Category: Sufficiently-Advanced Lifestyle

Takeaway

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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?

semafav_URL

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!)

blogject_semacrop

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…

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* 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!

Governing the High Frontier

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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

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Jim Rossignol on millennium people:

“I’m 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 can’t help thinking the strongest aphorisms of the 21st century aren’t to be found in Sterling’s ‘nation borders are like speedbumps’ and ‘I’m living out of my laptop’, 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 – the Ballardian future of local boredom and widespread repetition. It’s The New Quiet Desperation, these masses. They’re working in the offices and commuting home to a hillside development near Canterbury. It’s 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 they’re all getting good at filter feeding: we’re bottom dwellers, down in the cultural silt – 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 doesn’t 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)

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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

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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.

Geo-cashing

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A nice thought from Will Davies:

“…once one is reduced back to fivers and coins, the city feels very different all over again. One moves from a post-pay to a pre-pay world, in which anonymity is won at the expense of convenience, something the government is convinced ‘the public’ don’t want (William Heath has queried this repeatedly). It is a pain in the arse in many respects, but you do also get that bizarre, slightly retro feeling of being able to wander off into a crowd and be anyone you want, like the first time you go to the shops on your own to spend your pocket money. The flaneur, for instance, would surely have to use real pounds and pence (alright, francs and centimes) rather than an Oyster card or Visa. There is something rather wonderful about cash, in that if money talks, then nothing else has to.

Privacy arguments too often revolve around Big Brother vs libertarians, with extreme examples being bandied around by both sides. The ethical experience of privacy – or disconnection from the network – is that of a different type of freedom from the one being offered by the network. It’s the freedom to embrace contingency and inconvenience, rather than the freedom to get what you want. I propose a ‘Leave Your Wallet and Mobile Phone at Home Day’, in which once a year, individuals hit the streets with nothing other than twenty quids worth of low-tech, Victorian cash. Then see what happens.”

I’ve done this a couple of times myself, both intentionally and unintentionally. It makes for a different flow of time, and thoughts than you have when instantly connectable to your bank account or your friends.

Further thoughts on the art of disconnecting from Rajat at Rootburn.

Where (are the people) 2.0

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Liz’s notes on the recent O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference, even though she says they are sketchy, give a lot of food for thought (and they are funny, but it probably helps if you can imagine Liz recounting them, arms-a-waving) – I’m looking forward to her promised post-4th-of-July reflections.

Overall, it sounds like it was a fascinating carpet-mindbombing of the state-of-the-art of geographical technology and it’s effects on business and society. Wish I’d seen Nathan Eagle, and Kevin Slavin in particular.

One line in her notes will be thought about (and probably written about) much more by me:

“as always, they [O’Reilly] think that the difference between the desires of early and late adopters is one of size, not kind”

Crossing the Chasm was first published 14 years ago. Pre-web, pre-mobile. And yet the tech industry is still set in it’s belief that the mainstream will inevitably, steadily, globally – follow the alpha-geek early adopter. Surely it’s about time the Valley’s “Whig” telling of technological progress is tempered with the wiggly nature of human desire.

Clayton Cubitt interviews Tom Carden on “Generative Art”

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Tom and Clayton collaborated on a set of beautiful images this year, and now Clayton has published a short interview with Tom on his site.

Tom discusses with Clayton his reaction to the finished work and the process they shared to create it; but also his route to generative art, it’s history and his influences:

“Before mass access to computers, people used other hardware, tools, toys and rule-sets to make algorithmic and process-driven art – pendulums, spirographs, Indian rangolis, Celtic knots, mandalas and so on – and a lot of the methods people use in computer generated art were investigated by mathematicians by hand before computers were available, such as Fibonacci series and the Golden Ratio. Casey Reas has looked into Kinetic Sculpture in some depth, and that’s something I keep intending to read up on. I’m sure that before computers were around the same things that people like about generative art were satisfied by fireworks, fountains, may poles, crop circles, wax lamps and oscilloscopes. Grid-based games such as Go and Othello are very reminiscent of the patterns created by certain types of Cellular Automata, too. The main advantage with using a computer is speed, such that there is now scope for using any of these systems over long periods of time and with minute variations.”

Beautiful stuff – congratulations to both artists.

Arthouse biotech

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is a phrase that’s been blowing around in my head since I was in Austin, talking with Otwell and Boyd (which sounds like a great law firm, or a promising wacky misfit information science / buddy-cop pilot)

At /play, where nonsense lives, I wrote this:

Raiding the 21st century

The next step in cut-up culture
Arthouse biotech
Wetwork warhols
Nanobiological burroughs
Performance creationism
Xoological situationism
Some assembly required
Crick, Watson, Double-dee, Steinski.
Intelligent design as artistic statement
Playing god, 5 times a week with 2 matinees
Oryx
Crake
Cut
Splice
Mashup mammals
Rip/Mix/Birth

Ellis writes tales of the Spidergoat.

Reality is entering the Silver-Age.

If you think it’s been getting wierd around here lately, and I should really be writing reams and reams about bloody tags or something; then tough.

When the going gets wierd – the wierd apply for patents.