Egg vs. Chicken

So, a little house keeping...Actually, skip the house keeping that I should be doing. I know that this has been a little dry for a week or so. Sorry.
So today I'm going to do a little more intense house keeping. I'm going to clear up a question that people have thought was SOO clever forever. And it's not. Not even a little bit clever.
"What came first, the chicken or the egg?"
This question has become the namesake for indistinguishable timelines and seems to be roughly as famous as things like the "prisoners dilemma" or, more likely, the "tree falls in a forest" issue. All of the above claim to be philosophical and, in some way, psychological.

I'd like to make the point, though, that the question of "chick vs. egg" is, so far as I'm concerned, a dumb one.
It should be noted, here at the beginning, that I'm something of a man-0f-science and, therefore, will be discounting any ideas of "tree in the forest" (Descartes's uncertainty) and any conservative spiritual views of intelligent design, great wind, any of that weird Greek stuff...

So, this should be fairly simple.

As far as we can estimate, evolution works in the following way--

Specimen A from Species 1 finds Specimen B from Species 1. They get it on like JFK in the oval office.
Some time later, Specimen A gives birth to Specimen C. But Specimen C has suffered a freak mutation and, while not being a discernible difference, could be viewed as a member of Species 1.0000000......000001. Feel me? Minute change? Eventually, Specimen C meets another Specimen from Species 1.x and they get their Paris Hilton on. Extrapolate this forever and ever down the line and eventually you'll see a bunch of compounding mutations that start to make up tangible differences in Specimens of Species 1.x. Until eventually, one day baby is born to two specimens and that baby appears to be such a compound of minute changes that is needs to be viewed as Species 1.0 V2 or, simply, as species 2.0. How exciting! A new species!

NOW, what does this mean to the chicken and the egg? Anything?
Of course, people say "Well, how could a chicken egg be laid if there wasn't a chicken present to lay it?" But separately, "How could a chicken lay a chicken egg if that chicken, itself, was never in an egg to be born??"

Quite simply, I maintain that there was NO chicken to lay the first chicken egg. There was some pre-chicken(1.00000.....000001). That pre-chicken then got with another pre-chicken and then they birthed a freak. The first chicken. And how was it born?

Anyone? ideas?

Well, I'd say it was born via egg (as is a specific detail inherent in the genome of the species of chickens). That being the case; should it not be assumed that, sweeping away all Descartes anomalies and crazy spiritual science, the egg preceded the chicken?

Let me know if something about that isn't clear...And please, please please please, make fun of anyone who thinks that the chicken came first. Because that would just be silly.

I'd also like to note, for those people who are being particularly skeptical of my writings, that my "scientific" explanation found above was absurdly simple and I was merely cutting the corners that I felt could be cut to make the point with obfuscating the end result. Deal?
Great.

So-- "The egg preceded the chicken." That's my official public statement. Enjoy.


In light of this discovery,which i distinctly recall realizing to myself while standing near the kitchen table at Grandma Syd'z house (It should be noted that the implication, here, is that I made this discovery probably greater than a decade ago), I would like to criticize an article that I found in the Time Magazine that appeared at my place of residence, yesterday.

(you can find the article by clicking the title of this blog post!)

There was an article, "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live" by Steven Johnson, about how magical Twitter is.
Now, while I understand that Steven Johnson is only 41 years old, I still maintain that this is a perfect example of why old people should not be allowed to write articles like this.
I'm sure he did a great job trying to make some sense of the situation to some of the older, less tech savvy, readers of Time and he should be proud of that. But, as a writer, he should be completely embarrassed for writing an article that was, above all else, completely....Naïve, I guess is a good word for it.

He's a dude who's talking about a social media that, while popular, has not risen to prominence. Nor has it managed to make a truly marked impact on the technology world the way things like tabbed browsing, email, or, the best example, instant messaging.

Instant messaging has been a corner stone of technology-enhanced communication since its inception in the 90s.

And, while AIM may have dropped in popularity, instant messaging (truly brought to the social forefront by AIM) has forever changed communications.
I'll skip the common and current uses and just try to make a few conjectures about it's lasting impact-- What did instant messaging lead to?

-Cell phone texting (and blackberry messages...for you pretentious elitists)
-Microblogging....like twitter
-Search consolidators (basically turning a thousand articles into a blog that people read snippets off. It's pushing the envelope of "skimming" to the bleeding edge)
-And, a built-in messaging integration in almost every network user's enter, now. (Gmail, the Google Wave, facebook, twitter feeds, ustream, pandora...it doesn't stop there.)

Suffice to say, instant messaging set its phaser to stun and changed communication forever.

Has twitter done that?

Maybe.

Who knows. It's too new. There is no way to tell.

That being the case, though, is it really fair to write articles (from an old guy perspective) about how twitter is changing the face of communication. Steven Johnson was out of college BEFORE instant messaging even had a chance to infest all of our computers with absurd popups from the weirdest chatrooms ever conceived(species 4.0000000.....0001, maybe?).
Steven Johnson goes on to say, quite powerfully, that "In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it."
What a load of Time Magazine+Oldguy=crap tech bologna!

This is what got me thinking about the chicken and the egg, to begin with.

Did they make twitter, as it's used, and we use it. Or did they make twitter, a platform, and we adopted it to our human purpose.

In my opinion, he makes the right assumption, here. He says that Twitter was invented. And then we took the platform and did what we wanted with it. Twitter was the egg, and our communications are the chicken. Steven Johnson is absolutely right, in the matter.
Where he's wrong is claiming that it's...unique. Or even interesting!

