealed ourselves off from the rest of the world/unverse, losing a sense of biological interdependence. This manifests in other ways, as too-hungry, too-warm polar bears will tell you.)

My usually-persistent blogging has slowed to a drip, not because I don't have anything to say, but because hours are filling with meetings, leaving little time for writing. It's good to be busy and getting a lot done, but it's unfortunate that writing (along with other projects) has been swept aside. Some of the things that are occupying my time lately:

My company, Polycot Consulting. Along with partners Jeff Kramer and Matt Sanders, I cofounded Polycot in 2001 as a web consultancy, but our timing was unforunate (entity formation was filed September 12, 2001). Web technology development, which had been my passion for years, was clearly not in demand following the Internet collapse of 2000, and the events of 9/11/2001 further delayed any revival of interest in web business. The limited demand was for web development, so that was our focus for years. We were consulting, bringing our intelligence about the web to bear on many projects, but almost always in the context of a development project. However not only is there renewed interest in the web, much of that interest is in the realm of what's now called social media, which has always been my real passion. It was only when I discovered that you could build communities in cyberspace that I became a career technologist, and I've always been drawn to projects that were about building social spaces (for communities, virtual teams, online social networks, etc.)

I took a four month sabbatical from Polycot to build a blog network for Worldchanging.com, and when that project ended, I decided the next step was to build a focused social media consulting practice at Polycot. I've been working on that for several weeks now. My Polycot partners, meanwhile, have built a development practice focused on creating social media environments using Ruby on Rails. They're taking a limited number of projects in that space (and we'll have some exciting announcements soon as current projects are completed). Now there'll be two Polycots, and while we may combine consulting and development for some projects, the consulting practice will also stand alone. In addition to social media/online community/social networks, we also consult on user experience and information architecture, findability, and conversion support.

I've also been increasingly involved with the Bootstrap Network, which started in Austin and is spreading across the globe. Bootstrap is the most effective social network I've seen, manifesting fact to face and online, creating a remarkable support framework for entrepreneurs and their companies. Originally created for founders of Bootstrap Companies, the organization now welcomes potential entrepreneurs who're in ideation, and it's been working with established companies that began as Bootstraps via the "Rebootstrap" project, which helps restore the entrepreneurial spirit.

And I've been working via EFF-Austin with Aspiration's Allen Gunn (aka Gunner) and a dedicated group of Austin technophiles to coordinate the first Penguin Day Austin, an April 28 event that will give local nonprofits an opportunity to explore free and open source software. In addition to helping nonprofits, the event will bring local techs together, including members of the revived Open Source Posse (which has connections to Bootstrap, EFF-Austin, and the regional Digital Convergence Initiative).

I'm also getting involved with the
Cleantech Forum for Austin, editing and blogging at Worldchanging Austin, and working on various and sundry other projects... so blogging's been hard to work into the mix. I'll try to do more, but on the run, and shorter posts.

Photo: Hiroshi Inoue (President of NaCl, where Ruby was developed by Yukihiro Matsumoto), Jeff Kramer, and Jon L. at Polycot Consulting.

Google just acquired Doubleclick, one of the oldest Internet advertising companies. This "expands Google’s business far beyond algorithm-driven ad auctions into a relationship-based business with Web publishers and advertisers," according to The New York Times. Cornering the market, as they say.

Like so many late sixties/early seventies college students, I had a passing interest in author Carlos Castaneda's books about his experiences learning to be a shaman from the wise Yaqui Don Juan. After reading the first book, I was fascinated but skeptical; Marsha and I read the second book and maybe the third, and we decided that some of the "teachings of Don Juan" were interesting and compelling even if they were actually fictions. I was always curious about Castaneda; who he was, and the real bases for his stories &ndash even if they were fictions, they seemed to draw on real cultural, philosophical, and spiritual traditions of native Americans and others. (I just asked Marsha what she remembered of Castaneda's writing; she says "that you have to look to decide to see." We found this and other bits of wisdom useful and meaningful.) Currently Salon is running a very good, comprehensive article about Castaneda, the eventual compelling evidence that his books were fictions, and the strange life he led until his death in 1998 from liver cancer. After his dealth, five women who lived with him had their phones disconnected and vanished. Most assume they committed suicide.

