ornament & crime.
I reject the argument that ornament increases the pleasures of life of a cultivated person, or that it is beautiful. I prefer undecorated gingerbread. Modern people will understand.
futurebrain
Q: what are you afraid of regarding the future? A: I'm afraid that people don't want the future to happen.
- Interview with Tadao Ando, boxer turned architect
century
Century is almost definitely the best 'introduction' to the philosophy of Alain Badiou. Compiled from a set of lectures taking as their subject the 20th Century, it makes for some remarkable reading and gently introduces aspects of his wider philosophical vision. What I'm most struck by is the Lacanian influences and his ability to examine the Century in terms of what it says about itself. It's tantamount to the psychoanalysis of an epoch and illuminates his central thesis that the common thread behind the significant developments of the century is a passion for the real (where the 'real' takes a Lacanian meaning). His mathematically grounded ontology (based on Cantor-fuelled set theory), thoughts on multiplicity and Marxism are also subtly on display in these lectures.
Badiou is passionate, highly readable, succinct and immensely knowledgeable on the literature, visual art, poetry and politics of the Century. He makes seemingly simple, profound statements over and over again whilst examining Brecht, Breton, Mao, Mandelstam, Celan, Mallarme and others. If you've trawled through your fair share of Derrida and Foucault, Badiou is a refreshing, brilliant counterpoint with an astoundingly complete and mature ontology of his own.
I leave you with this drawing by Badiou himself, produced during a lecture entitled 'Truth procedure in politics':
babel
The certitude that everything has been written annuls us or turns us into phantoms.
- Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel (full text)
One of my favourite short stories.
primates
I’ve been thinking: let’s rate our technologies for how much they help us as primates, rather than how they can put us further into this dream of being powerful gods who stalk around on a planet that doesn’t really matter to us.
- Kim Stanley Robinson, from an interview on bldgblg, Comparative Planetology
ecophagy
Grey goo is a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating robots consume all living matter on Earth while building more of themselves (a scenario known as ecophagy).
- Wikipedia, on Grey Goo
I remember reading Eric Drexler's Engines Of Creation (1986) a few years ago and being delighted by it. Sure it's dated (the irony) and amidst the science and 'foresight' you'll find some rhetoric, but what a great read. Worth it for the cover alone.
xerox
Yahoo! is the Xerox of Web 2.0
- Someone (ok me) at the Last.fm kitchen table, whilst discussing Ian Rogers' presentation, Winners Leverage Scale
Ian Rogers is VP of Product Development at Yahoo! Music.
experiment
When I finally present a work it is not an experiment - it is a finished product.
- Edgard Varése, upon being dubbed 'experimental' by critics.
fb
How others compared you recently: "Who is hotter", you won 0 and lost 1 time.
- 'Compare People', Facebook App Email Notification
Thank you Facebook application platform, for all that you have done for me in 2007.
genomic
At my company Synthetic Genomics, we have a major program underway in collaboration with BP to see if we can use naturally occurring microbes to metabolize coal into methane which can then be harvested as natural gas.
- Dr J. Craig Venter, The 32nd Richard Dimbleby Lecture - A DNA Driven World (full transcript, video)
Presentation of the year.
heaven
Hieronymous Bosch, Center panel, 'The Garden of Earthly Delights', circa 1504
Worth seeing in in the context of the entire triptych and with the shutters closed. Bosch has consistently fascinated me for a decade now (I've been lucky enough to see originals of his in Venice and Madrid), and I finally got round to picking up a great publication on Bosch's life & work.
lifestream.
I wrote a piece for the New Statesman this week on Leisa Reichelt’s notion of ambient intimacy. It's pretty short and doesn't delve too deep, but such are the limitations of print. You can read it in full here.
gecekondu/ranchito/favela
Thus, the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first century urban world squats in squalor surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay... the one billion city-dwellers who inhabit postmodern slums might well look back with envy at the ruins of the sturdy mud homes of Çatal Hüyük in Anatolia, erected at the very dawn of city life nine thousand years ago.
Also check Neuwirth's TED Talk on what the World Bank called "the most significant problem of the next century" in 1990.
