So, this is really interesting. First Root Farm, our CSA here in Concord, is doing a Kickstarter project to buy a fancy new tractor.

This is the first time I’ve seen Kickstarter used in the world outside of media and technology products. Outstanding data point.

Here’s their Kickstarter video:

While lost in Walden Woods this afternoon, I discovered a neat feature in the new Maps application in iOS6. If you keep pressing the button in the lower left, it will turn on a view where it will show you your field of vision overlaying the map.

Neat.

I am obviously quite the woodsman. I made it out of a couple-acre forest with only my wits. And a GPS-enabled phone with a compass built in. And pluck — don’t forget pluck.

Hi kids.

I haven’t forsaken you. I’ve been juggling three big projects, and the personal blog has taken a hit.

(Also taking a hit: 39 Essays, which may have expanded from a one-year project to a 10-year project at the rate I’m going).

In the meantime, TweetDeputy is archiving the links I’m tweeting, so you can sorta keep up with what’s catching my eye there.

More soon!

Wow, Twitter is (in my humble opinion) committing a massive strategic blunder. If you want a thriving ecosystem, let your partners feel confident and make money.

Today. Literally, today. I’m sitting down and writing the product plan for a suite of new products. They’re knowledge products, but not specifically communications products. Twitter integration was a given. Now it’s unlikely.

Classic mistakes are classic for a reason — they’re highly seductive. Still, it’s sad to see.

I spend a lot of time working with machine learning — exciting, I know. That said, this is a really interesting use of it to determine “what makes Paris look like Paris”?

Take four minutes to watch this. It’s really interesting.

Wow, I’m going to lose all my “happy resident of the socialist hellhole of Massachusetts” cred, but I’m really looking forward to the remake of Red Dawn.

Seriously, we have Thor on our side!

The Butler household is getting ready for Patriots season. This sandwich might just hold us until the second half.

Big Vince is someone I’d trust when it comes to food.

Randall Munroe, author of our favorite web comic, xkcd, is writing a weekly series exploring the scientific underpinnings of interesting questions. This week? How long would humanity last in a robot apocalypse?

The good news: probably a lot longer than we’d expect.

What people don’t appreciate, when they picture Terminator-style automatons striding triumphantly across a mountain of human skulls, is how hard it is to keep your footing on something as unstable as a mountain of human skulls.

This is geeky, but supremely interesting if you’re into that sort of thing: the Cambrian explosion of everything.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the past few months about personal APIs, personal deputies and Freenon’s forkable nuggets of knowledge. Within a few years (maybe sooner), everything will have an API, and most of your personal interactions with the world will be API-mediated. I’m thinking through how Serendeputy fits into this model. Right now, it’s your personal intermediary for news, and your profile is its API. How does this extend beyond this one use case?

Mostly, I want to see what I can do to make sure that this future bends towards open, with individuals controlling their data and their life. (See the previous post on dystopian futures…)

Anyway, this is the type of stuff I’m thinking about. I want this to exist; now it’s just the small matter of implementation, distribution and paying the bills in the meantime

For my fiction reading this summer, I’ve been focusing mostly on near-future science fiction, especially stories that explore the logical conclusions to current trends. Here are two writers you should be reading:

Daniel Suarez: Daemon and Freedom TM are a two-part story. Kill Decision was just released last week, and I devoured it over the course of about 18 hours last weekend. The lawn suffered.

William Hertling: Avogadro Corp and A.I. Apocalypse are individual stories in the same universe. What would happen if Google became Skynet?

If you’re more interested in non-fiction, Ray Kurzweil‘s The Singularity is Near is a utopian look at the future, while Joel Garreau‘s Radical Evolution is much more balanced and a lot less cult-like.

Happy reading!

At this point, I’ve launched a dozen or more sites to the world. (including one for female sports fans yesterday.) It’s old hat at this point, but it’s still always stressful.

I think I’ve come up with my favorite comparison for it:

Launching a site is like driving in the snow. Even if you have your snowtires and a full tank of gas, even if you totally know what you’re doing, random things can happen. You need to be continually monitoring the conditions and you probably have a death grip on the steering wheel. Several hours later, you can probably breathe again.

I’ve been working on a site called She’s Game Sports for the past few months and it just went live this morning. You should check it out and let me know what you think!

As my own construction project starts later and is projected to cost more than expected, the new high school for Concord-Carlisle is in a bit of trouble with the Commonwealth. Oops.

I was last in Paris in Spring of 1989. I look forward to going again. Until then, I can bask in the legends of the Paris Ritz and pretend to be Hemingway.

We all want to be Hemingway:

CNET has an excellent writeup of the Boston technology scene.

It’s inside baseball, but a really interesting read.

It’s tough when you are hanging out at your older sister’s soccer practices. The time drags.

Luckily, Lucy is quite capable of entertaining herself (and me). Sometimes by conducting imaginary orchestras.

We live across the street from Walden Woods here in Concord, and we take family walks through them every couple of weeks or so.

Yesterday, Lucy was fascinated by the types of bugs one finds under a leaf. She may have found her calling as a entomologist.

I got this PlanetAll hat in 1998. A lot has changed since then, but the hat abides.

And the girls like it:

Even my students when I was living in China liked it:

Homeowner’s Rehab in Cambridge is doing a done of work make affordable housing more green. Check out this video with some good green-homeowner geekery:

They are using tools from my friends at Wegowise. If you haven’t checked out Wegowise’s toolset, you should head over there and see how they’re doing some really interesting visualizations to let you know where your energy dollars are going.

And, don’t forget, going green is not that hard.

Sadie’s about to wrap up her first season of kindergarten soccer here in Concord.

She’s still figuring it out, but she’s gotten a lot better over the course of the spring. Now, we’re working on having “high motor” on the field — less chasing the butterflies, more attacking the ball.