Emergent Web-i-ness, Information Connecting to Make All That Information More Interesting... What do you say about this?

Check out this video. It's a guy from Microsoft who in about five minutes will blow your mind 12 different ways. First he shows a user interface he developed as a way to display and view tons of photos and a host of other information in an elegant and totally useful manner (the software is called Seadragon).

The wilder application of Seadragon he demonstrates is a utility called Photosynth. Photosynth compiles photos (of Notre Dame, for example) from a public photo database (Flickr, say). It then determines the angle from which all the shots were taken and creates a kind of holographic image from all those photos. Finally, using Seadragon, you can navigate through those images, closer and further from any angle you want.

It's amazing. But I know this won't make any sense until you see it. So just go have a look.

I've been getting the feeling lately that we know a lot less than we think. Because of science, we tend to think we do know and can understand a lot. And maybe we can. But if you were in a huge room, where you were fed and clothed and had all your needs met, and everybody you knew was there, too (it's a big room, you know) you might think that the room was complete, an all-in-all, you might even call it the universe, and you might acknowledge that it was big enough to include nooks and crannies and mysteries that you just hadn't had a chance to explore yet and discover. If, one day, however, you heard a rumble from "somewhere else" -- maybe another room, or even another building -- you might then posit supernatural forces. Then again, being of a cooler scientifically oriented mind, you might rather posit the existence of an alternative or parallel universe. You might call it an extra dimension.

Modern astronomers, it seems, have found such a sign and are experiencing that odd moment of wonderment just now. They've discovered a giant void in space -- 100 billion lightyears across -- and are speculating it might be evidence of a wall between this universe and another. I certainly don't know, but then again this type of story does make you wonder how little we do know. And to stretch your imagination just a little bit to try and account for the new information.

Read about it all right here.

I have a small circle of friends who from time to time meet at one of our houses and watch politically relevant documentaries (mostly documentaries) and talk about them. The other week we saw one that seemed to have been produced during that same great outflow of documentaries that all came out in the lead-up to the '04 election, with names like Outfoxed and Bush's Brain. This one, The Take, (co-directed by Naomi Klein who has a new one out now called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism) perhaps went under my radar because it was internationally relevant, and most of the documentary presenters in my area at the time were focused on domestic politics.

The Take is about an anti-globalization movement in Argentina, and it's about workers organizing themselves to do something for themselves. Factories closed as jobs went overseas (wherever you are, there's always an overseas), and workers started taking over those factories and establish worker run co-ops to get the factories running again. It's a fascinating and very empowering film.

During the course of the documentary, there is also a national election going on in Argentina. It appears to be a race between a former president who is running again on a nostalgia platform but who really serves the interests of the wealthy class, and a number of opposition leaders who purport to be for the people (well, they all purport to be for the people, don't they?). The daughter of a woman worker who is part of the first and very successful co-op that re-opened a textile factory refuses to vote in that national election. She believes it doesn't matter who wins, and she is disgusted with national politics. In the end the opposition candidate her mother supported wins the election, but the movie states that he cut turned around and cut a similar deal with the IMF and World Bank that his predecessor had, indicating his pro-globalization stance.

The next day I said to one of my friends, "You know, I sympathize with that girl who refused to vote. If the system is a fraud, it's a political statement to not pretend to give it legitimacy." He made a funny face, and I couldn't be sure what he thought about what I'd said.

This article from Counterpunch argues that here in the US the only sane solution would be to refuse to vote in the next national election. Joel Hirschhorn says people are deluded if they think a Democratic candidate will do anything to solve the real problems the nation faces. He says the electoral system is a dance orchestrated by the two parties. One party oversteps its bounds, the next party says it will save the day, and then when it wins proceeds to do the same thing. The real choreographers of the dance are corporate business interests that pay for campaigns and benefit from the policies.

This point of view and the idea of a boycott of the election deserves serious thought.

Here it is.

You gotta see it, people.

Today Mr. K carries the world.

-Eddie Izzard as Mr. Kite in Across the Universe

I'll be real curious to see how this turns out -- fans sending in clips to youtube for Dylan's team to edit a video from them for "Like a Rolling Stone". Hmmm...

Story here.