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Kippi_sagt.jpg, originally uploaded by Flo Heiss.
Method man
Category: Humanity
Here 2.0: Big Here, Little Screen
Jason Kottke points to a remarkable post by Kevin Kelly entitled The Big Here, after the Eno-coined-counterpart to the Long Now – which shoots a diamond bullet through my thoughts for the last few months:
At the ultimate level, your home is a cell in an organism called a planet. All these levels interconnect. What do you know about the dynamics of this larger system around you? Most of us are ignorant of this matrix. But it is the biggest interactive game there is. Hacking it is both fun and vital.
In the post it goes on to take you through a quiz which examines your knowledge of your immediate environs, and the linkages it has to the wider ecosystem.
Here are the first three questions:
30 questions to elevate your awareness (and literacy) of the greater place in which you live:
1) Point north.
2) What time is sunset today?
3) Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap.
Kelly prefaces this with a positioning of the quiz as one of his “cool tools”:
“The intent of this quiz is to inspire you to answer the questions you can’t initially. I’d like to collect and then post the best step-by-step suggestions about how to answer a particular question. These are not answers to the quiz, but recommended paths on how one might most efficiently answer the question locally. Helpful websites which can provide local answers are wanted. Because of the severe specificity of local answers, the methods provided should be as general as possible. The emerging list of answer-paths will thus become the Cool Tool.”
So far, so good.
Wonderful, even.
My immediate thought though, reading both Jason’s post and Kevin Kelly’s mission is why the hell is this not on a mobile?
So – I over the summer am going to try and knit something together to get it there.
- I imagine it will be pretty easy (i.e. within the reach of my terrifyingly-bad coding skills) just to port the text quiz to a mobile using S60 python as a standalone experience.
- It might be easy enough then to both launch web resources from the quiz on the mobile device, and perhaps post answers in some easily-aggregated format to back out to the web from whoever takes the quiz.
- however might be more tricky…
What I immediately imagined was the extension of this quiz into the fabric of the near-future mobile and it’s sensors – location (GPS, CellID), orientation (accelerometers or other tilt sensors), light (camera), heat (Nokia 5140’s have thermometers…), signal strength, local interactions with other devices (Bluetooth, uPnP, NFC/RFID) and of course, a connection to the net.
The near-future mobile could become a ‘tricorder’ for the Big Here – a daemon that challenges or channels your actions in accordance and harmony to the systems immediately around you and the ripples they raise at larger scales.
It could be possible (but probably with some help from my friends) to rapidly-prototype a Big Here Tricorder using s60 python, a bluetooth GPS module, some of these scripts, some judicious scraping of open GIS data and perhaps a map-service API or two.
One thought that springs to mind would be to simply geotag the results of a quiz (assuming the respondent takes the quiz in-situ!) and upload that to a geowiki, something like Place-O-Pedia.
It might be delightful to see the varying answers from valiant individuals clustered in a location and inspire some collaboration on getting to the ‘right’ answers about their collective bit of the big here or the issues raised by the route there more importantly perhaps.
One open question would be if this ‘Big Here Tricorder’ where realised, would it genuinely raise an individual or community’s awareness of their local ecosystem and it’s connections at other scales? “Every extension is also an amputation” etc.
Well – we won’t know unless we build it.
While we’ve had a couple of year’s noise about Where2.0, I reckon there’s a hell of a lot of mileage and some real good could come of focussing on Here2.0… which gives me a nice little summer project – thanks Kevin, Brian and Jason…
Takeaway
A while back I had an idle wish for a firefox extension that autogenerated a 2d barcode (semacode or other) from the URL of the current page/thing/resource, so I could quickly snarf it into my mobile and take it with me.
Instantly-mobile deeplinky goodness with no fiddly typing.*
A random thought tonight while staring at my browser: how much info could I store in a favicon, if I made it a 2d barcode?