That's why I made that point about the chicken and the egg, at the beginning.

The egg always comes first!!

Of course we've adapted it and found uses for it that 2 guys (really cool guys...One of whom actually started Blogger, the site this is posted on...), the founders, would ever think it might be used for. We are using the basic methods they provided, but we've augmented and adapted. Basically, we've done the human thing.
If I had to make a bold statement, I would say that Species 1.000000002 was basic email communication. Species 2.000000006 was instant messaging. And they met up, got freakier than the idea of running into your grandparents buying lingerie at the mall, and had a little Internet baby. Is it Species 3.0, though? That remains to be seen. I'd guess that it's something along the lines of Species 2.000000012, something like that. You know...Something advanced, but not altogether a new wave, yet.
A perfect example of this, and Steven Johnson's misinterpretations, lay in one of his examples. He talks about a conference in New York that focused on education reform. There were 40 odd educators in a room and they held a conference. But on a large screen, there was a projection of everything that each one of them posted about the conference. Side conversations, jokes, heated remarks. Anything. Eventually the public even noticed it happening and started to have their posts heard on that wall. He says that that public-esque forum truly changed everything and that conferences will never be the same.

I'm sorry Steven Johnson, but you're a late adopter and I'd appreciate it if you tried to reel your articles in closer to the nursing home that you're writing them from.

To begin with--What in the world could possibly have ever hosted a "real-time" (that was a big point of his...he loves the real-time updating of twitter) forum where people could post and be seen by all(or privately) and the public could have found their way in and posted their own opinions? Hmmm...I mentioned them earlier. Anybody have a guess??

Chatrooms? These super-olde-skool communication devices that would allow anyone to join in and say whatever they have to say about a subject in real time.

Not only has that been an available option for all this time, but it's been happening for years. Gamers have been IRCing, while playing their favorite game, for years. Fore thinking professors have been posting similar IRCs or chats in their classrooms.
To bring the idea home--Even I have had a class with an IRC set up so that we could all chat on the screen behind the professor.
Not that crazy.
So what are Steven Johnson's panties doing all in a bunch like that?

My guess is that he's just too impressed with old people finally managing to wheedle their way into a form of communication that they can understand. And that communication has been opening a whole wave of technologies that they are being introduced to. He talks, with such pomp, about the huge wave of 3rd party developers and open-source works that are shaping twitter and, therefore, the new communication toy of the elderly. But the open-source movement and 3rd party developing has been going strong for quite a while. It's shaped essentially all of technology. All of it. forever. Grass roots innovation, man. Rock on.
What's nice about this little techie wave is that, because so many youngin's are getting into tech-magic and people can become tech geniuses with greater and greater ease, there has been a huge explosion of young, innovative, and basically free application development. Fancy, eh?
What's best about this is that it causes an enormous democracy. or should i say Democrazy. The applications that people like are kept alive. The ones that aren't adopted fail.
And Steven Johnson thinks that's awesome. It is awesome.
But why talk about Twitter?
Twitter is fun, no doubt. But why is he wasting time talking about it like it's the crowing glory of new technology?

Probably because he doesn't know any better...

I think that's the end of my rant. I don't want anyone reading this to think that I'm actually so absurdly disrespectful to old people and the way the adopt technology. I just don't think that it's fair for him to be wasting 4 pages in TIME magazine, the most read magazine in America (i think) to celebrate something he doesn't understand.

So please old people, young and old (Old people can be between ages 25-126), enjoy the new technologies. Try them. I have no doubt that these demographics have shaped these technologies in some way...Maybe they can have a bigger impact. So please, old people, try it. Go to twitter.com and sign up. All it takes is an email address. They'll never email you junk mail. It's totally secure. If you're really a savvy old person, you can post all your tweets from your cell phone. That will be sure to impress all of your friends. And just try it. Try watching your favorite shows on youtube or hulu. Check out LinkedIn.com. It's a site like facebook but for a more professional grade. But sure, check out facebook, too. Worry less about not getting "caught up in the system". It's not dangerous. Just check it out. Give Steven Johnson something real to talk about.


OK, that being said (and ended somewhat abruptly) I'd like to say one last thing about twitter while I'm here--
No one that I know who would be reading this is going to have heard of the thing I'm talking about, but that will make it all the more funny to them.

Twitpocalypse.

The Twitpocalypse (CLICK HERE for the website that coined the term) is similar in kin to the Y2k disaster. Basically, they were worried that when the twitter database reached a certain total number of tweets, all of the applications for twitter would fail. Twitter was expected to survive. But many applications were supposed to die. And on June 12th, at 11:52pm, they did. Someone sent this tweet "The Tweets must flow. http://bit.ly/Khk7s" and the Twitpocalypse occurred. Tons of applications went down. Grass roots developers screamed and cried. It was absolute melee for about 10 minutes. By the next morning, though, like a phoenix from the ashes, all of the major applications were releasing easily downloadable patches which righted the problem and left users with nothing to worry about.
Isn't it funny how such silly things can still happen in this day of advancement and technology?
How do we let these things happen? Well, for one thing, some of us are just too young to know better. For example, there are kids who have developed iPhone applications and made millions of dollars. Those kids are so young that they weren't even ALIVE for the Y2k scare. Seriously. So, hey, maybe old people know a thing or two. I guess we'll never know until we can unite in our ever changing communication ideology and grassroots support.

I guess we'll see.
Sorry I'm so long winded and horribly presumptuous! I hope everything is going well for everybody out there. Take care everyone!