21 March, 2003:

Posted at 16h54. Permalink.

Concept: Use the technology behind Newsblaster (What is? It "automatically collects, clusters, categorizes, and summarizes news from several sites on the web") at Amazon. Make use of the recommendations system (based on your purchases) to see which reviewers are most like you, and the reviewer reputation system; add in the story merger, and create: A unique single paragraph review, customised to your tastes, on every single item on the Amazon site. And then use the same system, only on Punternet.

Posted at 13h40. Permalink.

Evening Standard art critic Brian Sewell recalls the Second World War, in A horror too deep for tears [thanks Paul B], which is the sort of wordy, learned, quite probably pseudy article that only Sewell could write. "In 1942 the man who had shot my dog married my mother and made me go to school. The torments there could have happened at any time in the earlier 20th century, but the war added a certain zest to the possibilities of indiscipline. We sabotaged almost all attempts to teach us during air raids by removing the light bulbs from the shelters, and in the dark we spent countless hours engaged in mutual masturbation, occasionally whole days of it, infinitely preferable to mathematics".

Posted at 13h27. Permalink.

The Economist on A possible explanation for conspiracy theories [via Epeus' epigone]: "This curious observation is the basis of Dr Leman's hypothesis that there is some underlying process in human psychology that assumes that the bigger the effect is, the bigger the cause must have been". Yum.

Posted at 10h16. Permalink.

Gulf War II? ffs. Roman numerals like it's World War II. Like it's a continuation. Like it fits in to the grand sweep of history. Branded, already. "Gulf War II", not "Gulf War 2". A phrase with a comfortable heft. A memo of the past. Harks back to a quick, painless (for the West) war. Reassuring. Serious. A handy shortcut to talk about it. Dignified. Stops you thinking about what's actually going on. At least Channel 4 news last night had the decency to call it the "war on Iraq".

I'm ambivalent on the subject of war on Iraq. But it's like being rudely told to clean your room when you were going to anyway. If there's any justice, it would've been that the respective governments of the US and the UK didn't get their way, just for treating the people who voted for them with so little respect. But, since we're there, let's do this properly, and with the minimum of pain. And don't be lazy, and don't use words to forget what this really is.

20 March:

Posted at 17h44. Permalink.

Cosmic rays find uranium. To demonstrate the power of this technique: "Scientists in New Mexico have shown that this inexpensive and harmless technique can detect a small block of uranium concealed inside a truck full of sheep". Sheep. Gosh.

18 March:

Posted at 21h45. Permalink.

How do knots form in things, without you trying? Random perturbation results in a move towards a stable configuration. What is it about the construction of the system and its environment that makes this possible, and probable? The science of knots will be important some day. We'll want to design in - or out - spontaneous knotting. Like power laws happen in city size and earthquakes and newspapers, what sort of systems encourage them?

I've had this a couple of times recently, taking off my shoes. Whatever I do, the knot gets worse. Usually when I'm drunk. I have to tug the shoe off and tackle it in the morning.

Another excerpt from The Blank Slate, this time a quote from a letter from Khrushchev to Kennedy on the Cuban Missile Crisis:

"You and I should not not pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied a knot of war, because the harder you and I pull, the tighter this knot will become. And a time may come when this knot is tied so tight that the person who tied it is no longer capable of untying it, and then the knot will have to be cut."

17 March:

Posted at 21h34. Permalink.

":)"

Posted at 19h57. Permalink.

Slipping gently into the age of ubicomp... Check out the Ambient Orb [via paranoidfish links]. A coloured globe fed by mobile phone infrastructure providing you with an ambient view of the stockmarket, of your inbox or any piece of information you can grab over the www. Ambient Devices don't just do the orb. The Ambient product catalogue mentions a key fob that glows when the traffic's better than usual to reduce commute time. This is what future was supposed to be.

