Category: Nonsense

Veen Blog Meme

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Veen suggested this: What are the titles of the posts you have in your draft folder of shame?

The things where you’ve just thought of the title, but written nothing to back it up? The momentary points of self-deluded genius that in the cold light of day you thought better of?

From the last five years of rubbish, here’s just the titles of what I still have in draft:

  • 5am London
  • Who’s zooming who?
  • Short, steep and sticky
  • Tracking/emergence
  • Pop will eat itself
  • “There goes the fear”
  • (Rip, Mix,) Burn, Hollywood, Burn
  • Web services and brand
  • Which side are you on?
  • What dogs hear
  • DPH2004
  • The semiotics of CeBIT
  • Geoflow

Together now, these make now sense to me at least, as a list with a certain… resonance.

But individually?

Nah. Still nothing.

Wikipedia: we really haute to know better

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Evidence is building that Nicholas Carr’s argument against peer-production of knowledge by amateurs is dead-on.

Today’s Guardian rounds up a panel of experts to score the wikipedia entries against their deep domain knowledge in their somewhat-pointedly-titled “Can you trust Wikipedia”

It’s broadly good news for the free, open and amateur with scores in the 6’s and 7’s out of 10, with one 5 for the article on ‘encyclopedias’ as judged by an ex-editor of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Could the harnessing of “collective intelligence” not just be the wishful thinking of venerable west-coast technohippies, but something that could help humankind out of the beginnings of what may turn out to be it’s most difficult century, a.k.a. The Grim Meathook Future?

Maybe, maybe…

Until – we get to a 0 out of 10.

It’s from Alexandra Shulman, editor of Vogue:

“Broadly speaking, it’s inaccurate and unclear. It talks about haute couture and then lists a large number of ready-to-wear designers. As a very, very broad-sweep description there are a few correct facts included, but every value judgment it makes is wrong.”

We’re so HOSED!!!

The shipping bones

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Saturday morning – Foe remarked on my Pavlovian response to the opening bars of “Sailing By”, the music that introduces the late-night shipping forecast on BBC Radio 4.

Usually I am asleep by the end of it, or well on my way. Sometimes I can last until around South Utsire before I’m snoring like a taser’d walrus.

We have a DAB digital radio by the side of the bed, and Foe’s idea was to have the latest shipping forecast spooled on there for on-demand consumption, whenever you needed a nap.

I went one further, suggesting it gets spooled to your mobile, in order to take it where you want – a nap in the park, or if you’re been travelling to other timezones – a digital, portable melatonin replacement to get you to sleep wherever, whenever. The audio could be transmitted by bone-conduction under your pillow, as not to disturb others.

Foe then trumped this suggestion by taking the bone-conduction theme to its natural conclusion – the shipping forecast implanted, resonant in one’s bones; the offshore outlook of your sceptred isle sending you a-slumber whenever your head rested on your shoulder…

Hmm

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In an ideal world… Nanotalby, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

Rather than a Rokr (and you have money to burn, can’t wait for n91, live in Japan)- how about Chris‘s idea of sticking a Nano on the back of the Talby? Probably still thinner that the Rokr.

Depressing quote of the day for anyone working in mobile experience design from Engadget:

1:27pm – Garriques [President of Motorola’s mobile phone division] on the ROKR: “It’s a great ARPU story.”

Sheesh.

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UPDATE: Peterme asks what “ARPU” is. I apologise – it’s jargon, much used in the cellphone industry, for “Average Revenue Per User” – the grail is finding applications and services that drive it skyward, and mobile music is seen by a lot of the industry as one of those.

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.

Meatspace is the place

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From a blistering K-punk on Live8 (which includes a reference to “Teleo-Marxism”- awesome!), comes a line that I plan to pull out of it’s current K-punkian context and transplant to the field of tangible/embodied interaction design to drop as much as possible:

“In addition to anything else, to ignore the crucial functioning of the meat in the machine is poor cybernetics.”


I want to be invited to a college design crit as soon as possible just to be able to say that.

The day after…

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July 4th is important of course in some parts of the world, but the front page of the wikipedia tells us that on July 5th in

  • 1687, The Principia was first published
  • 1951, Shockley invented the transistor
  • 1954, the first TV BBC News bulletin was broadcast

A good day.

Size of a…?

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KABOOM!

So far, according to media reports, the business-end of Deep Impact that has been launched to hit comet Tempel-1 is the size of

  • A wine cask (NASA)
  • A washing machine (The Guardian, CNNi, News.bbc.co.uk*)
  • An oil-drum (BBC Radio 4)

I will keep this list updated with more popular-media-sizing-analogs for space probes (half-a dolphin!).
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* In keeping with other white-goods in North America, are US washing-machines bigger than their UK equivalents?