Jennings believes Castaneda knew they were planning to kill themselves. "He used to talk about suicide all the time, even for minor things," Jennings told me. He added that Partin was once sent to identify abandoned mines in the desert, which could be used as potential suicide sites. (There's an abandoned mine not far from where her remains were found.) "He regularly told us he was our only hope," Jennings said. "We were all supposed to go together, 'make the leap,' whatever that meant." What did Jennings think it meant? "I didn't know fully," he said. "He'd describe it in different ways. So would the witches. It seemed to be what they were living for, something we were being promised."

The promise may have been based on the final scene in "Tales of Power," in which Carlos leaps from a cliff into the nagual. The scene is later retold in varying versions. In his 1984 book, "The Fire From Within," Castaneda wrote: "I didn't die at the bottom of that gorge -- and neither did the other apprentices who had jumped at an earlier time -- because we never reached it; all of us, under the impact of such a tremendous and incomprehensible act as jumping to our deaths, moved our assemblage points and assembled other worlds."

Did Castaneda really believe this? Wallace thinks so. "He became more and more hypnotized by his own reveries," she told me. "I firmly believe Carlos brainwashed himself." Did the witches? Geuter put it this way: "Florinda, Taisha and the Blue Scout knew it was a fantasy structure. But when you have thousands of eyes looking back at you, you begin to believe in the fantasy. These women never had to answer to the real world. Carlos had snatched them when they were very young."

Wallace isn't sure what the women believed. Because open discussion of Castaneda's teachings was forbidden, it was impossible to know what anyone really thought. However, she told me, after living so long with Castaneda, the women may have felt they had no choice. "You've cut off all your ties," she said. "Now you're going to go back after all these decades? Who are you going to go be with? And you feel that you're not one of the common herd anymore. That's why they killed themselves."

Along with David Swedlow, I lead the Web Subgroup for Bootstrap Austin, and I think it's worthwhile here to talk about some of that group's connections and areas of focus. One interesting aspect: because it's part of Bootstrap, it inherently involves entrepreneurial activity, and because it's web-focused, it involves technology more than some of the other Bootstrap groups. Also, by virtue of my own connections, it has the potential to partner with a couple other organizations, specifically EFF-Austin (which is about tech policy) and the Digital Convergence Initiative, which is about regional economic development. Bootstrap Web members were instrumental in helping revive the Open Source Posse that originally began as part of EFF-Austin, and we've talked seriously about making Bootstrap Web members beta users of a web testbed that DCI hopes to create.

Bootstrap Web meets the last Monday of the month at 6:30pm at Café Caffeine (909 W. Mary in Austin). Our next meeting, on April 30, will be a discussion of commons-based peer production and open innovation, and how these concepts are relevant to the current and future state of web development and business. Founders off Bootstrap web companies are welcome - we have an interesting and lively combination of business and technical participants.

My friend, Serbian blogger Jasmina Tesanovic, emailed me the report below, republished here with her permission. The attach she describes has led to a protest "against the policy that turned Serbia into a society that bans the freedom of expression and a society in which each individual should fear about his own life because of his personal stance."

On April 14, at 2.50 a.m, in the center of Belgrade, two grenades exploded. They were planted in the bedroom window of prominent Serbian journalist Dejan Anastasijevic.

The first bomb burst early. The blast catapulted the second grenade into the street, into some parked cars and away from the sleeping bodies of Dejan, his wife and his fifteen-year-old daughter. This likely saved their lives.

Dejan, who writes for TIME magazine, was among the witnesses at the Hague International War Crime Tribunal against Slobodan Milosevic. As a journalist, his main line of inquiry was the connection between war crimes committed by Serbian military and police all over former Yugoslavia in the nineties. A painful issue. Recently the International War Crime Tribunal in Hague held that the regime of Slobodan Milosevic cannot be directly linked to the mass graves in Kosovo and the genocide in Srebrenica. Therefore the Serbian state is not formally guilty of genocide -- although genocide took place.

Therefore genocide was committed, not by the state, but by non-state actors. Secret armed militias in disintegrating states were novelties in the 1990s. They're not any more.

Nobody tries Al Qaeda for genocide, for they don't even pretend to be a state and even America abandons law and order to chain them in Guantanamo.

On April 10th, a verdict was issued at the special court for war crimes in Belgrade. This verdict involved the death squad called Scorpions, who were involved in the genocide in Srebrenica. In the spirit of the sentence of the Hague tribunal, the local tribunal also found the state of Serbia not guilty of genocide. Neither are the Scorpions guilty.

The Scorpion militia took the trouble to film one of their own misdeeds, so that the court witnessed the Scorpion defendants kicking bound teenage captives, jabbing them with gun barrels, denying them water, insulting them and then shooting them. Nevertheless, this does not constitute a proof of the grand-scale state-crime of genocide.

