Wow. Full-circle panorama from the top of Mt. Everest. The only place on Earth where there's nowhere to go but down. A view that people die for, regularly.

(QuickTime required. Link by way of Metafilter.)

My experiment in wikidom has been interesting so far, even though it's only been, what, a week or so? I'm finding that I'm much more reluctant to share my notes on works in progress than I expected to be. There are several reasons why not, none of which are the ones I expected: I'm not convinced that my notes are coherent to anyone but me, I'm most likely to need access to notes when I don't have an Internet connection, and my notes tend to include details like contact information that I'm reluctant to share without the individual's permission. Strangely, the loss of control over the information isn't all that worrisome, perhaps because my notes are so rough. They require a lot of added work (and added value) before I would worry about misappropriation.

So, if my original public scratchpad idea is uncomfortable, how can Thin Film Wiki help me and/or the industry as a whole? The most successful wikis out there seem to be knowledge bases of various kinds, meaning that they contain more or less static information even though the medium is inherently dynamic. Hmm. I need to think about this further.

(Crossposted to Thin Film Wiki: ToWikiOrNot to facilitate discussion.)

Updated to reflect new wiki location.

After four years, the EFF has put together a list of unintended consequences of the DMCA. One of the most serious is the chilling effect on legitimate security and encryption research. Companies are invoking the law to justify security through obscurity on a large scale.

Good explanation of what deflation is, why it's good (or bad), and what the Federal Reserve Bank (which thinks it's bad) is likely to do about it.

It shouldn't surprise anyone to see that when kids write more they get better at it. It turns out that email and instant messaging are teaching teenagers that the written word matters.

I spent the weekend in western Pennsylvania, where I'm originally from. I haven't been back in the spring in a while, and I'd almost forgotten how amazingly beautiful that country can be. Especially on a warm spring day when everything is green and the trees and rolling fields stretch as far as you can see. At this moment I'm pounding my keyboard in frustration because I let my digital camera's battery die and I can't find good images on the web. Sigh...

I'm still ahead of the technology curve, if only by a few days. I got a wiki set up before the New York Times wrote an article about them. (Free registration required.)

For companies, if not for individuals, resilience can be taught. It depends in part on the ability to improvise, even without "good" tools or materials, and to keep improvising until something works.

Mother Jones is hardly a neutral source, but the magazine makes an important point. Current US policy seems to be very good at removing unfriendly regimes, but not so good at cleaning up the mess military action leaves behind. First in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, no one in the administration seems to have a coherent nation-building strategy. Any good that resulted from the removal of the Taliban (or Hussein) will be undone if Afghanistan is allowed to return to anarchy.