Author: moleitau

Future imperfect

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Found by Simon Roberts, this FT article on the futility of trend-watching:

The future is unknowable because it depends on people and because people reflect, have will, make mistakes, co-operate and change their minds and ways. The past turns into one of many possible futures through human agency. The way to understand what is happening in the world is not to draw trajectories on paper but to ask what people are thinking and doing in their own lives and collective endeavours.

I think is what most teams that think about ‘futures’ for a living do, however. The outputs of processes such as scenario planning explicitly create ‘many possible futures’ as navigational aids, not pre-plotted courses to be slavishly followed.

I’m not sure you can call it “Virtual Earth”

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I’m not sure you can call it "Virtual Earth", originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

If this is what you get when you search for London.

I love that there are places called “Sublimity City” and “Deer Lick” neighbouring the great metropolis.

Things I dearly wish I had today

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A partial list:

  • An understandable guide to the intricacies of aliasadm
  • A ‘delete all from spam folder’ button in gmail
  • the phone number of the gmail product manager to:
    (a) ask for a ‘delete all from spam folder’ button in gmail
    (b) ask them to delete all 380849 spam emails from my spam folder for me so I don’t have to do it 100 at a time, and sidestepping the resulting 7616 clicks necessary to do so

I’ve mailed gmail support already, before you ask.

Argh.

Hard to beat

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Hard to beat

It’s taken a while this year for there to be a ‘sound of the summer’, but for me it’s got to be Hard-Fi’s “Hard to Beat”: poppy, danceable, tough, rough and sweet – with an obligatory reference to ‘rocking the city‘:

Can you feel it?
Rocking the city,
Ah yeah,
Straight out of nowhere-ness,
Like a fist,
Can’t resist you, oh no

Winner.

Doh-decahubris

moleitau

I’ve just managed to fairly painlessly import five years of writing into wordpress. Lots of pictures are missing though, and I’m not sure I have copies of them. Also, the effortless import process brought in all my typepad categories – which has created a librarian’s nightmare in the sidebar.

I realised this month that I will have been working on the web for 10 years, and speaking my brains at /work for 5 of those. No wonder I’m knackered.

Dr. Jonathan Miller

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Jonathan Miller
0wnzored “Start The Week” this morning.

This week’s edition has been a cracking listen – with the good Dr. Miller taking over the interlocution from Andrew Marr, effectively.

A great exchange with Laurie Taylor, on the death of, well, Death in consumer society – is topped by a quote during a discussion around George Pendle’s book about John Parsons and early rocket science – on why rocketry attracted occultists (Parsons, as well as co-founding the JPL, was a leader of the O.T.O.!) and iconoclasts in the early 20th C:

“The cosmos is a deeply dangerous thing to think about – into it, vacant minds expand…”

Very, very good.

Flickring TED

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Punting TEDsters, originally uploaded by The Kitten’s Toe.

As an addendum to the previous post – although there appears to be little written on blogs about TED Global, there are a whopping 254 pictures tagged as TED Global on Flickr.

The attendees, while too engrossed to write, were still able to snap away… Including this one of extropian anti-aging beard-king Aubrey De Grey on a punt!

Thread-bare TED

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I’ve become so used to being able to read about conferences and events online via the flying fingers of bloggers, that it’s a mild shock not to be able to find anything from TED Global in Oxford.

There have been a few reports by actual reporters, especially on the talks by big hitters like Dawkins, but little of the warp and weft of the threads of an event which the unstructured event notes of bloggers excel at capturing.

By coincidence I ran into Jyri, who had been in the UK attending TED Global, while waiting for my my flight back to Helsinki.

We spent the flight back chatting – and he told me that people with laptops had been asked to leave the front rows of the TED audience, as their LCD-bathed faces were disturbing the illustrious speakers.

How quaint!

In fact, all of TED seems like a quaint throwback to the mid-1990’s – from the lack of blogging/online participation to the wildly hubristic theme (‘Ideas big enough to change the world’) to the $4k price-tag.

Of course, all these factors are connected – the lack of online participation, the high-concept theme and price tag adding to the allure of the conference equivalent of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.

And, all this of course, is just sourgrapery from someone incredibly envious of those who could attend – and someone who rather enjoyed the mid-1990’s…