Gordon Bell, engineer and innovator responsible for – among other things – the DEC VAX computer, has entered “nearly everything possible from his entire life” into his computer as part of a Microsoft research project. He hopes to create a free-form database for organising your whole life. I need one of those. Thanks to Jack Schofield for the link.
Month: January 2003
Phil Gyford has done a wonderful thing
He’s stretched the weblog model to accommodate a day-at-a-time presentation of an 1893 edition of Pepys’ diary. There’ll be a new beautifully annotated and cross-referenced entry every day and there’s enough background information and context to keep anybody interested in Pepys, London or the period happy. It’s a brilliant application of Movable Type and really does illuminate the text – readers can further annotate the text by adding comments. I hope the historians and biographers are paying attention – this is a twist on conventional historiography that could change the rules completely. Phil writes about the project at his own weblog. “I’m looking forward to reading it myself, and I thought this would be a good way to have lots of people read it with me” he says, disarmingly.
Quotas for BBCi
Owen Gibson in The Guardian wants the BBC to be compelled to apply the 25% independent production quota to the web.
Anti-singularists
Singularities and other tech-determinist fantasies are shown the door in John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s The Social Life of Information. This is the sanest, most humane book I’ve read on information technology. Seely Brown ran Xerox’s PARC and Duguid is an academic working at both PARC and UCB.
You’ll have to wait until the interval…
I’m afraid I’m bringing this concert to your attention about 15 months late. Luckily the ‘performance’ isn’t due to finish for another 637 years so you have time to get an ice cream. The extraordinary John Cage (who used to have his own special side-bar feature here at Bowblog, back before blogger ate my template) scored his piece ‘As Slow as Possible’ to last about twenty minutes played on a solo piano but the literal-minded Germans plan to play approximately one chord per year on the Halberstadt town organ until 2640 thus neatly untethering music from human time entirely and sending the mind reeling. The performance stretches an ephemeral human enterprise across many generations and tests the endurance of every institution associated with it. I love this kind of really long-term thinking.
The Singularity
Proper Science Fiction writer Vernor Vinge is preparing his speech for the day the singularity doesn’t happen. Although I should probably get on with preparing mine for the day after it does (but who’ll listen?), I keep wanting to dive in and point out that the important thing about singularities of all kinds is that they don’t happen. Scenario planners, millenarians and apocalypticians (and geeks) thrive on predicting extreme – usually final – events. The end of this. The overthrow of that. They make these predictions by extrapolating from the potential of various technologies, institutions and practices. This kind of extrapolation always ignores the critically important context within which all these events happen. Human beings provide this context and it’s all friction.
Singularists subtract out the friction provided by human context. They make predictions based solely on the theoretical potential for X to happen – whether X is good or bad (hence Bill Joy’s hysterical revelation). Despite the unarguable logic of the bomb, nuclear wars don’t happen. With no regard to the liberating power of the net, the new economy did not sweep away the old. Whatever you read in the Sunday Papers a human clone will not take your job. This is not a cynical argument or even a jaded one. It’s really an optimistic reading of human-kind’s ability to influence our environment, neutralise extreme cases and side-step the inevitable. Vinge will make his speech.
A gruffalo? What’s a gruffalo?
If you’re in charge of small children (3 and up) and you can still get tickets, I think you should take them to see Tall Stories Theatre Company’s deliriously entertaining The Gruffalo, a touring stage adaptation of one of our favourite picture books. You’ll laugh and shout and, if you know the words, you’ll join in.
Forecasting
I’m bookmarking The FT’s page of predictions for 2003 from business, finance, politics, diplomacy and culture mainly so that I can check back next year to see how they did. Among other things, I learn that: Saddam will fall, house prices will not and Robbie Williams will not make it big in America.