It’s very quiet here.
I can’t remember being more tired, or more pleased with why.
Category: Me
Antichronos
“What he came up with was three different temporal dimensions – the first moving very fast, at the speed of light, the second very slow and “vibrating slowly back and forth, as if the universe itself were a single string or bubble”, the third – antichronos – in reverse. We experience them as one, creating a three-way interference pattern, which accounts for sensations such as foresight, déjà vu, nostalgia and precognition. The compound nature of time, Robinson writes, “creates our perception of both transience and permanence, of being and becoming”. He’s shown the novel to people who are “much more serious about the time travel stuff” and they’re “having a blast”. “They immediately map my three strands of time onto their system. They think I’ve partially discovered the real thing,” he says gleefully.”
Ago weeks of couple a Utrecht in DxF2009 at gave I talk this to link to way nice a is which.
Get Excited And Make Things!
It’s fair to say this post is a little behind-the-times, but I finally want to get round to recording the story behind my “Get Excited & Make Things” image – and also releasing the files, which was always my intention…
I was a little frustrated with myself and the world one day, and went to sit in Hoxton Square to do the Guardian crossword as a remedy.
Flicking through the G2 section I came across a short article about the “Keep Calm & Carry On” WW2 poster phenomenon.
It occurred to me that this was exactly the wrong sentiment for this age – and in fact the stoicism it recommends was been viewed ironically in the main by those who purchased it.
I started sketching on the paper a contrary statement, where stiff upper lip was replaced by a stiff upper arm from soldering…
The royal crown was replaced by one made of spanners (or wrenches, for our yanqui friends) – and Get Excited & Make Things was born.
I posted it to flickr, where to date it has had over 90k views. It got turned into t-shirt of the week by my friends at Howies (and became their fastest selling shirt ever, apparently!) with the proceeds going towards their Do Lectures.
Then, an art print by Jen and friends at 20×200 – with proceeds going to Creative Commons.
Along with that, It got featured in various press articles, and there’s a flickr pool for spottings in the wild.
It’s still available via my mates at Mule Design – with the proceeds going to Smallcanbebig.org.
I only mention it’s success (though gratifying personally, obviously – and I’m very happy that it’s provided some small contributions to good causes) – because it seems that it has resonated with so many people.
And that’s the really amazing thing – that there might be a determination, en-masse – to really get the blood pumping and make our way out of the messes we’ve created.
With that in mind, I’m offering the original files under a CC-non-commercial, attribution, share-alike licence.
If you want to use the images for commercial means, we can talk of course – about you giving some donation to a good cause in exchange. I say that, as it’s cropped up in a few places being used without prior permission for commercial ends…
So here they are.
Thank you to everyone so far who has bought a shirt, a print – or just printed it out and stuck in up in their work place or college.
Please stay excited, please stay making.
Semagram
“In the next report I submitted, I suggested that the term ‘logogram’ was a misnomer because it implied that each graph represented a spoken word, when in fact the graphs didn’t correspond to our notion of spoken words at all. I didn’t want to use the term ‘ideogram’ either because of how it had been used in the past; I suggested the term ‘semagram’ instead.
It appeared that a semagram corresponded roughly to a written word in human languages: it was meaningful on its own, and in combination with other semagrams could form endless statements. We couldn’t define it precisely, but then no one had ever satisfactorily defined ‘word’ for human languages either. When it came to sentences in Heptapod B, though, things became much more confusing. The language had no written punctuation: it’s syntax was indicated in the way the semagrams were combined, and there was no need to indicate the cadence of speech. There was certainly no way to slice out subject-predicate pairings neatly to make sentences. A ‘sentence’ seemed to be whatever number of semagrams a heptapod wanted to join together; the only difference between a sentence and a paragraph, or a page, was size.
When a Heptapod B sentence grew fairly sizeable, its visual impact was remarkable. If I wasn’t trying to decipher it, the writing looked like fanciful praying mantids drawn in a cursive style, all clinging to each other to form an Escheresque lattice, each slightly different in its stance. And the biggest sentences had an effect similar to that of psychedelic posters: sometimes eye-watering, sometimes hypnotic.”
– “Story of your life“, Ted Chiang
This week we became BERG.
This is BERG.
From Business to Buttons, Malmo
My talk at “From Business To Buttons” in Malmo has been recorded and is online with all the rest of the event here.
It was a gentle ramble through some territory Tom Coates and myself explored last year, with some added detail about the Dopplr Personal Annual Report.
It’s about 40 minutes or so if you’re really bored…
Malmo was a blast (literally, in terms of the weather and horizontal rain) thanks for the invite and hospitality from the Business-to-Buttons crew, especially all the interaction design student volunteers I hung out with and pointed us to the best bars and art exhibits in the city, including the fantastic Sonic Youth exhibition I snuck away and saw…
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The Helsinki City Run
Registering for the Helsinki City Run, originally uploaded by moleitau.
is tomorrow, and I’m in it (with my Arphid chip…)
Thanks to everyone who has donated money in support at http://www.justgiving.com/moleitau: we’ve made about £700 for research into Parkinson’s Disease. Brilliant. I just have to run the 21k now, which according to this brilliant page on wikipedia, is about the length of Manhattan.
There’s still a little time left to donate if you want to pile some last-minute pressure on me…
My knees have joined Twitter
My knees have joined twitter, originally uploaded by moleitau.
I’ve got two weeks until I run my first half-marathon in Helsinki, and for reasons of disaster, debauchery, duty and plain-old laziness I’m well behind in my training.
So, I thought I would try some auto-cyber-bullying.
I’ve often said that my favourite people on twitter are inanimate objects, so I’ve created a twitter account for two things that won’t be animate for much longer: my knees.
The theory being that you can follow along the final two weeks of my training, and if you see me skipping or slacking, you can shout marine-corps-drill-instructor-full-meta-jacket-style abuse @moleitausknees.
In order to further-up-the-social-pressure, I’m running to raise money for The Parkinson’s Disease Society, so please do pop-along to my justgiving page and put something in the pot to make sure I finish…
Data as seductive material
I got invited to northern Sweden by the lovely folks at Umeå Institute of Design and Tellart.
It was a fantastic couple of days, where ideas were swapped, things were made and fine fun was had late into the sub-artic evening…
It was their first (and hopefully not the last) Spring Summit at the Umeå Institute of Design, entitled “Sensing and sensuality”.
I tried to come up with something on that theme, mainly of half-formed thoughts that I hope I can explore some more here and elsewhere in the coming months.
It’s called “Data as seductive material” and the presentation with notes is on slideshare, although I’ve been told that there will be video available of the entire day here with great talks from friends old and new.
Thank you so much to the faculty and students of Umeå Institute of Design, and mighty Matt Cottam of Tellart for the invitation to a wonderful event.
Arphid-sniffing Robot Portraiture
Muttering about mobile
What I wanted to say at the Mobile Web 2.0 conference panel, originally uploaded by moleitau.
Haven’t done much of it since leaving Nokia, and certainly didn’t get the chance at an awful event I got invited to speak on a panel at last year (see the sketch above); but did get to bang on about some ongoing obsessions and thoughts while climbing out of a terrible hangover at the PSFK Good Ideas Salon today. I think it was being taped, so that might be online at some point for you to laugh at. Also, got to catch Christian Nold speak which was great. Thanks to Piers Fawkes for the invitation.
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Update: a very nice write-up from Jemima Kiss of The Guardian
Petafloptimism 