Paul Krassner interviews RU Sirius about the Open Source Political Party. [Link]

Open Source Party is an attempt to apply some of the principles of the Open Source movement, which started out as a software movement and has evolved into a cultural sensibility, to the current and future political situation. Why are our political institutions decades or centuries (Washington B.C.) behind our technology? It's also an attempt to define a sort of alternative political agenda that seems nascent in our culture right now--this novel mix of liberalism, libertarianism, pragmatism and vision that many of us see buzzing around us.

Mark McGuinness, a poet and business coach (interesting combo) from the UK, created and posted a free, Creative Commons-licensed book called "Time Management for Creative People." His focus is on creating more time for your own creative work via a set of time management practices he's picked up or figured out. Good advice, well-written. Add it to your to-do list!

UT Austin's ActLab, Sandy Stone's rogue subdepartment within the school of communications, was slashdotted – the fascination du jour being ActLab's current commitment to Weird Science. It's Dorkbot breaking into academia, putting up its feet, and smoking a cigar-shaped object.

Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy (!) has assembled an interesting, as in spectacular, set of astronomy photos. He's also a funny guy ("I likes reality the way it is, and I aims to keep it that way.") Reality, in the cases presented here, approaches the surreal (which is what I likes). [Link]

Whole herds of my online contacts were sending me "trust requests" via the new people-focused search engine, Spock, and I finally took a few minutes to investigate. I found several articles that were generally positive, suggesting that a vertical search engine that aggregates data about people (not entirely new - think Zoominfo) might be worth checking out. I joined and invited a few of my friends. Two or three asked me about the site, and I responded that it seemed okay to me, though it did seem to be dumping a lot of email (trust requests) into my inbox. I saw a post about it on an email list and, having missed some of the context, asked the poster to say more about his issues. He didn't, but others responded, including my colleague Bill Anderson, who mentioned a Wired article about the site. I had also seen Nancy's post about the site, and followed up with her. She told me she was getting emails from the site reporting activity associated with her data there, even though she had never registered.

She gave me the link to a Wired News article about Spock that I'd seen but hadn't followed, assuming it was just the Wired News blog post about the site that turned up in a Google search, that I had already read. However the longer Wired News story suggests the Spock team might not be thinking through some of their decisions. For instance, Spock created a Facebook app similar to Mad Libs. Via this app, many people "stories about themselves and their friends, filling the blanks with scandalous terms," not realizing that the stories would be indexed and stored as part of Spock's aggregate data.

... they were horrified to discover that Spock used the terms they supplied to build public profiles on them and other Facebook members. (After being contacted by Wired News, Spock erased the tags from many of these profiles, but some were still visible at press time.)

Spock evidently has kinks in interpretive aspects of its algorithms: blogger John Aravosis of Americablog was tagged "pedophile" because he had used the term in writing about Congressman Mark Foley.

I still think Spock has an interesting approach that could be valuable, their stumbling launch has burned a lot of social capital. It might be hard to recover.

(Even if you're avoiding the site, check out Leonard Nimoy's page... it's only right.)

I spent some time yesterday covering the Austin Green Art booth at the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar. Meanwhile Randy's been sending 'round the video below...

If you find this compelling (and why wouldn't you?) — donate to Austin Green Art!

Not really news to most of us: food prices are increasing. [Link]

Marie Thompson, a mother from Brooklyn with a couple of kids in tow at the grocery store, said she spends hundreds of dollars a week on groceries, including two gallons of milk.

"It seems to me that I spend more and more every week on food," said Thompson. "It's hard, because I have three children at home so there are five of us to feed. Beef is very expensive. The milk is very expensive. Even the butter has gone up."

Even with gasoline prices soaring, milk still tops gas prices. The nationwide average for a gallon of whole milk is $3.80, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That dwarfs the nationwide average of $2.99 for a gallon of unleaded, according to AAA.

(Marsha and I used to spend $10 a week on groceries... in the 1970s.

Blogger/Twitterer Susan Reynolds' bout with breast cancer created online community convergence and creative thinking about raising money - in this case for Making Strides, the American Cancer Society's breast cancer campaign. Connie Reece et al started the Frozen Pea Fund. What do frozen peas have to do with cancer? The answer's here. The whole story's posted at Tech PR Gems.

