Cliph Nesteroff’s blog Classic Television Showbiz is one of the great filters for YouTube on the web. He consistently puts up a ton of great clips of all sorts of gems from the golden age of television. Recently he linked to an interview between Mike Wallace and Aldous Huxley which is well worth a watch. Huxley covers an amazing amount of ground, and his subtle excitement about the “pharamocological revolution” is quite fun.

Special thanks to Peterock for reminding me how to spell Aldous

The fire in Santa Barbara is officially called the Tea Incident, because it started near (or at) a (or the) tea house, on Mountain Road in Montecito. (Here? Ah, no, here.)

There are lots of good places to see what’s happening. One of the best is this Google Map. KEYT, Edhat, the Independent, Noozhawk and others are helpful. Inciweb has nothing so far, perhaps because the Tea Incident is not yet an official wildfire. It’s usually very helpful once it gets rolling on a fire. And the MODIS maps are great. That’s a screenshot of one, above.

It’s also a little too interesting that temperatures will be as high as 90° today (unusually hot for here) with strong winds from the northeast. Which will be bad, if any of the fire is still going. Some of it will be, but it’s clear that this is not a rolling conflagration like the Oakland fire in 1990 or the San Diego fire last year. Watching the Montecito and Santa Barbara fire chiefs and Santa Barbara Mayor Marty Blum in a press conference right now. The phrases “damage assessment” and “mopping up” are being used. Also “narrow window of opportunity” to contain the fire.

So right now the top thing people want to know is, Which houses have burned down? Can we be exact about what has burned? Saying “over a hundred homes” gives us a quantity of nothing.

If anybody has something exact — streets and neighborhoods, if not addresses — let us know in the comments below. Meanwhile I’ll be headed out shortly to check things out, or at least to sit at a coffee shop and hang out with concerned and/or evacuated neighbors.

[Not much later...] The County Sherrif is on now, and giving specifics. The Mount Calvary Retreat House and Monastery is completely distroyed. (A beautiful place, and a terrible loss.) Areas where many homes burned: Las Canoas, East Mountain Drive, Gibraltar Road, Scofield Park. Mostly inside a triangle between Westmont Collage, the East Riviera and St. Mary’s. (By Rattlesnake Canyon.) Over 100 homes lost, but many also saved.

Today Alex, Jeff, and I had the opportunity to talk with some of the DC government’s leading technology officers about open data at the Apps for Democracy press conference. Washington, DC is emerging as a leader in opening up government data, and I have to say we’re proud. The city opened up more than 200 real time data streams as part of the Apps for Democracy contest, a competition they sponsored that asks local web developers to take this data, analyze it, and put it on a website in a way that DC residents will find useful, and rumor has it that they’ll open more data streams up in the near future.

Here’s a photo of Alex, Jeff, and I with Mayor Fenty at the press conference. We’re psyched to have a mayor who encourages innovation in technology and comes out to give awards for it.

The fact that DC seems to be firmly behind open data is pretty revolutionary – they’re one of the first governments in the United States to do something like this. We spoke with Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kundra and City Administrator Dan Tangherlini and they both see that it’s not only the citizens who benefit from open data and the more information that comes with it, but also city governments who benefit from all the tools that are made with this data too. There was even talk about how our entry Stumble Safely could be repurposed as a tool for police officers to better identify crime hot spots around bars : )

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Responding to this site, where it is stated:

By recognizing that the Golden Rule is fundamental to all world religions, the Charter for Compassion can inspire people to think differently about religion.

Except that the Golden Rule isn't fundamental, or shouldn't be. It presumes we all want to be treated in some sort of charitable manner, when in fact any number of people want to be treated poorly, out of some sense of self-loathing, masochism, or the like.

The Golden Rule is the foundation for any number of transparently unethical rationalizations, such as "Anyone else would have done it," or "We would all steal from a blind man, given the opportunity." It justified aspersions against character. "If I were handicapped, I wouldn't want to be helped up the stairs."

What people in fact want is not to be treated the same, but rather, to be treated as different. For one person to respect another's values and traditions, even if he does not care for them or even support them. To support the right of an individual to be treated in society in a way he would not want personally to be treated, because that's what the other person wants. To be tolerant of, indeed, to embrace, diversity.

I am by no means the first to make such criticisms, and no serious initiative on ethics can ignore them. From Wikipedia:

Many people have criticized the golden rule; George Bernard Shaw once said that "The golden rule is that there are no golden rules". Shaw also criticized the golden rule, "Do not do unto others as you would expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same." (Maxims for Revolutionists). "The golden rule is a good standard which is further improved by doing unto others, wherever possible, as they want to be done by." Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2) This concept has recently been called "The Platinum Rule"^[33] Philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell, have objected to the rule on a variety of grounds.^[34] The most serious among these is its application. How does one know how others want to be treated? The obvious way is to ask them, but this cannot be done if one assumes they have not reached a particular and relevant understanding.

The golden rule is no foundation for ethics, and people should not pretend that it is.

Via Joi Ito.