How many of you, like me, had shelves full of books full of images of suburban life being enjoyed on the edge of plexiglass toroid in geostationery orbit?
You can relive the optimism of you childhood when you thought the future would be “spandex jackets, one for everyone” at NASA’s “Space Colony Art from the 1970s” page!
“on 28 April, Beverly Hughes, Minister for Citizenship and Immigration, responded to a parliamentary question about ID cards and only mentioned the earlier 2,000 responses.
She said: “The responses have been about 2:1 in favour of introducing a scheme”.
In late May Home Secretary David Blunkett seemed to signal that the government was determined to introduce ID cards. He bluntly declared: “I want them because I do want to know who is here.”
Stand is now trying to get official word about what will be done with the 5,000 responses it passed on.”
Unbelievable.
Matrix-franchise visual effects supervisor John Gaeta watches us wander into dreamland:
‘The subtleties of reality manipulation in your life are all around, and they’re becoming denser and more sophisticated and more intimidating every day,” Mr. Gaeta said. “I’ve often said that the visual effects technicians of today will be the social engineers of the future.”‘
» NYT: Bullet Time Again: The Wachowskis Reload [Reg. Reqd.]
Paul informed us in the pub last night that TiVo PVRs are going for around 300 GBP on eBay. Prior to being discontinued in this country, they were being sold at the knock-down price of 100 GBP on the high-street. Contrary to the received wisdom in old-media circles, the market illustrates the demand not being supplied…?
“Our artists no longer try to put us in touch with God and the eternal, but with the infinity of our own archives.”
-James Flint on Brian Eno
I’m in Santa Clara at ETCON. Last year, I travelled down from San Francisco on the CalTrain, through a landscape I was not familiar with the reality of, but had visted a thousand times in movies and on the television: American Suburbia.
This year is a little different, as I have a hire car. A four-wheeled symphony in biege, it’s transformed my view of the burbscape.
Last year, I was stuck in the hotel, and at the mercy of those who could give me a ride in their cars. This year, I am the master of my own velocity. I can go where I want, when I want.
My when’s been screwed-up by the jetlag, and my where by the burbscape. There’s no centre to the sprawl. The “cities” of Santa Clara, Sunnyvale and San Jose spread their edges into each other, seen from the freeway. Signage is the only declaration of division; the only tell-tale of the territory.
“There’s no there, there” as Gertrude Stein said. No sense of place or centre. Impossible to find, impossible to feel. Reyner Banham christened this “autopia” in “Los Angeles: the architecture of four ecologies”. Built around the car, and the freedom of movement that promises. Radically decentralising and dehumanising the intersitial space and arteries of the city.
I’d read his and other accounts of this ecology, this mental and physical landscape, but to experience it is disturbing. Driving to the hotel yesterday, it finally came home to me exactly how radical the Segway Human Transporter is within this context. It always seemed kind of cool to me, but being a european city dweller, used to the walkable city; and moreover – a visitor to walkable American cities, such as NYC and SF; it was a revelation.
Coindentally, outside our room this morning lay USAToday, with a cover splash on the design of American cities being bad for people’s health and lifestyle:
“Why don’t Americans walk anywhere?
Old answer: They’re lazy.
New answer: They can’t.
There is no sidewalk outside the front door, school is 5 miles away, and there’s a six-lane highway between home and the supermarket.
Many experts on public health say the way neighborhoods are built is to blame for Americans’ physical inactivity — and the resulting epidemic of obesity. “
and further on in the article:
“Why you can’t walk there from here:
* Spread-out neighborhoods. Bigger houses on bigger lots mean neighborhoods stretch beyond walking distance for doing errands.
* Zoning. Residential neighborhoods are far from jobs and shopping centers, even schools.
* Reign of cars. Roads are built big and busy. Intersections and crosswalks are rare. Shopping centers and office parks are set in the middle of big parking lots, all of which have become dangerous places to walk. In many cul-de-sac suburbs and along shopping strips, sidewalks don’t exist.
Suddenly, the crowded city looks healthy.”
» USAToday: The way cities and suburbs are developed could be bad for your health by Martha T. Moore
Fabulous post from WDavies in iSociety‘s continuing quest to examine the reliance of the networked society on emergent GoogleTruth. He attended a seminar/discussion about the influence of the kind of knowledge and ideas produced by policy thinktanks on society, which includes this fascinating list of characteristics:
“The type of knowledge produced by LSE and Demos is defined as:
- vehicular not ultimate [particularly interesting idea: this knowledge is not expected to remain valid, but to be a useful way of producing further knowledge by drawing interesting people together; its constantly snowballing and fragmenting]
- diagnostic not predictive
- meaning rich/information poor
- communicative not representational
- transient not timeless
- inclusive not polarising“
All it ever takes is a view well-placed /stutter/edit/ a few well-placed, finely-crafted, meaning-rich/info-poor Oblaat-shielded memebullets… The world is slicked with the vaz, and everything slides. Goodnight, United Nations.
My emboldening:
“Opifer Ltd found globally around thirty different schoolbook series for newcomers and sent them to East Timor for evaluation. The evaluation
team, which consisted of local teachers, finally came down in favour of the
Finnish book series.“The fact that they wanted the books in a politically neutral language definitely contributed to the selection outcome. Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesian, English and French are all associated with colonialism”, Billany explains.
The best asset of the Finnish Opin Itse books is its illustrations. Furthermore, there isn’t that much text to the books. The teacher can pretty much decide on the actual language of instruction.“
If anyone in Finland is reading this, I’d love to see a couple of these illustrations.
» Children in East Timor learn Finnish from schoolbooks [Thanks Fiona]
This is a nice short read on maps and territory:
“The map is simplified to make it legible. In so doing, the author imbues it with his own vision of the world and his own priorities.
Maps are subject to all kinds of manipulation, from the crudest to the most subtle. They are eminently political objects, and governments rightly consider them an effective propaganda tool.”
Compare with Rashmi‘s:
“it is incorrect to think that Recommender Systems cannot have an agenda, or less of an agenda than categorization. Recommender Systems are explicitly designed to encourage people to buy. Often, they are the technique that helps the telemarketer suggest another product to you in a late evening phone call. In contrast browse, or search systems are much more self-directed. Recommender System algorithms are fine tuned for marketing and sales purposes not for helping you discover information. “
We’ve got to make our navigation, search, taxonomy, user-interface – everything as ‘impartial’ as possible, whilst still making it buzz and fizz enough to get people involved and active within the system. We’ve just started our detail design phase, so these thoughts will be at the front of our minds.
» Le Monde Diplomatique: A political look at territory [via Demos Greenhouse
Storing in public a rough note of an ultracrepidatary half-formed thought/position had/held talking with Tony:
Professional craft is a response to scarcity. Where there is no scarcity, there is no need for professional craft. It becomes personal based on subjective drivers. Opinions, points-of-view, and reportage are now non-scarce. In the post-postfilter world, what professional crafts do we look to?
Petafloptimism 