Open culture is people who are hacking not just software, but also the society that we live in. There is a school of thought that what we are about is "just software." I have always believed that this is just as much about ideas that we live by, as it is about the software.

As for "what does OSS have to do with romance?" -- you've missed the context, I think. We were talking about women in open source software, and what it takes to create an environment that is safe for women in the Open Source Software world. That is the correct context, so then the question would be: "What does romance have to do with women in open source software?" And my response would be: "I think a lot."

Here's my explanation:

I have observed, both within myself and others, that there are a lot of (shall we say:) geeks and nerds in our group. Yes, there are a great many socially capable men who have lots of girlfriends and an abundance of romance in their lives. I observe that these programmers are *not* the ones who are making a hostile environment for women.

Where I see men making Open Source software unsafe or unattractive to women, I find men who have frustrations with women.

What are those frustrations about?

In my opinion, they are about sex and love and romance.

On the flip side, from the perspective of women: I have talked with women who have wanted to learn to program, who have felt an attraction to the field. "But when we ask the guys to help, they fall in love with us." These are words that I heard first from a woman's mouth. I would not have guessed, but it makes sense. "We just want to be friends, learn to program, and get good jobs."

Okay. "But don't you see that these boys, guys, and men that you want to learn from -- don't you realize that many of these men have gained what they have had, because they were wounded in love, and found refuge in programming?"

"Yes, but it's not my fault or responsibility."

"True, I agree; But you do need to understand the situation and move accordingly."

My belief is that love and sexual desire are the hidden nervous system that we never talk about. If you look underneath the resentments, I don't find "misandry" or "misogyny;" Rather, I find frustration in love and romance.

I'm much more interested in an Open Culture than I am in Open Source software -- and I *love* Open Source software.

I have seen (and been involved in) disputes over womens involvement in programming, Open Source culture, etc.,. I have to say: It gets really personal, really fast.

I don't think this is about "Woman good, man bad." I don't think this is even about "Woman good, some men bad."

We are not a culture that thinks much about love and romance -- we tend to retreat into talking about software.

But I think we really need to talk about love and romance.

We should have Watson fact-check Slashdot story submissions.

If you were born in the late 70's, are reading this article, and like fiction, consider reading Ready: Player One.

It's founded on the same premise -- video games become the metaverse. But what if that metaverse was written by Richard Garriott? And cost just one quarter to play? I read it, and just loved it. Even my 10 year old daughter loved it!

Reminds me of this YouTube video -- Eye-Tracking To Improve Camera Motion And Depth-Of-Field.

I can see the limitations in a theater -- only one setting can be used by all people. But in a single person's experience, it has been made to work -- you can focus dynamically based on what the person is looking at.

del.icio.us is one of the best research tools on the Internet, -- especially for keeping abreast of innovations in the programming world.

It works like this:

You're working on text processing in Python, or something. So you search delicious for "python" and "textprocessing."

You go through the results, most of which are fairly generic.

But when you find something interesting -- you don't stop there: You ask, "Who was this person who thought this was interesting?"

Then you look at *that person's* tags under "Python". Do they look interesting? That is: Is this person looking for things that are interesting and relevant to you? They aren't bookmarking the ordinary mainstream things, that is.

Then you add that person to your *network.* Get a group of about 10 interesting individuals into the network.

Then search for "python" and "python textprocessing" in that network -- and now you start to get very, very interesting results, consistently.

Yes, but have you forgotten Isaac Asimov's corollary?

"When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion -- the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right".

And it's not just "...quick to accept something they read as true," -- it's also quickness to accept controversy as legitimate doubt.

Consider: "Someone can make an argument that sounds good against evolution, therefor I don't know, and you don't know either."

Good god, then it's even WORSE!

For an example, check out these numnuts.

There is no "rationalism," there are only imaginations of rationalism -- and those imaginations are generally pretty poor stuff for the soul.

The idea is that if you look and act like a smug selfish conniving snivling jerk that spends his (and it's generally his) time coming up with mathematical theologies of social networks and bayesian systems, that you're somehow more "rational." Dios, it's gross.

Seriously here, though:

The problem is the ends. Rationality can never be for just itself; Rationality is always towards some purpose. And what purpose would one orient their rationality to? Well, a lot of people think that money and power are the ultimate purposes, so they judge themselves and others by how far they get in this "rational" persuit. Then there are other people who say, "Well, actually, the goal is some equitable distribution of power and influence (and what have you,)" and so there you end up with liberal philosophies or efforts to make the middle class swell or what have you.

Would-be "Rationalists" need to identify what they live for, which will not in-itself be a "rational" thing. It won't defy reason or logic or what have you, but it won't be derivable or even based in reason or logic. It'll be an imaginary thing, or an imaginary society, or an imaginary world, or an imaginary person, most likely -- but an imaginary thing worth loving.

The athiests I know all have comic books in their back pockets. They should just fess up where their hearts are, rather than hiding behind the facad of "rationality."

"Linked data is data you can click on. It will take you to another data set."

I've thought since early 2000's that our data structures (like JSON) need the concept of a pointer. What would it look like? A URL, of course -- a URL pointing to yet more JSON data.

{"name": "Lion Kimbro", "favorite color": "yellow", "homepage": "http://www.speakeasy.org/~lion/", "friends": [http://example.org/joel, http://example.org/whit, http://example.org/phil, http://example.org/amber%5D}

The idea here being that you have API support to dereference, say, friends[0], when you make use of it. The data is pulled and connected up with the local memory system when it's used.