Blackbeltjones/Work “The cosmos is a deeply dangerous thing to think about - into it, vacant minds expand” - Dr. Jonathan Miller

From Jeff Noon’s new book “Falling out of cars”:

“Noon has taken the idea of signal-to-noise (the ratio of useful information to background static), turned it around and made a viral disease of it, creating a world in which information is still contained in road signs, books, television shows and on radio, but the static in the human brain has become so strong that few people can now process the signal which offers that information.

In this world, mirrors suck out your soul and words disappear from the page as soon as you’ve read them; events repeat endlessly and shops feature simple signs like “Food” for those whose minds are still virus-free enough to read. Only government-supplied drugs can keep you sane, and every sight, every coincidence has such significance that, paradoxically, all the meaning has been bled from life.”

More thoughts for 2004 over at DiePunyHumans.

Filed under: Society and culture
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Optimus Claus says “Happy Newtonmas one and all, and don’t forget to tune in on December 25th to watch my distant relative, Beagle2, land on Mars“

I will be glued to my telly on that morning… hope it’s going to be shown live. Have a lovely holiday, and see you back here in 2004.

Filed under: Misc.
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Wow. What a pretentious title for a post! Let me explain myself a little. I’ve been playing around with Webb’s excellent little Lightcone thing, in the hopes of incorporating it somewhere. I’d been thinking about our “cultural lightcone” a couple of years back when I joined the BBC again.

Cultural lightcone?

If you remember the Carl Sagan book / film “Contact”, it plays with the idea of a cultural lightcone: that the alien intelligences have encountered our radio waves as they travel out at the speed of light towards them, and let us know by playing us back video of Hitler.

This from the nicely old-fashioned the offical movie site:

“Humans have actually been sending messages to the stars since the discovery of radio almost 100 years ago and the first television broadcasts earlier this century.

This means that among the first interstellar notices of our existence were the original episodes of I Love Lucy, first broadcast around 40 years ago. By now Lucy and Desi have travelled 40 light years into our surrounding neighborhood, an area inhabited by roughly 100 stars.”

I quickly sketched a little screen of a cultural lightcone, based on the BBC’s archive:

Here we see a 1975 episode of Dr. Who gliding by Vega.

The idea I had in my head was that this starscape would be simulated on a interactive (maybe flash-based?) client screensaver, which was grabbing and displaying the stars, media objects as they got located in the lightcone, and comments of others who had downloaded the connected-screensaver: memories of the programmes or other stuff that had happened that year. A kind of grid-blogging effort with the media as a mnemonic device to unlock people’s recollections of those years: a bit like a giant distributed version of the BBC’s I Love… series; and the starfield as a nice, vaguely poetic and attractive organising glue to the whole thing.

Other cool effects would be that as you got closer to our home, Sol; then stuff start to get really hectic, as the media output I guess has grown an awful lot over the 75 odd (light)years of BBC broadcasting; and the grid-blogging would start to resemble real time commentary on media…

Also, if it was truly decentralised, ie. the BBC just released the client and the initial media nodes and clips it would be fantastic – people would weave their recollection of Auntie between them and upload their own encodings of lost episodes or shortform clips that meant something special – and it would exist as long as someone had one of the client running… copying an un-burnable library ad infinitum…

Filed under: Interface innovations
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This should probably be in /play, but whatever. They just played all 8mins of Kashmir on 6music. If you’re familiar with the overblown Zep epic, then there’s a really, really good breakdown in the middle with Bonzo’s drums, some strings and Plant mumbling and wailing a bit. They work it for a while, but just as it’s getting funky, they swerve back into the chugging riff that is the song’s trademark.

Which is a longwinded intro to making a LazyGadget request.

I’d like a small amount of sampling/looping/effect generation capability on my iPod/personal music device which I could access and manipulate with one hand. Just to muck around and extend bits like the breakdown in Kashmir long enough to ruin them for myself…

Filed under: Product design
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Tom from OK/Cancel on the anthropomorphic tendency I’ve definitely felt towards my Roomba.