And of course there's Microsoft SPOT -- running over a national (uh, American) FM network, it's a bunch of wristwatches squirting birthday reminders at your from your Outlook calendar. Um. Dan Hon already said this: closed gardens are rubbish. Give each device a url and let it accept events. Let everybody send events to devices for free if the service is free, or if it's a commercial service then Microsoft can take a cut. The problems when a single company owns the infrastructure and the service... I mean come on! Grow the market! Enlightened self-interest!

The future would be cooler - the future would be wicked - the future would be now - iff people weren't so fucking stupid.

Three tangential thoughts.

1. It's a tedious refrain I know, but we appear to be converging on the right kind of model to think about this selective-broadcast model used by SPOT: emit and accept. Emit information without any thought to destination. Accept in your news aggregator which has an RSS shaped hole, data shaped list RSS; in your orb which has a stockmarket level shaped hole, data shaped like market level. And so on. And so forth. But like Sam Ruby says: "RSS aggregators may quite possibly be pushing the limits of the Internet by implementing a polling architecture on top of HTTP GET", so what to do? Maybe we'll end up implementing a distance-like metaphor on the network; maybe we'll implement clouds of virtual particles around data sources and sinks to negotiate connections before exchange bosons are swapped. Whatever.
2. Actually this verbs thing springs another thought. Object orientation. Games especially, where a NPC or an object is its own code chunk, complete with methods. Or even events. I'm not sure this is a good model. In the real world, do objects really take verbs? A verb is a negotiation between me, the object and the environment. Where's the intelligence to choose the verb kept? It's the telegraph model again: signals, wires, connections, nodes-and-arcs. Not sure about that. Is communication really that narrowband? Isn't the only reason we use verbs to interact with computers that processing power places limits on the input bandwidth? A hammer doesn't take verbs: when I pick it up communication between me and it is wideband full-on surround sound hi-fi. Come to that, it's pretty human-centric to think that the skin is the outer boundary of complexity and it's all semaphore inbetween independent brains. Can't communication be just as information rich as people themselves? Stacks of bad metaphors all over the place here, holding us back.
3. Dancing Bluetooth robots [via Gizmodo, thanks Matt Jones]. Which is so damn cool, so damn script them to dance when I get email, so damn walk around my desk and stand by my diary when it's a birthday and eat that you closed garden SPOTwatch, so all of that that it needs to be said again: Dancing Bluetooth robots! Soo damn dance in the garden like there's honey nearby and FUCK WITH THE BEES DUDE, FUCK WITH THE BEES.

Braindump over.

Posted at 9h53. Permalink.

The widening domains of BBC search meets weblogs: Searching the BlogSphere (includes source) [via Gotzeblogged]: "Search the Web/ Search my Blog/ Search Blogs I Read". Spot on!

(I really rate the way the BBC search works -- if you search at BBC Food then it looks closest to that first, then all the BBC, then the www at large. And gives a great interface to it. It's changed the way I use on-site search engines: I now go to Guardian Unlimited, navigate to the section I know the article I'm looking for is in, then use the search engine. But does it give me closest results first? Nope. But it should take advantage of those clues I give it! This would be a way for the Google Toolbar to be improved, over-and-above the Google site itself. Use current site and the relatedness/distances implicit in the Google map (maybe recent navigation too) to push up results that are close by. It'd work wonders for the Guardian.)

Posted at 9h31. Permalink.

Last week's AIGA London event on The Aesthetics of Code was excellent. Copious (paper) notes were taken.

Processing particularly grabbed me. It's an environment (a small API and a custom IDE) made especially for sketching interactive and generative art (so the programs are extremely short and it's fairly easy to understand what's going on). The pieces produced with it are pretty, but much more impressive is the work put into the social aspects: the reference material is slim and accessible; there are copious examples for learning. Oh and: when you export the applet, it encourages the View Source mentality. Nice touch. (I've put my first Processing piece [Java] online. It's quite lame.)