Duane Gran’s log of thoughts

A delightful NY Times article delves into the moral implications of wealth and poverty and puts into clear relief how we have a moral imperative to serve others who are less fortunate. It has been years since I’ve read a good Kantian viewpoint and this article may well be one of the best I’ve seen.

Clay Shirky summarized my thoughts exactly about the faith people place in virtual reality:

Like video phones, which have been just one technological revolution away from mass adoption since 1964, virtual reality is so appealingly simple that its persistent failure to be a good idea, as measured by user adoption, has done little to dampen enthusiasm for the coming day of Keanu Reeves interfaces and Snow Crash interactions.

I’ve neither had time nor inclination to comprehend the hype of Second Life. I read Snow Crash and still consider much of it to be prophetic, but virtual reality is a niche that has primarily served the plot line of film. It is simply not relevant or useful in any way that I can imagine.

If I’m wrong, you’ll see me wearing a dunce hat on my avatar.

David Pogue recently wrote an excellent critique about the lack of civility in digital communications, but an ancillary thought has begun to percolate with me. The fifteen year-old’s uncivil response — the object of much hand wringing — is noted by Pogue and many readers for his scatter shot use of punctuation and poor grasp of grammar.

Before I throw stones in a glass house I’ll volunteer that I stumble in this area as well. My only defense is that I try to improve my writing.

Consider for the moment the last time you witnessed cursive print. Odds are that it was penned by someone in the elder generation. I don’t know how it is being lost, but you would be hard pressed to find many people under thirty who can write in cursive.

My disturbing hypothesis is that punctuation — those extra characters which slow down the IM and BlackBerry user — may well go to the same dustbin as cursive. For a period of time we elders will wag fingers or tisk away, but gradually the written language will evolve.

i dont know how ill relate to them

An Atlantic Monthly article makes a good effort to assuage the scorn of urbanites toward the chain store menace, but it falls short. The argument rests on the dullness of the varied store model of the past:

Big cities could, and still can, support more retail niches than small towns. And in a less competitive national market, there was certainly more variation in business efficiency — prices, service, and merchandise quality. But the range of retailing ideas in any given town was rarely that great. One deli or diner or lunch counter or cafeteria was pretty much like every other one. A hardware store was a hardware store, a pharmacy a pharmacy. Before it became a ubiquitous part of urban life, Starbucks was, in most American cities, a radically new idea.

The charm of those various stores was not that they were unique. It mattered not one iota that the place was called “Tom’s Hardware” while the place in the next town was called something else and the buildings were different. What mattered was that Tom lived and worked in your community. He was invested in the local culture and had no motive to change it. Tom’s participation, be it through sponsoring a little league team or advertising with the local paper, made him a pillar in the community.

Much less can be said for the McManagers of many franchises today whose products and mode of business is distinctly regional at best and rarely represents local values. Satellite businesses are tied to the logistics chain of the parent company and inherit a culture. Some people find it comforting when a Big Mac is the same everywhere, but there ought to be a way to have some threads of uniformity without mechanizing the process.

It is at this point that I can’t hide my luddism very well, but I like to think that I have a healthy skepticism for what should properly be called corporate central planning: a mode of capitalism whereby regional, national or international headquarters dictate the manner in which local businesses operate. If it is a logistic gain to consolidate business processes, rather than re-invent them in every community, it is therefore also a loss of culture to perpetuate homogeneity.

You can’t consider the issue in isolation of suburbia — the norm for community design. An Alternet article provides a scathing commentary on the state of suburbia and corporate central planning:

The public realm has two crucial roles in our collective existence. First, it is the physical manifestation of the common good. Second, is literally the dwelling place of civic life. And so if you fail to design the public realm with deliberate artistry, and by so doing degrade and dishonor the public realm by turning it into a uniform automobile slum simply to accommodate x-number of cars, you will automatically degrade the quality of civic life and the public’s collective ability to conceive of a common good beyond incessant motoring.

The article makes a strong case for why the popular appeal of chain stores and suburbia aren’t sufficient enough reasons for crafting public policy around their existence. No one holds a crystal ball but anyone can see that modern life’s comforts are predicated on cheap fuel and global stability. We’re heavily invested in the status quo but if history is any guide we may regret these assumptions.

Today I will be giving a presentation to The Virginia Local Government Web Alliance on using XML technology. My aim will be to talk more about the “why” of XML rather than the “how”, but I’ll naturally include discussion on the “why not” since there are many reasons to not use XML. My experience lately is peppered with exposure to document-based markup in literary projects, but I hope to be able to give the audience an idea where XML adds value. In particular I aim to show how exposing data in XML enables serendipitous data reuse. Governments should embrace open content and transparency. Sharing data in an open and documented format is an important step in that direction.