Watched Memory Games (2018) from Netflix

Directed by Janet Tobias, Claus Wehlisch. With Yanjaa Wintersoul, Nelson Dellis, Johannes Mallow, Simon Reinhard. Glimpse into the brain's vast potential for memorization through the eyes of four competitive memory athletes as they share techniques and insights.

Great overview of some basic memory techniques, the personalities of several big names in the space, and a bit about the competitions themselves.

Rating: ★★★★

Watched "Face the Nation" on March 1, 2020 from cbsnews.com

On this "Face the Nation" broadcast moderated by Margaret Brennan:

Watched "The West Wing" A Proportional Response from Netflix
Directed by Marc Buckland. After being offered "a proportional response" to the Syrian military's downing of a U.S. military plane on a medical mission (and carrying his newly named personal physician), the president demands an option that will have greater impact. Leo gradually must talk him down, while Bartlet snipes at everyone, including Abby. The president ultimately agrees to the initial option, but is not happy ...
Watched Beethoven “Moonlight Sonata” for Old Elephant by Paul BartonPaul Barton from YouTube

Mongkol is a 61-year-old former logging elephant. His captive-held life was spent hauling trees in the Thai forest. His body shape is deformed through hard labor, he lost his right eye and tusk in this brutal logging practice. Mongkol was rescued and brought to Elephants World to spend the rest of his days relaxing peacefully in freedom by the River Kwai. I discovered Mongkol is an extremely gentle, sensitive elephant who enjoys music, especially this slow movement by Beethoven which I play to him occasionally in the day and night.

You half expect the elephant to do something, but really the entire point is the quiet peacefulness.

Doc Searls retweet of Charles Johnson’s post ()

Watched The Unitive Web from YouTube

This explains our proposal for a new generation of the Web, which we call The Unitive Web. Currently, there is a growing movement from the independence of the web, towards dominant companies. These companies offer organized information, but this comes at a price. We lose our independence more and more. The Unitive Web is a proposal to have both organized information and independence. It offers one generic approach closely compatible with the current web, which makes it possible to create a global open virtual space of information that is responsive and reliable. It offers open customization of user interaction, open bottom-up schema mapping, integration of (AI) algorithms, and facilitates in the protection of privacy. Kickstarter project will be launched if/when there is some interest first.

I only got about halfway through this watching at 1.5x. I’m purposely not embedding the video.

Some of the basic ideas about complexity theory are intriguing here, but it feels more like they’re trying to ground their ideas in solid science when they likely don’t have the proper grounding. I can’t help but thinking about Claude Shannon’s article The Bandwagon and seeing the same things that happened with information theory now taking place with complexity theory.

They’re also proposing a huge amount of infrastructure that is tenuous at best. I’m more than happy to await a minimal example before considering this further.

It almost kills me that they can’t be bothered to create a Kickstarter without “further interest.”

Watched IndieTrustWeb from IndieWebCamp Austin 2020 | Internet Archive

Some interesting ideas here, but I don’t feel like there are any that I could run with and want to build some concrete functionality out of. I suppose that more of my interest in this area relates to ideas about aggregation and discovery.