More Roberts Intel

ThinkProgress: "Though John Roberts' views on privacy and reproductive rights are still unknown (like so much about the nominee), Roberts' wife is a prominent anti-choice activist." [link omitted]

Also: "Judge John Roberts needs to be asked about his position on the amount of deference that should be given to the President in conducting the war on terror," as his approach apparently diverges quite a bit from the Justice he would replace.

Thoughtless Acts

The slides during David Kelly's talk were all of thoughtless acts (here's the flickr tag) — design innovations people implement in daily life without realizing it. (E.g., pencil hair clip.) Sounds like something I probably could have seen at BoingBoing had I been paying close enough attention, and a cool little takeaway.

[Technorati tag: AlwaysOn2005]

There are Unconferences, And There Are Un(comfortable)conferences

The dynamic here at the evening's featured keynote with Sandy Berger, Jerry Brown, and Michael Medved just gets more and more bizarre. I've just witnessed what I can only call a full blown techpartisan rebellion. In a nutshell: Tony steered the talk into the turbulent waters of the Roberts nomination, the war on terror, and elsewhere, and the audience went from restless, to surly, to evaporated.

First, the snide (and enviably economically phrased) live chat simply cracked the room up at inopportune moments. (Chatter "Ike" observed, "politics and technology don't mix well." The evidence was pretty undeniable — or maybe it was just the distinctly bad-manicure-on-chalkboard effect Medved had on the crowd.) The strangely timed chuckle-bursts then gave way to the metal-on-canvas whoosh of laptops being stuffed into cases all over the room. Tony, not oblivious (he's getting it from the chat, and the emptying room), observed that "If the price of oil doubles, we're all out of a job." Questions to Mayor Brown about his blog, though, proved too little, too late. Were those the unmistakeable chimes of Steve Gillmor's Windows shutdown sequence? You got it. Hoo boy..."You can put this one in the refrigerator. The door's closed, the light's out, the eggs are cooling, the butter's getting hard and the Jell-O is jiggling..."

[Technorati tag: AlwaysOn2005]

Read About Roberts

Technorati is on the spot: "On July 19, 2005, President Bush announced that U.S. Circuit Judge John Roberts Jr. is his choice to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court. This is what bloggers around the world had to say."

So is Wikipedia: "Roberts is 50 years old, lives in Bethesda, Maryland, and is the first Supreme Court nominee since Stephen Breyer in 1994."

Greetings From The Always On Innovation Summit

"The Giant Brain Is Us:" Tony's emblem for the conference reminds me a bit of Wired Magazine's Blake Ross cover...though Tony's is from the back...The talk by Peter Hirshberg and Michael Markman was too good and visual to try to recount in text. Watch the video, which, if you're not doing live, I think you'll be able to do after the fact (there's supposedly an archived program). It's worth it. Among the "endangered species" in a graphic shown for far too short a time: "Anyone who disagrees with Dave Winer."

[Technorati tag: AlwaysOn2005]