From the archives, w/e 28 May

13.46, Friday 28 May 2021

Blog posts this week from years gone by.

1 year ago

A month long conference is a neat concept (24 May 2020).

They’re moving on from the standard two day conference format … our online conference program will take place weekly, across a whole month.

I’m giving a talk next week which is broken up into 3 x 30 minute chunks across consecutive days. I still think there’s a lot to be explored in novel conference formats.

How I would put voice control in everything (26 May 2020).

Stick a timer in my stove, a switch in my light bulb, give each a super limited vocabulary, never connect to the internet, and only act when somebody is addressing you.

Also includes the idea of a dedicated attention sensor, so a device knows when it is being glanced at or pointed at.

Grocery shopping, localism, and last mile delivery (28 May 2020).

Corporations and startups will inevitably move hard into the last mile delivery space. How do we make sure it’s not shit?

The lockdown forced me into a kind of localism for groceries and I have to say I liked it.

9 years ago

Ze Frank on ugly (22 May 2012).

“In Myspace, millions of people have opted out of pre-made templates that ‘work’ in exchange for ugly. Ugly when compared to pre-existing notions of taste is a bummer. But ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool.”

A classic Ze Frank monologue on personal expression, and an idea I come back to again and again.

13 years ago

The geometry of music (26 May 2008).

Cause and effect are confused. Which comes first, the visualisation or the music? If Tymoczko watched a partner and I dancing, could he interpret the plan view of the ballroom as an orbifold, run his algorithms backwards, and play generated Chopin that was magically in sync with our improvisation?

Sadly most of the links in this post are broken. But the idea of a “reverse music visualiser” seems more achievable than it was when I wrote this post. Imagine staring out of a car window, and having the rhythms and regularities of passing traffic, street lighting, and clouds all style-transferred back onto Chemical Brothers beats played through your headphones…


Posts selected from the On This Day archive spelunking page. This is an experiment to see how to best include old posts in the current feed in a meaningful way, possibly as a regular Friday feature.

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