The bodies of the dead are there on film, the genocidal intent is obvious, but there is no clear legal chain of orders between any formal state apparatus and this covert squad of armed marauders. Who ordered what, when, why...? A whirlwind in the storms of a disintegrating state, says the verdict.

The whole world saw that film, that was the cause of the tribunal, so everyone knows at least that those five indicted Scorpions, in one way or other, did commit the murder of six innocent civilians merely guilty of being Moslems. The president of Serbia, Boris Tadic, declared after the sentence that such crimes deserved capital punishment.

But who in Serbia will give the order to legally kill the state's legally unsanctioned killers? The Scorpion death squad was tripped up by their urge to brag on video, but the same people who ruled Serbia during the nineties are still in power today. Milosevic is dead, Mladic is hidden, but most of their colleagues and collaborators, open and covert, walk the streets of Belgrade, blustering and threatening about Kosovo and their political opponents.

The chief prosecutor of the Scorpions is not satisfied with the sentence. The lawyers of the victims are angry. The defense lawyers of the Scorpions are triumphant. In prison or out of it, the Scorpions consider themselves moral victors; with the evidence so crushingly against them, that strategy was the best they could hope for.

They do have one other strategy: the strategy of covertly killing people. A death-squad is still a death squad, and a gangland atmosphere of lethal intimidation works as well on Serbs as on the alien Other. The death squads lash out against journalists who report them, as Dejan Anastasijevic, who knows the situation well and publicly commented on the verdict.

Did the death-squad who planted grenades in his bedroom window take the trouble to film it?

As as a few aging Scorpions shuffle off to prison for their crimes of many years ago, Serbian civil society remains imprisoned by its worst elements. Journalist Slavko Curuvija was assassinated by Milosevic secret police hit-men, back in 1999. Our late premiere Zoran Djindjic was shot by state mafia in 2003. That doesn't even count the havoc wreaked by state-mafia complex on its own death-squad soldiers, from Chief Tiger Arkan, shot in 2000, through hundreds of underworld less known bombed in cars, shot in cafes...

Dejan has many friends in the world and at home, but he and his family are profoundly unsafe, just like everyone else in a hollow state that secretly cherishes death squads while failing to keep public order. As long as Dejan writes the facts, as long as Serbia lives in organized denial, as long as the tribunals minimize the criminal issues in the name of reconciliation or realpolitik, the truth will act as a bomb in terrorist hands.

Ever since Milosevic reduced Yugoslavia to his private casino, the much battered entity called Serbia has never been a lawful state. State failure may soon become a luxury that the Balkans can no longer afford. Although I never make decisions out of fear, I confess, I am afraid.

Photo: Jasmina speaking at EFF-Austin's SXSW event in March.

Doug Rushkoff will be speaking at the Paramount Theatre Wednesday night. Doug's an old friend of mine; I interviewed him a few years ago for the Austin Chronicle, and thought, in all modesty, that it was one of his better interviews. Here's one of my favorite bits from that talk:

JonL: Well, you throw a party, and you invite everybody to come, and you really have a good heart, you really want it to work. But the thing is, how do you accommodate the diversity, and how do you accommodate the fact that some people have bad intentions?

DR: There's so many models, even biological models. You figure we're all one body, right? And every person's a little cell. So okay, I want to have a gathering of cells, the good ones. Not the pimple cells and cancer cells, I just want nice ones coming in. And you know that after a certain point, you can invite maybe one or two negative people, and then hope the energy of the good group heals those people, or brings them around somehow.

But you invite five or six or seven, and you crash the whole thing, and it makes you feel really shitty. I always used to tell myself that I never want to live a life where, if I was tripping, I'd look at stuff and bum out. And one thing that does bum me feels like a lingering elitism ...

JonL: Within yourself?

DR: Yeah! I want to hang out with certain people, I don't want to hang out with others. But on another level, well ... shit, I'm a human being, I'm only on this earth for so much time. It's easier to look at images of starving people than images of fucked-up people. With starving people, at least you can say how do we get them food? What can we do? But what can you do about fucked-up people? And unfortunately, maybe half the people in our culture are fucked-up people. I mean, I'm fucked-up in my own little ways. But there's legions of unconscious people, people who are what I would call coerced by corporate America, coerced by television, coerced by the very systems of logic they've succumbed to.

Link to a press release about the Wednesday gig. Link to the event page, where you can buy a ticket.