“None of this makes sense, yet it makes perfect sense. It feels perfectly natural for me to relate to my little autonomous vacuum cleaner in this way. After all, how else could I talk about it? Our entire language is built around words for emotions, words for folly, words for thoughts and ideas. That’s the raw material we have to work with, but these words refer to properties that machines do not have.”

» OK/Cancel: I, Robot, You Jane.

Filed under: Sufficiently Advanced Technology
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I would really like the guys at Tribe to search-and-replace ‘REJECT’ with ‘No thank you’.

That’s all…

Filed under: Interface innovations
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A lovely post by Tom Coates following on from Kottke’s “metadazzle overfizzle” [which IMHO is much nicer shorthand for all this “what are the human experiences of the semantic web” gubbins than “metacrap”]:

“Because in fact it’s not that there’s too much metadata in the world, it’s that we have incredibly primitive and vestigial mechanisms to help us transcribe it from world to idiot-savant computer companion. We’re stuck in a middle-period between the emergence of useful computer processing power and the computer’s upcoming ability to self-annotate, transcribe and create metadata simply, elegantly (and in vast amount) in the background all the time. In the meantime our transcription processes are tedious and long, our computers eager but clueless – and the amounts of metadata available for any given thing trivial compared to the richness of information and association you could get from a genuinely interested and knowledgeable person. This will all change in time of course, but in the meantime (and in fact regardless, given the information we generate without even noticing it on a routine basis) we’re stuck writing love letters in Excel whether we want to or not.”

Very nice.

Coming back to Jason Kottke’s illustration – it’s so refreshing that it is an illustration. Makes the user-experience challenges so clear and marked. Marc Canter talked the about talkers and do-oers in the semantic-web in terms of negative and positive contribution.

Perhaps Marc forgets what Jason has done so well here: that there’s room for scribblers too… An honest and knowledgable interaction designer making some of the user-experiences concrete, if only in pixel form; can make a lot of difference to the debate.

But then I would say that, wouldn’t I.

» Plasticbag.org: a frament of a world full of metadata

Filed under: Taxonomy and metainformation
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Alias-fans assemble! Cracking idea from Scott Raymond. Quoting big chunks, but it’s worth it:

“With the addition of RSS, BitTorrent could really be taken to the next level, and I’d be able to forget about the plumbing of TV altogether. I want RSS feeds of BitTorrent files. A script would periodically check the feed for new items, and use them to start the download. Then, I could find a trusted publisher of an Alias RSS feed, and “subscribe” to all new episodes of the show, which would then start downloading automatically — like the “season pass” feature of the TiVo.”

He goes on to pitch it to the media owners:

“Illegitimate uses of this system would obviously abound. But the potential legitimate uses are huge as well. For one, traditional content providers (like the TV networks) could take advantage of the demand for their programming by scooping the copyright infringers. If ABC released Alias on BitTorrent with advertising built in, the file could be delivered to their audience very fast, and would cost them next to nothing in distribution costs. The economics of producing video programming would be upended — each viewer of the program would, in effect, foot the bill for a tiny slice of the distribution overhead, causing a massive component of traditional media company infrastructure to become obsolete.

It would be an audacious move for an advertising-supported channel. The arguments about skipping ads in Tivo is not necessarily avoided. You can imagine if they did do this, then they’d want you to download a handicapped, proprietary player, that was a player only- with no other button that “PLAY”, keyed to a proprietary file format that they’d use for the media itself.

Would I mind? I dunno… if I got to watch what I wanted. When I had my Tivo, I didn’t really care how the shows were encoded, but that was becuase the entire user-experience was so good. If I got stuck with a locked-up file format, and a bad player; then I’d be annoyed that there was no path for innovation or improvement around the experience.

Also, the argument might be made by the media owners, that if they didn’t lock the goods up, then some enterprising soul would edit the episode for ads and re-release it as a torrent.

Scott ends with a rousing paragraph:

“The result: the TV distribution networks are completely end-run by an ad-hoc, decentralized, loosely-coupled network. And in the process, significant opportunities are afforded to independent content producers of audio and video to reach a mass audience with insignificant distribution costs.”