Tim Karr posts a top ten list of 2007's worst telco moments. Big telcos are trying their best to control and monetize the Interet. They have friends in high places.

In September, departing Attorney General Alberto Gonzales filed a brief with the Federal Communications Commission, urging the agency to oppose Net Neutrality. The DOJ stated that broadband companies like AT&T should be able to erect toll booths and filter traffic -- upending the even playing field that has made the Web an unrivaled engine of democratic discourse and new ideas.

The DOJ move once again proved the point: Powerful corporate and government gatekeepers are working together to dismantle Internet freedoms and impose their will upon the Web. By moving against Net Neutrality, Gonzales was merely pulling last-minute favors for friends in high places. Soon thereafter, Free Press submitted a FOIA request to shed light on the DOJ's recent hit job against Net Neutrality and uncover whether industry lobbyists or White House politics had a hand in this unusual action. We're still waiting for a response.

My energy undermined by respiratory virus, I've been a little listless and depressed this Christmas weekend. Last night I watched "White Christmas" for the first time in many years, and this morning I've been listening to Caroline Kennedy's recent Christmas discussion with Tim Russert, prompted by publication of her book A Family Christmas. She says she learned a lot while writing it; one story she offers is that of the World War I Christmas Truce, which began on Christmas Eve, 1914. German and British troops sung Christmas carols from their respective sides, and this led to shouted greetings, then to actual visits across the line. Firstworldwar.com refers to the ad hoc temporary truce as "a shining episode of sanity from among the bloody chapters of World War One — a spontaneous effort by the lower ranks to create a peace that could have blossomed were it not for the interference of generals and politicians."

"White Christmas," though it begins during World War II, is a musical comedy set in postwar USA — but it's still a movie about war, or at least about the bonds that form during war. Protagonists Bob Wallace (Bing Crosby) and Phil Davis (Danny Kaye) met during war, and much of the film is about their efforts to help their former commander in the Army's 151st Division, Major General Thomas Waverly (Dean Jagger) — in the end bringing veterans of the 151st together for a musical salute to the General. It was common for post WWII films to celebrate and acknowledge the military, and the lush, unreal technicolor hues you find in "White Christmas" and other films of the era were in part a manifestation of a desire to escape the darker realities that were such a presence through both world wars. Baby boomers were born into this world; it's no wonder so many of us were such fervent idealists, and so ultimately disillusioned.

Earlier this week I heard another story — on NPR — about the impact of a Iraq war veteran's post-traumatic stress disorder on his marriage. At some point in the story, the veteran, Peter Mohan, mentions how his wife didn't understand the bonds he had formed with his buddies while in the military. He was evidently unable to refocus on his own life and marriage when he returned to civilian life. This made me think about Audie Murphy, a high-visibility case of PTSD.

I wonder this Christmas about all the soldiers stationed in Iraq and elsewhere, away from family and home — and former soldiers with PTSD, some of whom, like Peter Mohan, have been transformed by war. It's a sad moment. I suspect we'll see more wars, worst wars, and various devastations even worse than wars. I resist the thought of my grandchildren at war, and their children.

But I'm Technicolor-blind at this point.

Last week the LA Times ran a piece called "Drugs to build up that mental muscle." Smart drugs aren't new - nootropics were getting a lot of press in the 90s, e.g. John Morgenthaler in Mondo 2000 #2: "New Drugs That Make You Smart." I'm not thinking these drugs make you more intelligent. but they might make your cognition a little sharper and more efficient. (I'm not confusing focus with intelligence.)

Is knowledge a rut that stymies innovation?

Andrew S. Grove, the co-founder of Intel, put it well in 2005 when he told an interviewer from Fortune, “When everybody knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’.” In other words, it becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself.

I've had a couple of situations of late where I responded to academics on email lists and thought, too little jargon, I'm going to sound like a dumbass. I can't do jargon well, though, because I've worked so hard to think, and write, clearly. And I've come to realize, after years of thinking about thinking, that nobody's smart about everything and many outsmart themselves. Good piece about this in the the New York Times.[Link]