The real holy grail, of course, would be to provide revision control on all government regulations, and eventually, on legislation. This would no doubt be fought tooth and nail by lobbyists who don’t want their fingerprints on the final result, but that’s precisely why it would be such a breakthrough. And that’s also why I suggest that the Obama team start with change.gov: demonstrate that the system works, that it has enormous benefits in transparency, and work from there.

If this sort of a versioning system would be properly introduced on legislation level, it would surely make it easier to track changes and see which interest groups have had their say and used their influence on which revisions (at least officially). Also, pending changes could easily be viewed and commented by any member of the public. Plainly this would be good for transparency and democracy on the whole.

Luxofor, the square traffic light

Traffic lights of the future Los Angeles in Blade Runner.

[Via Engadget]

A mosaic depicting the Minotaur and its slayer, Theseus, inside the labyrinth at Knossos

Some years later we visited a castle in France (I think) that had a vast hedge maze in the garden – or at least it felt vast (and extremely fascinating) for a pre-teen boy. What if one got lost in there, and never found a way back out?

Environmental Graffiti has listed the 10 most incredible mazes and labyrinths in the world. The most interesting realization for me, as I researched the subject a bit, was the distinction between a “maze” and a “labyrinth”. I had never thought there was one. Wikipedia explains:

The term labyrinth is often used interchangeably with maze, but modern scholars of the subject use a stricter definition. For them, a maze is a tour puzzle in the form of a complex branching passage with choices of path and direction; while a single-path (unicursal) labyrinth has only a single Eulerian path to the center. A labyrinth has an unambiguous through-route to the center and back and is not designed to be difficult to navigate.

When in turn visiting my late aunt’s summer cottage in Nauvo in the archipelago of Finland many years ago, she showed us a stone-lined labyrinth which in Finnish is called jatulintarha (sometimes translated as “giant’s guard”; jatuli were a race of giants in Finnish folklore). Most of these stone formations are from the Middle Ages or younger, although some of the oldest ones might even be prehistorical. No one knows their exact function; they might have been part of some ritual. Similar structures can be found in other Nordic countries. In Britain, labyrinths made out of turf are called Troy Town.

Jatulintarha, a Scandinavian stone labyrinth

Queen Victoria, from LIFE archives

[Via Helsingin Sanomat]

Frank Miller's Sin City got a visually successful film treatment (at least based on these covers!).

More likely though, adapting what is essentially a visual medium (comics) into another visual medium (film) is not such an easy task, especially when talking about live-action adaptations (as opposed to animation, where the stylistic qualities of the original work are more easily preserved). In this respect we are at quite an intriguing point in time as advancing CG technology is giving new possibilities for film makers to merge live-action and animation techniques. Recent examples of motion-capture assisted animation include The Polar Express and last year’s Beowulf, and while the results have been a bit too CGI-like to my liking so far, there’s no telling where we will be a few year’s down the road. Perhaps something like Scanner Darkly? (I’m not saying all comic adaptations must look like comics on the silver screen, but some of the visually more compelling ones might benefit from the new CG techniques.)

The way of future comic adaptations in Scanner Darkly?

An interesting project currently in the works is the series of new Tintin films with Steven Spielberg directing the first one and Peter Jackson the sequel. Jackson’s company WETA Digital, who also created the CGI animation for his Lord of the Rings trilogy, is animating Tintin based on live-action motion-capture. A 20-minute test reel was produced as a proof of concept, with Spielberg commenting to Variety:

Hergé’s characters have been reborn as living beings, expressing emotion and a soul which goes far beyond anything we’ve seen to date with computer-animated characters. We want Tintin’s adventures to have the reality of a live-action film, and yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live-action format would simply not honor the distinctive look of the characters and world that Herge created.

Jackson further explained that the characters will not look cartoonish, though:

Instead, we’re making them look photorealistic; the fibers of their clothing, the pores of their skin and each individual hair. They look exactly like real people — but real Herge people!

At least there are enough influential names behind the project to guarantee creative freedom – now let’s just hope they put it to good use.

In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

Kind of ironic, seeing how heavily his presidential campaign relied on the Internet for communications and fundraising.

Even if he won’t be reading his e-mail anymore, Obama hopes to be the first U.S. president to have a laptop on his desk at the White House. He also plans to use YouTube to “communicate directly with the American people” even when in office. Is Obama truly the first Internet-era president? It will be interesting to see how these plans will be executed. I don’t have a very good grasp on how the U.S. government uses Internet for making information available, but if the situation is anything like in Finland, it’s not the matter of not having the information at your disposal. Oh no, there’s plenty of that out there for you to browse to your heart’s content. What’s more difficult is how to make it interesting. Government policy changes and committee minutes aren’t exactly what people go looking for as the first thing when they go online. A Q&A with the president will certainly generate more interest, but will the above-mentioned goal of communicating directly with the people mean dumbed-down answers not to confuse the Joe Sixpacks out there, or actual factual hard talk about politics?

Incidentally, a Slashdot commentator brought up some interesting tool proposals for a “Web 2.0 government”:

Wikis for pending legislation.

Only members of congress ( or their staff ) can make changes, but anyone can add a comment to any change. Use a moderation system like on /. to hide frivolous comments and to ensure that insightful comments rise to the top.

Use an issue tracker for existing legislation. Have a problem with a law? File a bug. It may be marked as trivial or may get fast tracked as a patch. Either way you know it’s status and can organize to get that status changed if enough people agree with you.

Use RSS feeds to distribute Congressional hearing notes, comittee transcripts, and legislative votes.

[Via Slashdot]

So why the second attempt? Mostly it’s for selfish reasons as I wanted a place for my musings, somewhere to collect things I encounter daily on the Internet, a site for random ideas and impressions. A scrapbook of thoughts, if you will. At this point I have no clue where this is going. If someone finds any of it interesting, all the better. Drop me a line if you do!