609
609: Age And TruthYoung people love what is strange and interesting, regardless of whether it is true or false. More mature spirits love in truth what is strange and interesting in it. Heads fully mature, finally, love truth also where it appears plain and simple and is boring to ordinary people: they have noticed that truth is accustomed to impart its highest spiritual possessions with an air of simplicity.
Nietzsche, 'Human, All too Human'
hick's law
The time to make a decision is a function of the possible choices he or she has and can be expressed as t = b log2(n + 1)
Where t is the time taken, b is a constant and n is the total number of choices.
Hick's Law, from Haacked's, '19 eponymous laws of software'.
how hands win the editor wars.
The last.fm toilets have become a battle-ground. Left to right - Textmate reference, Vim cheat sheet, Emacs cheat sheet. Barely legible on the Textmates sheet, someone has scrawled 'tab triggers ftw'. I use textmate and vim over emacs nowadays. My observation on Emacs (through 18 months of use about two years ago) is that Stallman must have very large hands. Not a very useful take-away but I thought i'd share nonetheless. Allan Odgaard on the other hand, he has my kind of hands.
2/3 things
"I'm very careful when crossing the road... I think of the accident before it happens"
- Jean-Luc Godard, '2 or 3 things I know about her'
phonogram
In my article of 12 years ago I enumerated among the uses to which the phonograph would be applied: 1. Letter writing and all kinds of dictation, without the aid of a stenographer. 2. Phonographic books, which would speak to the blind people without effort on their part. 3. The teaching of elocution. 4. Reproduction of music. 5. The "Family Record", a registry of sayings, reminiscences etc, by members of a family, in their own voices: and of the last words of dying persons. 6. Music boxes and toys. 7. Clocks that should announce, in articulate speech, the time for going home, going to meals, etc. 8. The preservation of languages... 9. Educational purposes: such as preserving the explanations made by a teacher... 10. Connection with the telephone, so as to make that invention an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records...- Tomas Alva Edison, The Phonogram, 1890
attention ghetto
Half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress. That's how much information we create in a year - 92% of it is stored on magnetic media. It's time we shifted our focus from creating a wealth of information to addressing the ensuing poverty of attention.- Peter Morville, "Ambient Findability", citing "How Much Information?"
on osmosis.
For many years Dr.Rosenblueth and I had shared the conviction that the most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those which had been neglected as a no-man's land between the various established fields. Since Leibniz, there has perhaps been no man who has had a full command of all the intellectual activity of his day. Since that time, science has been increasingly the task of specialists, in fields which show a tendency to grow progressively narrower.
- Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 1948
bernd and hilla becher
Bernd and Hilla Becher constructed a typology of industrial buildings in post-war Germany. It's an amazing body of work. They are the most productive collaborating couple i can think of. Lovegrove says, "industrial design is the art of the 21st Century", and the engineer in me, the one that correlates beauty and function, is tempted to agree. It's the same part of me, however, that fondly recalls the smell and thick layers of white powder inside ammonia chemical plants. Go figure.
human scale.
MySpaceaphobia: the agoraphobic feeling of being a tiny individual roaming around in an enormous social context, being chatted up and chased by shills, sock puppets, and unsavory characters.
- Stowe Boyd, Human Scale, Neighbourhoods, and Myspaceophobia.
This harks back to my comments on Flickr and the mass ID suicide.
pain in the parse
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING, expecting ')' in /var/www/html/www.flickr.com/include/init_config.gne on line 359
flickr.com, circa 21:49pm
Hear that? It's the sound of someone writing code directly on a production box, and yet someone else forgetting to edit the php.ini to suppress errors ;)
why do we stop?
Why do we stop? The simple and honest truth is that we want to devote our time to other creative things. We still love music and we will still be active and supportive of the scene. We aren't in financial ruin, we don't think p2p networks have destroyed the music industry, we don't only want to listen to country western, we just want to take on other projects with as much love and intensity as we did this one.
- Joshua Kit Clayton, website announcement upon the closure of record label Orthlorng Musork.
meringue.
This image is copyright David Shrigley. Don't even think about it. The lawyers will come with their stoats.
It's been on my mind.
ogle.
