what drives history?

mcluhan suggested that technologies drive the evolution of media - agent modeling raises the possibility that the number of people in the world also have a significant effect on how we communicate. Specifically: would we have facebook or twitter if there were only 100 million people in the world?

bug list

1. delicious bookmarks - I've been using this for almost two years now, and it's finally dawning on me that it's not my fault that I always have to click the "tag" icon at the top of my browser twice. It's the program's fault that the first time, when I type in a few characters, and then hit the down arrow key to select the convenient auto-fill tag suggestion - it deselects it when I use any of the commands that normally confirm the selection. So press tab, right arrow key, or space - and then enter to confirm the whole tag - and as the window is closing I see that only the first few characters of my tag are saved!

2. this blog - as you can see I've been using this also for a couple of years (thanks to Ash Bhoopathy at yakshaving.net for getting me started on both!) but I still haven't been able to get the google analytics/tracking to work! I have no idea who is reading this, if anyone. If you are, tell me how to make this work.

patents

to add to John Seeley Brown's observations about the benefits of paper (his are that it's easy to add to, to share with others, and it doesn't run out of batteries): a paper lab notebook (that's permanently bound, dated, and with numbered pages) makes it easy to prove that one has made an invention.

Digital records are not so believable.

Paper isn't going away. It may be replaced in many contexts, but not in all contexts.