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Patients Like Me is a “way for you to share your real-world health experiences in order to help yourself, other patients like you and organizations that focus on your conditions.”

Claude Shannon, father of information theory, separated information from meaning. His central dogma, “meaning is irrelevant” declared that information could be handled as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning. The consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we are drowning. The immense size of modern databases gives us a feeling of meaninglessness…It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland. As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information.

Freeman Dyson, in his review of James Gleick’s book on information, in NYRB

Nat Torkington writes up a good precis of Google Plus and, well, its pluses and minuses, and it’s worth a read. I agree with him especially that Circles are confusing and the ability to share with a Circle should be limited to that Circle; people in that Circle shouldn’t be able to reshare what you’ve shared with them.

He points out that Google has done the right thing in allowing you to take your data with you out of the system, unlike on Facebook. This is important. He groups this under the bad, but it should be under the good. The “free and be-advertised-to” business model is the default model, and he takes them to task for not innovating on the business model. He says “You’ll notice that none of the social networks have subscription options. Nobody says “pay me $100/yr and I’ll keep all your data private and you can have an ad-free experience.” As Kellan pointed out (on Google Plus) there is at least one service where you can pay $25 a year for exactly that, Flickr.

Entrepreneurs gonna entrepreneur. I have a new startup! We are building something consumer-facing, something social — all the things I love best — for optimal founder-market fit!. It’s crazy times in the Valley and while I prefer doing startups when the going’s tough, money is scarce, and talent is thick on the ground — the best time to start a company is always two years ago, and the next best time is now. So now it is.

We are funded by my buddies at True Ventures (especially Jon Callaghan & Tony Conrad, rockingest investors this side of rock), my very own fund Founder Collective (with Dave Frankel, Eric Paley, Chris Dixon, Zach Klein, Bill Trenchard et al.), SV Angel (including David Lee and Ron Conway, Godfather of the Internet), Betaworks and independent angels, friends and family such as Keith Rabois, James Joaquin, Shoshana Berger and The Best Sister in the World.

You can sign up to get launch announcements and be a beta tester by joining our mailing list.

And we are hiring both back end & front end engineers. We’re working primarily in Ruby on Rails, using Backbone.js, and jQuery mobile. We are located in San Francisco, in Hayes Valley. If this sounds appealing, email us your resume and tell us about yourself.

UPDATE: Whoa! I changed “engineers are unemployed” to “talent is thick on the ground” — Someone wrote recently that he knew it was a bubble when it was easier to raise money than hire engineers and that was what I was thinking of when I wrote that. Came across the opposite as how I meant it. Thanks for pointing that out, various folks!

Nicholas Kristof is a longtime champion of women’s rights, and protecting children from prostitution, especially in Asia. He’s done amazing work with Sheryl WuDunn in co-authoring Half the Sky, and even rescuing children from brothels himself.
Along with Norma Ramos, I was surprised to see the word “voluntary” in his editorial below…I think he probably meant ‘compelled less by violent pimps than by violent parents, sexism and poverty ‘. I’m quoting Norma’s response below:

Nicholas Kristof’s Op-Ed piece “Raiding A Brothel…” (5/26/11) calls for the prosecution of pimps and brothel owners as an effective tool towards ending sex trafficking. For too long law enforcement resources have been directed at arresting the prostituted instead of those who would commercially sexually exploit them. In other words, we have been arresting the wrong people. We join Mr. Kristof in this call for a shift in law enforcement priorities and add that it is crucial to adopt the Nordic approach by arresting the buyers of commercial sex who create the demand that is fueling sex trafficking.

In contrasting the brutality of prostitution in India with that of prostitution in China, Mr. Kristof states that women in China are typically “… working voluntarily.” We have found otherwise. Typically we find that women and girls are pushed into the sex industry through childhood sexual abuse, gender and racial inequality, poverty and pimps.

Given any other choice, the vast majority of women and girls in prostitution would be choosing opportunities that could lead to real careers — just like men do.