Chip Rosenthal just sent a link to an article in the Austin Statesman that I missed just before SXSW Interactive, called "We lived and died by our blogs; now, not so much." It's an odd article that tries to be ominous/prophetic about the fact that some bloggers drift away from blogging, as though that was a big deal. One interesting quote: "According to research firm Gartner Inc., more than 200 million abandoned blogs litter the Internet." To me that's like saying that books or periodicals litter libraries. People will stop writing, distributing, reading, etc. in any medium, and what does that suggest? I think it's proof of life – as living entities, we change and evolve and, yes, sometimes we move on from some of our pursuits. [Link]

This Thursday, I'll be sitting on a panel to explore the impact of social media on politics, organized by Mike Chapman for Austin's Social Media Club. I'll probably talk about advocacy vs democracy. [Link]

From information aesthetics, "a data visualization artwork based on data from a building monitoring system that gathers electricity, condensate, & chilled water usage figures in real time. the purpose of the eco-visualization is to make key environmental performance data publicly accessible & easy to understand for everyone." Imagine planting massive lcd displays with this kind of dynamic imagery outside factories everywhere so everybody and his uncle's brother will exactly how much carbon is spewing.

I was part of the Austin Social Media Club's panel on social media and politics tonight. It was very good, and I made some new friends, including Chris Leonard, a great guy with a dry wit who's done a lot of social media work for the Republicans in Texas. Somehow I don't have many Republican friends (big surprise), but the ones I meet are funny and interesting, not at all evil. Take your party back, guys!

We probably talked too much about the impact of social media on elections, and too little about social media and participation in policy formation (which I did bring up toward the end). However no complaints - it was lively and well-moderated (by Mike Chapman, who's worked as a lobbyist/government affairs specialist and was a cofounder of the local SMC. I hope to see more of my fellow panelists.

Photo: yers truly, with Sam McCabe, Mike Chapman, Eileen Smith, and Chris Leonard.

Weblogsky friend Joel Greenberg has an interview in today's Tech Monday (registration required). Joel, formerly of GSD&M, talks about his new gig with a Second Life-focused company called Electric Sheep. While at GSD&M, Joel became a Second Life expert, so he knows the turf pretty well.

Why are advertisers interested in "Second Life," and what sort of possibilities do they see?

People are interested in "Second Life" because intuitively they see it as a communications medium that is really kind of cool. I think "cool" is the wrong word for advertisers — ultimately they want to make money. It's too early for "Second Life" at this point for advertisers to really make money. So they are doing it for a number of reasons. One is PR. I think the window of opportunity for PR is closing for companies entering "Second Life." For the past six months or so, or the past year, you could get a buzz for saying "Yes, we are doing something in 'Second Life.' "

Why are very traditional marketers OK with experimenting in "Second Life" and not other worlds?

Well, first of all, it does freak them out. But when you say, look, as of a year ago, the GDP of the ("Second Life") world was $65 million. That number came from ("Second Life" owner) Linden Lab. And I've heard it's up to $225 million. That is the value in U.S. dollars of all goods and services sold in-world. It gets their attention.

I'm not sure I agree with Joel's implication that Austin doesn't have Web 2.0 activity. He says "... there are no video sites coming out of Austin," however I know of at least one (because Polycot is involved), and I think there are at least a couple others. And while it's clear there's very little VC activity in Austin, there are some folks trying to revive interest, and there are several projects that could be called "Web 2.0" that are bootstrapping.

Photo: Joel presenting Second Life to Bootstrap Web.

This week I've been focused on business, Bootstrap, and sustainability. On the business side, I've been thinking about the reorganization of Polycot into two divisions – my division will be focused primarily on consulting and will work with strategic partners (including the other division) on development projects. The other division will be devoted to fairly large web development projects with Ruby on Rails as the platform. Both divisions will be working in the social media/online community space. On the consulting side, David Swedlow and I were discussing this week how we'll be focusing as much or more on the social aspect of the web as on technology.

The Austin-based Bootstrap Network is growing and evolving, and part of my role there is coordinating the online social network, working with Small World Labs, and evolving the online network's relationship to the physical social network(s). There's quite a bit to do to here. Bijoy, David Swedlow and I met with Michael Wilson of Small World Labs this week to clarify our relationship and process for coevolving the site with the organization.