Sounds very sensible to me… especially perhaps for a large public service broadcaster who doesn’t need to worry about those troublesome ad-revenues… The BBC will probably investigate all sorts of content-management and DRM gubbins in the course of it’s investigation of p2p-distribution (as mentioned by BBCi’s chef-du-digital Ashley Highfield previously) – whereas it has the information resources and the talent right now to quickly and (relatively) cheaply do what Scott has outlined.

Dear (Risk-Averse) Auntie: Here is the data. Turn it into RSS, make the links to torrents, let the community of early adopters who are screaming out to help you, help you.

Use these open standards to quickly and cheaply create the loam, and others [cf. Steam] will make great bleeding-edge clients and functionality to navigate your media-commons.

» scottraymondnet: 16 December, 2003 | Broadcatching with BitTorrent

Filed under: Sufficiently Advanced Technology
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For various reasons, after an interval of several years, I decided to install and try using TheBrain.

I found it broadly-inuitive in use and it required a minimum effort on my part to start to create quite dense, useful mesh of topics that have been floating around in my head. It also felt like I was creating.

It made me think, in a way that I was thinking about the ideas, their content and context; without having to think about the tool itself.

I still find myself thinking too much about formatting and markup when I am using a wiki, which I guess is my nearest comparable experience.

So far so good.

However, After my first wonderful five minutes, I wanted to share the notes with a colleague.

I have been trying to do this on-and-off for an hour and still have no idea how to do this.

Both the application and online help don’t seem to have anything more useful than telling you how to save ‘individual thoughts’ in the jargon of TheBrain (and the help is full of servicemarked terms and jargon, pretty unhelpful to dive straight into without buying all of their marketing talk from the top) – not how you could share or save the aggregate of those thoughts, which is surely the real value that the program has helped create. Nope. It’s all frustratingly locked-up it seems.

To be clear, I want to save a specific ‘node’ and it’s related child nodes in a format that will represent this well (Outliner-type format I guess) and share it with someone else who does not own a copy of TheBrain.

If anybody knows how to do this I’d be very grateful if they’d let me know

An aside – this experience reminds me how using ‘office’ IT, computers and applications used to feel pre-web/Win3.1.

The work I did in each was silo’d and separated, for you to save or more likely print in order to share or compare with work done in another application; especially between things like AutoCAD, WordPerfect and Excel – which were perhaps at the time seen as programs for very different users.

Filed under: Misc.
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And the seagulls, and the crows…

This is the inlet about 2 minutes from my place in Helsinki. It was about 1 degree celsius this afternoon. With the exception of a few duckinhabited zones, it was all iced over.

Only by a few millimetres but enough to support the odd strutting seagull.

Filed under: Misc.
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Found this comment on sound and interaction design by Hans Samuelson on the Ivrea Hub, which helped me understand in part why my Skype cold-calling experience made me have such a knee-jerk reaction:

“the public nature of sound – it projects and radiates, it is an active expression against which there is little defense. It’s essentially impossible to shut your ears; eyelids are a last line of defense against visual noise, but there is no equivalent for touch, or even sound. The always-on world…”

Filed under: Interface innovations
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I think I just got telemarketed over Skype.

Someone I don’t know from Sweden called me and said that he’d made a music track he wanted to play me. I declined as politely as I could and then altered my preferences so that only my buddylist can call me.

As I clicked to confirm I felt a pang of remorse. Maybe this was just a budding musician reaching out across a rich-media-enabled social network to someone he didn’t know to form a connection for a temporary shared enjoyment of some music. It would be ludicrous to think this was some kind of conscious telemarketing effort? What if there is some enterprising Scandinavian marketing services firm clicking down through the public Skype directories calling people up and giving them the sell?

The “media-bleed” from the legacy of phone and telephone marketers coupled with the immersion and intimacy I associated with the acoustic space (computers, desk, chair, speakers, screen) had created a knee-jerk reaction in me.

I felt uncomfortable that I’d felt uncomfortable.

But I didn’t change my preferences back.