A favicon is 16×16, and readable datamatrix 2d codes go down to 10×10 and 3mm. Of course, readable here means by an industrial scanner from a crisp printed sticker, rather than a mobile phone and a fuzzy LCD display.
Here’s the semacode for the wikipedia entry on Blogjects (it was the 2nd workshop that Julian and Nicholas have run on those blighters this week, so it seemed an appropriate choice!)
As you can see, a fair slice of the data is cropped if we try for 16×16 in order to make a favicon.
Still – I wonder if there’s anything doable there? Could something useful and/or diverting be done in this little space in the address field?
If not, my original lazyweb wish for a firefox extension to create instant takeaway datashadows still stands…
—-
* Yes, before Charlie gets all-up-in-my-face (;-) – I know winksite has semacode integration – but I want EVERYTHING I visit to have a code ,whether they like it or not!
Worldchanging, unfortunately.
“We now have the capacity to literally change the relationship between the Earth and the sun.”
Now if only that nice turn-of-phrase were being used in the audacious-superfuture-planetary-scale-engineering-Dyson-Sphere sense…
And, via LMG, here’s the trailer to Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth”
The Super 8 ages of man
Momus has been watching Super 8 home movies:
“I’ve been watching these movies in tandem with The Private Life of Plants, the David Attenborough TV series from 1995. Trees, of course, can live hundreds of years. Watching humans, in comparison, is like watching something speeded up, fleeting. We’re born, we reproduce, we die. We’re gone in a flash; there’s a yellow flare, some numbers, some leader and the spool runs off the bobbin.”
Lovely.
Governing the High Frontier
The NASA Ames Summer Studies of Space Habitats from the mid to late 1970s have recently been linked by BoingBoing and O’Reilly’s Make Blog, principly for the evocative, nostalgic images therein.
The text of the Summer Studies makes for fascinating read though. Here’s an extract from the 1975 study, suggesting that the future inhabitants of the L5 Lagrangian Libration point would be left to orginate their own forms of government and policing…
“Distance and isolation also affect the governance and social order. Whether space colonization is a unilateral effort on the part of the United States or a cross-national enterprise, it will most likely be sponsored by a public or quasipublic organization with a bureaucratic structure which permeates the early settlement. The sense of isolation may stimulate the organizational development of communities away from the organizational form of the sponsor as the interests and life circumstances of a rapidly growing population change and develop. The form of governance depends very much on the preferences of the settlers, in much the same way as allowances for individual choice have been emphasized in other considerations of life in space.
Maintenance of order and of internal as well as external security initially falls to the Earth-based sponsoring organizations and then to the organized community which is expected to rise early in the colony’s history. The small size of the settlement, combined with a rather precarious manufactured environment, may emphasize a concern for internal security. Any individual or small group could, in prospect, undertake to destroy the entire colony by opening the habitat to surrounding space, by disrupting the power supply, or by other actions which have few corresponding forms in Earth-based settings. Whatever organizational form the colonists evolve, it must be able to assure the physical security of the habitat and its supporting systems, and this need for security may infringe upon other desirable features of the colony and its operation.”
Surely there has to be a TV series or two here – Deadwood in Space? I guess a Russell T. Davies reboot of StarCops is out of the question…
Spectacular baleen
Jim Rossignol on millennium people:
“Iâm more concerned by the way all this stuff (from the bright shiny geek theory to the starving refugee story) slides off the suburbs and backwaters of the developed world. I canât help thinking the strongest aphorisms of the 21st century arenât to be found in Sterlingâs ânation borders are like speedbumpsâ and âIâm living out of my laptopâ, or any of the grim analysis about disease and prejudicial madness in the poorest regions. Instead I find myself catching the occasional observations made about a rather more mundane future faced by millions â the Ballardian future of local boredom and widespread repetition. Itâs The New Quiet Desperation, these masses. Theyâre working in the offices and commuting home to a hillside development near Canterbury. Itâs a small suburban home. Hermitic and yet engulfed. Fish out the mobile phone and order three types of vegetarian pizza (illusion of comparative health value judgement in junkfood) to eat while watching Lost, or Invasion or some other sophisticated entertainment. And these middling classes need to be distracted, so theyâre all getting good at filter feeding: weâre bottom dwellers, down in the cultural silt â rapidly getting sensitive enough to root out the most nutritious, the most interesting sediment, the most worthwhile jetsam that floats down from the higher strata. And it doesnât have to have a jot of intellectual bulk, we can live on spectacle alone. As long as the flow is steady.”