Sustainability is popping up in various corners of my professional life as well as in avocational pursuits, like the work I'm doing editing Worldchanging Austin. I can't really talk about everything that's going on because it's not all fully baked, and some of it involves projects that other people are brewing that are still confidential. What I can say is that a sustainability economy is emerging and Austin is probably destined to be a significant hub of that economy and the community that forms within it. There are several organizations I want to work more with, including the Clean Energy Incubator (where I had more of a relationship earlier in the decade, when I was part of the Austin Clean Energy Initiative, and Flow, which I've been looking at for several months – check out the pdf with the Flow Ethos of Interaction and, if you know me, you'll understand why I'm interested. Nothing really new there, but there's never much new under the sun, where ideas are concerned – however execution is another matter.

Photo: One of the wildflower photos I shot near Inks Lake last weekend. I'm a sucker for Indian Blanket (though I confuse 'em with Indian Paintbrush, as when I named this jpg).

Annalee Newitz suggests that civilization may collapse with a twitter, not a bang. [Link]

In other words, will maintaining ourselves in Twitter time -- constantly growing the population, constantly using resources -- kill us? Bettencourt and his colleagues say that's a very real possibility.

One outcome of their model proposes that a society in Twitter time will collapse when it uses up all its resources. The population will drop off precipitously, and as it drops our pace of life will slow exponentially. Of course, there's another way. An equally real possibility is that urban cultures go through phases of Twitter time, then slow down again for a while, essentially "resetting" the model.

Feedback on SXSW 2007 made me feel pretty good - one of the sessions I helped organize, Henry Jenkins' presentation, had the highest rating of all sessions and panels (4.95 of 5 points) - thanks also to Joel Greenberg and danah boyd fro their invaluable help on that session. The session I coordinated and moderated, "Blogging Where Speech Isn't Free," rated seventh (4.71 of 5 points). - thanks to all the participants in that session - Ethan Zuckerman, Rob Faris, Shava Nerad, and especially Shahed Amanullah, who also won the Dewey Winburne Award for his work at altmuslim.com. Link to Ratings | [Link to Overview]

The Map of Science is a network map showing the relationships between 1.6 million scientific articles. The algorithm for the map was put together by Richard Klavans and Kevin Boyack. At
the site you can click through to other maps showing analysis by geography, industry, institutions, and topics.

Picked up on this Guardian piece via Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond blog. Gwyneth Jones should drop by the nearest Dorkbot, I think. [Link]

A long time ago, back in the 1980s, a new kind of science fiction burst on to the scene. For progressive fans of the genre it was like a supernova, blasting the old finned space ships, streamlined Metropolis robots and tentacled aliens right out of the sky. It was called "cyberpunk", and if you want to know what it looked like, you can see the cyberpunk future in Ridley Scott's dark, elegaic Bladerunner. The manifesto went like this: in the forseeable future there will be no aliens, and no trips to distant planets. Digital technology, however, will get better and better at an incredible rate, throwing up fantastic new gadgets that will not remain in the hands of the wealthy. They will immediately be adopted by "the street". Every punk will have a supercomputer in his pocket (and this was before desktop PCs, mind you, when video-camera, Wi-Fi internet access phones weren't even a twinkle in a Finnish eye). And everything else in the world will get much, much, worse.

Much of the science-fiction establishment hated the cyberpunks. Science fiction was supposed to be about progress, and how advances in technology will inevitably create a better world. But they were right, and the truth they told is highly relevant to this new century of sci-fi come true. If a child is told at the age of five that he has the cognitive scan of a delinquent, there's a very strong chance that he'll fulfil that prediction, especially if he continues to be singled out. Our gadgets are just like our children. They have the potential to be marvellous, to surpass all expectations. But children (and robots) don't grow up intelligent, affectionate, helpful and good-willed all by themselves. They need to be nurtured. The technology, however fantastic, is neutral. It's up to us to decide whether that dazzling new robot brain powers a caring hand, or a speedy fist highly accurate at throwing grenades.

Photo: A friendly robot hanging out at an Austin Dorkbot.

We had a pretty great Penguin Day yesterday, though I was a little concerned because of low turnout. However that actually worked in our favor: we only had twenty people, but they were the right twenty people. I posted photos at Flickr, but they don't do justice - you can't photograph an explosion of creative energy, however hard you might try. Allen Gunn (Gunner) from Aspiration led the discussion, and we were also joined by the briliant Michelle Murrain from the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative. Michelle led a great session over lunch, where we discussed the needs of nonprofits (and how NOSI might help meet 'em). I think the techs learned more from the nonprofits than vice versa, which was very productive. There'll be followup a t http://austinpenguinday.org.