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As has recently been much discussed and debated, the Facebook’s Open Graph reveals plainly what has been known by some for a while: Businesses want to own your online identity.

Why? Because they can make money with it. Facebook, being a private corporation, becomes more valuable the more everyone interacts through its channels. With Open Graph, it has taken a bold step forward and declared that the You on the internet is owned by it.

Perhaps you’re ok with this. I’m not. You could quit Facebook entirely. I’ve chosen instead to reduce the access and information it has about me, and I will be interacting via the web in a different way than Facebook desires in the future.

If you’d like to begin disconnecting your online self with Facebook, I recommend this article on how to manage your online self settings. Unfortunately, FB is making it difficult to manage even your own information on the internet. I will be trying to stay ahead of the curve on this, while still mantaining the real benefits that FB and other social networking sites provide. My small diatribe against it’s recent developments is on the main page of this site, and it is reprinted below:

• Inspired after thinking about some of the concepts presented in “You are not a gadget” I am reducing my agreement with the modern web to wait for a more human iteration. My involvement in LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook is thus diminishing. I do want to to see the web to be a means for people to connect, to interact, and to share life, but I don’t want corporate entities dictating the terms of those relationships.
• I encourage others to examine the reductionist form applied to people on such sites; are you really a list of your favorite books and changes in status? Is that what you want the social web to reflect?
• You can learn more about me here on this site, and I’ll be redirecting most of the “social networking” sites to here. If you’d like to contact me, my email is readily available and on the left side of this page.
• Glory to God, this web allows brand new things and a new ways to interact as humans, but let’s make it what we want.

I will be attempting to update as I learn more about this, and I am awaiting the response and efforts that produce a truly open web that reflects the way human beings want to interact.

Fun news for the day. I’ll be headed to the Colorado Cold Molecule Workshop in Boulder, CO this summer. It will be a 3 day workshop in July with many of the key researchers in the area I’m looking to research for my PhD. I’m planning to stay an extra day to go hiking in the nearby mountains, which should be great.

I’m also interested to see what these workshops are like. I expect I’ll learn a lot about the different things people are concerned with in this field, as well meet some of the people whose papers I’ve been reading for the past 6 months.

On a related note, I just finished a book called The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics was Reborn. The author, Louisa Gilder, sets out to describe the conversations that drove the physics forward. She makes a point about physics that I like:

“Science rests on experiments,” wrote Heisenberg, but “science is rooted in conversations.”

Nothing could be farther from the impression physics textbooks give to students. There, physics seems to be a perfect sculpture sitting in a vacuum-sealed case, as if brains, only tenuously connected to bodies, had given birth to insights fully-formed. These Athena-like theories and Zeus-like theorists seem shiny, glassy, smooth–sometimes, if the light is right, you can see through them into the mysteries and beauties of the physical universe; but there is hardly a trace of humanity, or any sense of questions still to be answered.

In the book, she recreates many of the conversations that would have taken place in the early development of quantum theory. Heseinberg, Bohr, Dirac, Einstein, and others all come alive in the text and their conversations are fun to see in reading the book. I hope to have some of those conversations at the workshop this summer.

(image courtesy of Scott Ingram Photography. Creative Commons License via Flickr)

Matthew 21:1-3

When they neared Jerusalem, having arrived at Bethphage on Mount Olives, Jesus sent two disciples with these instructions: “Go over to the village across from you. You’ll find a donkey tethered there, her colt with her. Untie her and bring them to me. If anyone asks what you’re doing, say, ‘The Master needs them!’ He will send them with you.”

Psalm 119 (excerpt)

I rise before dawn and cry for help;
I have put my hope in your word.

My eyes stay open through the watches of the night,
that I may meditate on your promises.

Hear my voice in accordance with your love;
preserve my life, O YHWH, according to your laws.

Those who devise wicked schemes are near,
but they are far from your law.

Yet you are near, O YHWH,
and all your commands are true.

Long ago I learned from your statutes
that you established them to last forever.

(image from flickr creative commons)

When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”
So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod.
And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.” (Matthew 2:13-15)

Moving is hard. I only moved a couple times growing up, but one of my family’s moves stands out from the rest. One of my younger brothers, in elementary school at the time, didn’t like that we were moving. When it came time to move, he climbed underneath the table and clung to legs yelling, “I’m not going to leave. He also posted a note for the rest of the family to read, presumably for when his voice wore out: “I’m NOT moving. I’m staying in this house.” I think he summarized that gut feeling we may get in response to moving. “A new place, a new people, a new way of doing things? Do I really have to??”
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The Christian Classics Ethereal Library provides a free, unformatted version of the Little Flowers of St. Francis. However, they charge for the pdf version. So, I took the text version and created a pdf using LaTeX. Here is my version one of The Little Flowers of St. Francis, where the text is public domain, but the formatting is my own. I’d like to keep working on the formatting. Any suggestions?