This is a man - bluntly - whose only contact with Web 2.0 that I can find is a pretty humiliating set of pictures on Flickr of him on a private jet and ogling at half-naked dancing girls
- Tom Coates, on Ashley Highfield, the BBC's head of New Media
fart.
I would love to have you subscribe to my Ajax-driven, folksononimic fartcast. It will literally blow your eyebrows off.
attitude.
The mantra of the well-informed UK geek seems to be, "The world isn't like me -- technology is central to my life, but that's not so for the rest of the world, and it won't be any time soon."By contrast, the mantra of the San Francisco geek is more like, "Technology kicks so much fucking ass I am about to explode. Soon everyone will realize this."
- Cory Doctorow, commenting on Tom Coates' insightful discussion of Paul Graham's xTech 2006 talk, How American Are Startups?.
noise video.
I made a noise video from my old handycam tapes. I've found myself coming back to it quite a lot over the past few days. Here's a low resolution excerpt(avi) captured on my digital camera (original still vhs right now).
informal.
As Deputy Chairman at ARUP, Balmond's approach to large scale projects has single-handedly shifted the role of engineering in the architectural process. The principled miscibility of design and structural engineering he encourages is inspirational and refreshing. It serves to break down the perception of engineer as dry, technical doer and promotes the idea of creative engineering and intertwined design/build phase. It's a great parallel to certain agile approaches to software engineering. Pick up Informal for more.
role: model.
pipe.
Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
- Doug Mcllroy, inventor of Unix pipes
kaizen.
Japanese for continuous and incremental improvement, a business philosophy about eliminating waste in working practices.
Kaizen is a daily activity whose purpose goes beyond improvement. It is also a process that when done correctly humanizes the workplace, eliminates hard work (both mental and physical), teaches people how to do rapid experiments using the scientific method, and how to learn to see and eliminate waste in business processes.
- Wikipedia
tensegrity.
The word 'tensegrity' is an invention: a contraction of 'tensional integrity.' Tensegrity describes a structural-relationship principle in which structural shape is guarenteed by the finitely closed, comprehensively continuous, tensional behaviors of the system and not by the discontinuous and exclusively local compressional member behaviors. Tensegrity provides the ability to yield increasingly without ultimately breaking or coming asunder
- Buckminster Fuller, Tensegrity
know thy domain.
If i'm going to buy a technology related product, then i'd prefer to buy it from a domain geek - someone with an almost obsessive knowledge of the technical details of said product. This works for me because i'm a particular kind of customer - one with an interest in tech. Generally, people like me want a domain geek because:
- A domain geek does not want to sell you whatever 'specials' distributors are pushing on their franchised store in any particular month. He's in this for life.
- A domain geek will call BS on anything that's technically mediocre.
- A domain geek will teach you something about said domain.
- A domain geek will give you an enthusiasts approach (cable? Here's a reel, cut it yourself!)
- A domain geek will be keen for you to test out the technology in question before buying. After all, he would never buy anything without pulling it apart first.
Case in point: In search of a speaker system for my place I walked into a sevenoaks nearby and was met by an audiophile named Rob, with thick glasses and unhealthy looking skin.
The first thing Rob said was, "no we don't do computer audio, we do sound fields. You need to go somewhere else". You need to go somewhere else. There isn't a single better line in retail for boosting consumer confidence in you. He then proceeded to draw me two schematics on a piece of paper with an HB pencil. The first explained crossover (a simple concept, but i'm a bit of a novice when it comes to sound engineering). The second was a conceptual architecture sketch for a proposed system, based on 10 minutes requirements capture. During that time he had extracted a lot from me without my conscious knowledge; my usage patterns, the dimensions of the room, the issues i have with my current system, my budget and a number of other bits.
This weekend Rob set up the proposed system in their basement and i dropped by with a CD of anything i could think of that would call BS on a mediocre system:
We blasted these through it and it sounded ace. I walked out of there with some B&W components and an amp. Victory to the domain geek.
tufte on powerpoint.
The cognitive syle characteristics of the standard default PP presentation: foreshortening of the evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, a deeply hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organising every type of content, breaking up of the narrative and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous decoration and Phluff, a preoccupation with format not content, and an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.
