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Television equals 2,000 Wikipedias per year (from "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus")

I just read this sobering snippet from a talk by an NYU professor, a guy who just wrote a book called "Here Comes Everybody: the Power of Organizing without Organizations." The snippet of the snippet, the money quote:

So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the sitcoms.

Jeremiah Wright on Bill Moyers

I forgot this was going to be on last Friday, but Heidi and I managed to catch the last half of the interview while waiting to see Battlestar Galactica. ¡AY CARAMBA! I have never heard religion discussed so thoughtfully on television, ever. EVER. It's eye-opening about Wright, and Obama, and American Christianity. Just as I recommended actually listening to Obama's race speech if you're someone who *claims* to want substance in your politics, this interview with the always-awesome Bill Moyers is completely worthwhile. At least watch it for 5 or 10 minutes (I can only vouch for the second half), and see if it doesn't hook you. Suffice it to say that neither CNN nor Fox News ever discussed Wright's view of hermeneutics.

Need words? If video is still a hard sell, this is pretty spot-on commentary on the interview, with many excerpts.

Another reason Barack is so appealing?

I always suspected a lack of assholes. Now it's confirmed, in a story on Politico, "Obama team remains unshaken and unstirred":

Jim Margolis, Obama’s media consultant, said he had planned to take a pass on the presidential race in 2008. His first candidate, former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, dropped out, and he had a rocky experience on Kerry’s 2004 campaign. But he ended up on the same plane one day with Axelrod and began to reconsider.

“You gotta come spend a little more time with Barack,” Axelrod told him.

“You know what these things are like,” Margolis said.

“There are no assholes,” Axelrod responded. “There are going to be no assholes on this campaign.”

Yes, even *we* know what these things are like.

It's what's for dinner

(via Boing Boing)

Typeracer

Congratulations to Typeracer for monetizing a weird idea. (Thanks for the tip, J-Pa!) Go on, it's surprisingly addictive—and yes, I am a very sucky typer. Typist. Key-masher.

"Where Housing Is Headed"

An interesting interactive graphic from WSJ (which makes me feel lucky to live in Seattle, esp. when you look at the employment outlook and general indicators):

FYI, I'm getting these for everyone

There's a 13-foot-tall beholder outside of Caffe Umbria in Pioneer Square right now....

Madness:

(Mark is there shooting a D&D TV commercial for Wizards.)

Interactive foreclosure map

So how's your neighborhood doing?

Update: I win, I've got one in my building, on my floor! And wow, that is a hella deal:

Update update: okay, Heidi reminded me that it's been in foreclosure almost since we moved in. (It's the one where we always see new legal papers posted on the door when we walk by.)

"Charlie Rose," by Samuel Beckett

Found via VSL, as "Waiting for GoDot.com":