I’m reminded of Molly Wright Steenson and Anne Galloway‘s thoughts on suburbia and exurbia from a couple of years ago – that’s the real place needing attention and study, and perhaps design intervention, not groovy hipster city districts or grimly fascinating favellas.
Before and after science (fiction)
To get going again, some words from our new sponsors.
John Thackara, “In the Bubble” (if you haven’t read it yet, why not?):
“…switch attention from science-[fiction] dominated futures to social fictions in which imagined new contexts enrich and otherwise familiar world. Design scenarios are powerful… because they make a possible future familiar and enable the participation of potential users in conceiving and shaping what they want”
H.G Wells, in an 1891 essay “The rediscovery of the unique”:
“Science is a match that man has just got alight. He thought he was in a room – in moments of devotion, a temple – and that his light would be reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought into harmony. It is a curious sensation, now that the preliminary splutter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands and just aglimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of all that human comfort and beauty he anticipated – darkness still.”
T.S Eliot (in his 1940 commentary on H.G. Well’s ‘The first men in the moon’):
“We can have very little hope of contributing to any immediate social change; and we are more disposed to see our hope in modest and local beginnings, than in transforming the whole world at once. On the other hand , though the immediate aims are less glittering, they may prove less deceptive: for Mr. Wells, putting all his money on the near future, is walking very near the edge of despair; while we must keep alive aspirations which can remain valid throughout the longest and darkest period of universal calamity and degradation”
Last word to Mr. Wells:
“If the world does not please you, you can change it.”
To Do List
Reposted from Bruce Sterling’s Viridian List, BP’s Lord Browne in Fortune magazine on why humanity better start with it’s GTD:
“Build 700 nuclear stations to replace fossil-fuel-
burning power plants, or increasing the use of solar
power by a factor of 700, or stopping all deforestation
and doubling present efforts at reforestation. Achieve
all three of these, and pull off four more equally
large-scale reallocations of capital and
infrastructure, and the world would probably stabilize
its carbon emissions.”
Ay yi yi.
The Grim Meathook Future
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Joshua Ellis, republished by Jim Rossignol:
âFeeding poor people is useful tech, but itâs not very sexy and it wonât get you on the cover of Wired. Talk about it too much and you sound like an earnest hippie. So nobody wants to do that.
âThey want to make cell phones that can scan your personal measurements and send them real-time to potential sex partners. Because, you know, the f*cking Japanese teenagers love it, and Japanese teenagers are clearly the smartest people on the planet.
âThe upshot of all of this is that the Future gets divided; the cute, insulated future that Joi Ito and Cory Doctorow and you and I inhabit, and the grim meathook future that most of the world is facing, in which they watch their squats and under-developed fields get turned into a giant game of Counterstrike between crazy faith-ridden jihadist motherf*ckers and crazy faith-ridden American redneck motherf*ckers, each doing their best to turn the entire world into one type of fascist nightmare or another.
âOf course, nobody really wants to talk about that future, because itâs depressing and not fun and doesnât have Fischerspooner doing the soundtrack. So everybody pretends they donât know what the future holds, when the unfortunate fact is that â unless we start paying very serious attention â it holds what the past holds: a great deal of extreme boredom punctuated by occasional horror and the odd moment of grace.â
Petafloptimism 