- Edward Tufte
bear/fractal/mode
For those who like bears and fractals (if this isn't you i suggest a long hard spell of reflection) - i bring you the bear/fractal/mode page. The animation is from this collection of fractals.
nature vs nurture.
A side note: In my years of analytics and data mining, a recurring theme is that better algorithms are nice but better data is nicer.
- Steve Krause, in Last.fm Vs Pandora.
linda stone at eTech 2006.
- Noise becomes data when it has a cognitive pattern.
- Data becomes information when assembled into a coherent whole, which can be related to other information.
- Information becomes knowledge when integrated with other information in a form useful for making decisions and determining actions.
- Knowledge becomes understanding when related to other knowledge in a manner useful in anticipating, judging and acting.
- Understanding becomes wisdom when informed by purpose, ethics, principles, memory and projection.
[ Linda Stone, who coined the phrase Continuous Partial Attention back in the nineties, paraphrases Dee Hock, ex Visa CEO and director of the Chaordic Alliance, during her etech 2006 keynote on attention. ]
Crowd.
Four conditions to be met for collective intelligence to flourish:
- Diversity of opinion: Each person should have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.
- Independence: People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them.
- Decentralization: People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.
- Aggregation: Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.
See the wikipedia page for more.
Intracranial.
The most immediate observation regarding the nervous system is that its functioning is prima facie digital.
- John Von Neumann
On Frameworks.
Context beats consistency. Reuse only works well when the particular instances are so similar that you're willing to trade the small differences for the increased productivity. That's often the case for infrastructure, such as Rails, but rarely the case for business logic, such as authentication and modules and components in general.- David at Loud Thinking.
A framework is a framework, no more no less. Its downfall is the inclusion and creep of business logic - no matter how implicit (e.g. authentication) - into its domain. On the broader question - is re-use overrated? - i am always wary of speculative generality and counter-productive reuse in code. As one commenter to David's article points out,
Programmers have an irrational fear against throwing code away.
Quango
So i'm having lunch with a friend - a technology consultant - who tells me he's working predominantly with Quangos right now. This prompts me to search the definition of the word immediately:
n. pl. quan·gosAn organization or agency that is financed by a government but that acts independently of it.
One of the projects this friend of mine is involved with is the regeneration of the Battersea Power Station site. Mammoth in scale, the new plans include a hi-tech Media Center he says might turn out like a Media Lab for London. Watch this space.
Media Futures
Seth fleshes out his objectives for establishing an exchange for attention data, to encourage a shifting of credit risk from publishers/advertisers to investors and a move to CPL (cost-per-lead) metrics. All in all a bold vision for the future of online marketing and a piece replete with implications for people like myself who develop ad-serving technology.
I'll be re-reading this and posting more conclusions as they come.
The Future of Media
This is well put,
1 - Microchunk it - Reduce the content to its simplest form. 2 - Free it - Put it out there without walls around it or strings on it. 3 - Syndicate it - Let anyone take it and run with it. 4 - Monetize it - Put the monetization and tracking systems into the microchunk.
[ originally from Some VC in NYC ]
Amator
Paul Graham voices about 80% of everything i think about Business. The other 20% goes on this blog. Check his latest speech.
Splitting work and life is one of the key tenets of professionalism. This, i am convinced, is one of it's main mistakes.
The semantic root of 'work' in French ('travail') is the Latin word for torture. The Latin root of 'amateur' ('amator') means 'lover'.
If you don't love what you do, don't do it.
Manday.
Mandays are pointless. Mandays are bad. Mandays don't exist.
Here is the dictionary definition of a manday:
An industrial unit of production equal to the work one person can produce in a day.
It's a poor way to quantify a programmer's output because it's a variable with a huge range. Time-based performance measures in software development are flawed and kind of old school. Same with Lines of Code (LOC). As Negroponte recently pointed out in his AIGA conference speech,
If programmers were paid by the amount of lines of code they removed as opposed to added to a piece of software, the world would be a better place.
Dissertation.
The dissertation format in Computer Science completely ignores the nature of software development today.
The academic establishment needs to change this.
A dissertation comprises an individual piece of work, authored, documented and executed by an individual.
