Over the past few months I’ve been forming something of a theory on mass hysteria and how the sudden rise of interconnectivity on a global scale has distorted opinions and led to many instances of closed thought and conclusions based on incomplete data sets.

One example that came to mind this afternoon was how it’s now possible to exist entirely inside of one ideology. Everything one reads can originate from a like ideology. This is more possible than ever because of the way information coagulates online. Blogs with similar beliefs link to one another, social networks and influence leaders create balkanized communities. These communities exist as thought-overlays across society, ignoring geographic boundaries.

Another byproduct is the ability to organize gatherings and protests on a scale unimaginable to those limited by a printing press or xerox machine. A few years ago flashmobs were regularly gathering hundreds of people at random locations with virtually no advance notice. Apply that same principle to any given political cause and you end up with demonstrations orders of magnitude larger than anything before. The organizers of those causes then believe their mission and themselves to be significantly more right than their predecessors. This builds on the first idea too, those same organizers existing wholly within their self-selected ideological gardens, seeing anything beyond their walls as a threat or evidence of their own self-righteousness.

What we’re most at risk of losing is the ability to understand and rationally challenge dissenting views.

Humanity as a whole wasn’t really ready for what the Internet and global connectivity has given us. But one of the great lessons of history is that humanity is never ready, we always get blind-sided by advances and then cobble together a future from the leftover shards of what once was.

Adobe Illustrator CS2 on Intel Macs crashes a lot. Usually, the crash has to do with something involving a compound path, even simple ones. The kind that have been working just fine for twenty years. Today I had a reasonably simple, hand-drawn compound path which would crash Illustrator immediately if I so much as tried to change it’s color.

The improbable workaround is to restart Illustrator with the Appearance palette hidden. It really is that simple. Just close the Appearance palette, quit and restart Illustrator. The palette works file after that, at least for the current session.

Chelan on Adobe’s forums deserves credit for discovering this. Me, I just kept doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.

A few years back, before Noemi was born, Lila and I trekked out to the Prospect Park Zoo to meet our friends Paula and her daughter. They’d recently moved to Brooklyn, but when we first met they were living on 13th street, literally across the street from our front window.

Walking around near the prairie dog mound, Paula said she had the craziest thing happen to her, and that I’d never guess what it was.

“What,” I said, “You have an identical twin?”

Paula’s jaw dropped while her eyes seemed to focus somewhere 30 or 40 feet past my head. “Yes, How’d you know?”

I didn’t, I was being a smartass. An accidentally and uncannily intuitive smartass.

Paula was adopted as a baby separately from her identical twin sister. Neither knew anything of the other’s existence until that day in 2004 when they’d somehow discovered each other.

Unfortunately, we’ve sort of lost touch, or at least haven’t seen each other in a long time. I don’t remember all the details of Paula’s story, but I just noticed that her book, written with her twin sister, is available for pre-order on Amazon: Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited. My copy is reserved, I’ve been waiting to read this for three years.

Here’s hoping this makes it to Oprah. And I’m sending Paula an email now.

Update: Paula and Elyse’s site: Identical Strangers

A friend called in the middle of a promotional email disaster. Due to a screwup by their mailing service, messages only went out to a random portion of their list. It was a disaster because all he had left to work with were two text files, the masterlist and a log of what had already been sent.

So we basically needed to delete the contents of a small file, “deleteme.txt” from the contents of larger file, “masterlist.txt”. The lines to remove were not contiguous and some lines in the smaller file might have already been removed from the larger file.

Here is the piped unix command I used to do this:

cat deleteme.txt deleteme.txt masterlist.txt | sort | uniq -u > newmasterlist.txt

The uniq command’s -u flag outputs only lines which appear once, omitting every duplicate line. I used cat to join the deleteme.txt file twice to guarantee the interim file would contain at least two copies of every line to remove. If the lines already appeared in masterlist.txt, then there would be three to remove, but forcing duplicates made sure I wouldn’t end up with the already deleted lines being added back in (an XOR).

As I wrote this out, it started to seem more and more simple, almost to the point of silly. Writing this post took far longer than fixing the files. But the solution didn’t occur to me right away and this post is now exactly what I was googling around for.

Momofuku Ando died in Osaka January 5th, he was 96. In 1958, Mr. Ando invented the instant ramen noodle and changed the world.*

• Nissin Foods bio: Meet the Inventor
• Wikipedia: Momofuku Ando
• New York Times: Momofuku Ando, 96, Dies; Invented Instant Ramen
• San Jose Merc: Revolution in a bowl

I’ve been eating at the Momofuku Ssäm bar regularly, never realizing that the name of David Chang’s expanding restaurant empire was a winking nod to the inventor of the instant noodle.

* After writing this I found the Forbes obituary, which cited an inscription at the Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum, “In 1958, Momofuku Ando invented instant noodles here in Ikeda, and changed the food culture of the world.”

More info at RobotGossip and RobotsRule. Here’s another video (via Digg):

The design is apparently based upon work by Sean Frawley and Dan Getz while in high school. Their work is said to be based on a 19th century french invention.

When attempting to capture footing into FCP from the Canon HV10 camcorder, I got the following message:

It turns out that something in either FCP or the HV10 is very finicky about the camcorder’s power source. Here are a few solutions:

1. Close the Log & Capture window, plug the camcorder into wall power, re-open Log & Capture.
2. Open iMovieHD. Just opening iMovieHD seems to be enough to kickstart the FireWire connection. iMovieHD was able to read and capture from the camcorder even when FCP couldn’t.

I haven’t had the issue pop up at all when running on wall power. It may be related to a low charge camcorder battery.

Occasionally, when correcting the state of the camcorder, FCP’s Log & Capture window gets stuck and won’t close. I haven’t found any way to close it other than restarting FCP.