Filed under: Society and culture
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Russell Beattie:

“This morning on #mobitopia we were talking about our WiFi day and I said, “I can’t think of anything to write about WiFi.” Then I started thinking and realized that it’s been a “just” a year using the technology and it’s gone from being Cool, New and Amazing, to just Plumbing I use without thinking about it. I’m actually writing this in the living room connected to the router in the bedroom via WiFi. I hadn’t noticed until I started writing this piece.

That in itself is probably the most amazing part of WiFi now. “

I like the title. “From amazing to plumbing” is probably the dream goal for a lot of conscientious experience designers, but a nightmare of commoditisation for any company.

Unless of course they can be confident in the value of great design to create positive lock-in; come up with amazing, delightful plumbing, cf. Apple.

» Russell Beattie: From Amazing to Plumbing: A year of WiFi

Filed under: Uncategorized
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I was obsessed with AeroGel back in the summer. A succinct and surprising summary of it in The Guardian today [my emboldening]:

“One of the most beautiful of modern inventions is aerogel. This eerie stuff is a jelly made with air instead of water. A sheet of it can support 4,000 times its own weight. It is one of the great insulators, as well as a great soundproofer. It is uncannily light. It looks like frozen smoke. And pretty much its only use so far is aboard a spacecraft called Stardust, which is preparing to sail through the tail of a comet and catch its dust with a trap made of the stuff. Aerogel sounds like the last word in materials science, but in reality it has been around since 1933.“

The article itself is focussed on LED technology, which is cool… but not as cool as AeroGel. For instance, here’s some AeroGel art by April Debra Tsui.

Filed under: Sufficiently Advanced Technology
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Real-time patterns of wifi usage at Carnegie-Mellon University are plotted on this map.

I’m intrigued by the brave souls who appear to be using their wireless devices outside the shelter of the buildings, as current weather in Pittsburgh doesn’t seem too compatible with alfresco work…

» CMUsky.org: All Connected WiFi Users::Carnegie Mellon Campus
[found via the still-chugging-along-nicely warchalking.org]

Filed under: Navigation and wayfinding
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“Our esteemed friends at The Register are reporting on how a hoax email caused large numbers of people to flood the switchboard of their local police.

This illustrates a phenomenon of “media bleed”, where the attributes of one medium overflow to pollute or enhance another. In this case, the anonymous nature of email has bypassed the anti-abuse features of the PSTN.”

» Teleapocalypse: DDoS comes to the phone network

Filed under: Society and culture
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can be found here. Caution: the background pattern makes it a little hard to read on a PC…
[via Chad]

Filed under: Blog watch
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New(-to-me) blog on mind and idea stuff found via Seb’s Open Research, which I gravitated towards purely because of the nostalgia-value of the URL, but stayed for stuff like this:

“Modern preconceptions have it that simply by applying our brains and concentrating hard enough on a problem (e.g. a crossword clue), we should be able to see the solution. This is the “Hare brain” approach.

The book says that there are two types of solution moments. Yes, one is when we sit down and just think hard. But there is another solution moment which comes seemingly out of nowhere, when we’ve been staring out the window, or having a shower, going for a walk. This is the tortoise mind approach. This is a result of a) having done the hare brain thinking in the first place and b) just relaxing your frontal lobes, and letting the rest of your brain “background render” the solution.

» Monkeymagic: December 2003 Archives

Filed under: Blog watch
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Very well-done [212k or so] dynamic map of the USA, showing photographs of moveon.org meetings to watch a documentary about the Iraq conflict.

The effect of zooming in 2-3 clicks from a semi-continental clean, vector map to rich, warm human-scale photos is powerful.

» MoveOn: Democracy in Action: Countrywide Map
[via Dan Gillmor]

Filed under: Interface innovations
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Tom Hume on the ettiquette of ‘bluejacking’ and ethnographic opportunity it affords:

“Bluejacking is interesting because it’ll give us the first clues as to how people feel about these kinds of interruptions and how they’ll react to them.”

» Tom Hume: Bluejacking as a learning opportunity

Filed under: Society and culture
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