This scenario is neither a fruitful nor desirable one in software development today. The scenario, in short, does not exist outside the academic context.
Academia.
Folksonomy is organism where most Semantic Web research is formalism.
The classic academic/real world divide.
Walk.
To paraphrase Nietszche - the only thoughts worth thinking are those had whilst walking.
So if you're stuck munching on someone else's code my advice is: go for a walk.
If you happen to have a boss and he isn't too keen on employee walks, just say something about grabbing a coffee. If he doesn't buy that then your boss sucks. Replace him.
DIY > DIT
Youth culture's DIY ethic evolves into an all inclusive DIT (Do It Together) mindset. Open source occupies an ideological void left by DC Hardcore, and the FSF adopts a stern straight-edge stance.
Boring.
The secret of being boring is to say everything- Voltaire
The future is boring- JG Ballard
botcasts.
The Rebotcast Network get synths to read you RSS feeds. Great for the blind i guess, and just as handy for commuters with a blind hatred of public radio. I'm using it to catch up with BBC world news as i lunge to work with my mp3 player.
My podcast tip of the moment: Mark Kermode's Film Reviews. Unrestrained sardonic bliss.
DRM Background Reading List
A few bits'n'bytes i glared at this evening:
- Microsoft's Darknet Paper
- Lawrence Lessig: Free Culture
- Del.icio.us DRM page
- The Law of Computer Entropy
- Cory Doctorow: Microsoft Research DRM Talk
- DRM is Doubleplus good for Business, Congress advised
My reading was prompted by Sun's announcement of it's royalty-free digital rights management initiative, which at first glance seemed absurd to me. The EFF (Doctorow) has called it a "walled garden" and that's what it looks like from where i'm sitting.
And it's Doctorow's talk that is the pick of the reading too. I'd recommend anyone interested in digital media read it if they haven't already. I agree whole-heartedly with this observation,
Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we've changed copyright. Copyright isn't an ethical proposition, it's a utlititarian one.
And the whole thing is well delivered, including some good points for you eBook non-believers (you know who you are!); speaking of which, i'll probably be compiling my fiction to PDF in the near future.
Best Hacker 2005.
Awards are questionable things, but this one was merited. A one man J2EE destruction kit.
Students << Software
I was psyched to find Cycling 74 offering generous student discounts on their suite of audio-visual programming tools. Max/Msp (core programming environment) + Jitter (graphics library) for $450. Sounds expensive but it's just over half price for some excellent tools. For a UK student, it's a scoop and a half.
Apple have also been focusing on their educational program, launching Apple Digital Campus recently. I've used a Mac during my Computing course and it's been absolutely perfect. Again, they've got solid student discounts on everything.
I can't overstate how crucial student discounted software is for computing students - for the IT industry as a whole. Whilst at college you develop a taste for environments, technologies and languages that you carry with you for a long time (or these days, until the next lot of fad technologies show up) - it's in the interest of anyone developing software of any sort to catch us while we're young and easily led*.
And no, Comp Sci students don't pirate everything and stay strictly open source - not if we really admire the developers involved. Doubly not if you implement hard-drive specific challenge/response authorization (ahem).
*I'm easily led.
YubNub
Jon Aquino's YubNub is a social command line for the web. Try it here. At base level it's a customisable search query form. Much like existing web browser plug-ins. However, any user can add functionality to it, and there's lots of potential in adding a formal 'piping' (as in unix piping) framework, whereby you can envisage search queries like:
amazon hasselhoff | aws_get_titles | technorati_array_query | technorati_get_authors
To give you a list of anyone who's blogged about any films david hasselhoff has ever been in (for possible contact and formation of Hasselhoff co-cast fanclub). Or simply:
google_img david hasselhoff | upload_to_flickr
Any web script triggered by a GET request can be declared as a YubNub command.
YubNub is a crucial, simple idea (cooked up as a 24 Hour challenge), and it's wholly in step with the net's slow morph from a set of interlinked documents to a global operating system running distributed, networked applications and services. It faces serious customer abuse/spam/security issues. It'll be interesting to see how it evolves in the coming weeks.
Also check Jon's Introspicious - intermediate tag analysis on the bookmarks you index at Delicious.
