Clifford Stoll is a nutty guy. In a good way. In fact, when I first saw this talk, I blogged that I wanted to be more like him as I get older. Ultimately Clifford’s message is about culture and education. Sure, he’s a scientist, but his rampant curiosity and hands-on thinking makes me consider him more of a hacker. Never mind that he wrote that article in 1995 that basically said Amazon and Wikipedia could never exist — I mean, he was wrong, but perhaps the point behind it is worth the extreme stand on technology.
You can’t really expect a guy that says he “thinks locally and acts locally” to get the bigger picture, but what he does do at a personal level with kids and other curious folk I think is very special.
I recently visited a friend, game maker Alec Holowka, who introduced me to Dan Dennett. He was brought up for his book, Consciousness Explained. Here he talks about memes, but memes as parasites. They infect hosts, get them to spread the meme, and continue to live on.
The most interesting part of this talk was his reference to Guns, Germs, and Steel. In the past, we’ve unintentionally killed off civilizations by bringing to them our local germs. Today we’re doing it again, but with memes. The ideas of our culture have certain “germs” we’re accustomed to that if brought to a very different culture could threaten their livelihood.