For the prostituted, the right to say no to unwanted sex has long been destroyed. At its core prostitution is violence against women and girls. A Canadian study found that women and girls in prostitution face a 40 times higher mortality rate than the national average. By all accounts, China has yet to achieve social conditions that meet the indicia of gender equality and has a high rate of poverty. In other words what may be masquerading as choice is actually a function of lack of choice.

After watching The Truth about Zombies, I learned things about zombies I didn’t know. People in Haiti, where Voudoun is practiced, fear zombification more than they fear zombies. Zombies are fairly harmless, since they are ppl who have been poisoned so that they suffer paralysis, but with total consciousness and awareness. But what was most interesting to me was that zombification is a form of capital punishment visited upon ppl who have done some harm to people in the community, but who have not been served by the justice system. So it is a punishment meted out by an extra-legal Voudoun justice system. The adjudicator, in addition to zombifying the perp, takes their will, their “petit bon ange”, and keeps it in a bottle.

I was just read this phrase “salary commensurate with experience” in a email list I’m on, and thought perhaps it should be “salary commensurate with effectiveness” or “salary commensurate with excellence” instead. A lot is gained through experience, but experience teaches some and not others. Effectiveness and excellence, whether or not they were attained by simply having the knack or through the school of hard knocks, is really what you want to reward.

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

John Seely Brown, who was the director of the amazing Xerox Parc for many years, and whose book The Social Life of Information was hugely influential in the tech industry in which I work, has a new book coming out soon, The New Culture of Learning, which looks great. You can download the first three chapters from the site.

He talks a lot about one of my pet subjects, Community Mentoring, the apprenticeship model of education:

Where traditionally mentoring was a means of enculturating members into a community, mentoring in the collective relies more on the sense of learning and developing temporary, peer-to-peer relationships that are fluid and impermanent. Expertise is shared openly and willingly, without regard to an institutional mission. Instead, expertise is shared conditionally and situationally, as a way to enable the agency of other members of the collective.

…as well as a dozen other favorite topics of mine: play as a means of learning, constraints as a stimulus for, rather than an inhibition of, creativity, and so on. I wish I could figure out how to get my hands on the whole book. There is a great page of resources on the site as well, for further exploration.

Here is an interview with John from the site, talking about tinkering as a mode of knowledge production, an idea reinforced by my recent visit to MakerBot.

(Thanks for the head’s up, Scott!)

Mark Mothersbaugh of DEVO tells a story:

Wow, was it ’77 or ’78? I remember it because Northeast Ohio was under a blanket of snow about 30 inches deep. At that point, everybody in the band had quit their day jobs just to be totally dedicated to the band, so people were letting us sleep in their living rooms or wherever we could sleep. We got a call from Richard Branson — we were all in our 20’s back then. He says, “Hey, wanna come down to Jamaica?” And I’m looking outside at the snow — I’m wearing a winter coat to try to eat breakfast in this cold apartment — and I said, “Yeah, I’ll come down to Jamaica.”

So Bob 2 (Bob Casale) and me went down. To make a long story short — I’m trying to think of how to paraphrase this — he had a bunch of guys from Virgin Records with him. We were in this nice hotel room. They brought out all this Jamaican marijuana. In Ohio, we didn’t have drugs at all. Instead of the summer of love, we had the summer of agony over and over again.

And they were asking us what we thought of the Sex Pistols, and we said, “Oh, we really like ’em. At their last show in San Francisco we were there, and they came to our show, and it’s a shame they broke up, blah, blah, blah.” “And what do you think of Johnny Rotten?” “Oh, we think he’s great. We think he should totally change what he’s doing and do something new.” And they go, “Well, that’s great, because Johnny Rotten wants to join Devo and he’s in the next room. And we have members of the press from all over England with us here, and I’d like to take everybody down to the beach and make the announcement that Johnny Rotten is joining Devo.”

And when he said that, I remember looking at Richard Branson, and I realized he had the mandible and these protruding teeth of a brain-eating ape. And I became scared of him after that.