After I was rambling on about definitions of information and entropy the other day, I remembered the master’s ruminations on that theme relating to September 11th 2001.
» Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie: This is Information
[via the awesome linkmachinego]
Azeem has posted some very interesting and provocative thoughts about what the BBC as an 800lb non-commercial, non-governmental public-service gorilla could be doing in the networked world if it put it’s mind to it.
Being a lowly employee of aforementioned venerable public-service organisation, I couldn’t possibly comment or contribute to this debate
You could though.
A piece by Nico Colchester who died, age 49, last week:
“Crunchy systems are those in which small changes have big effects leaving those affected by them in no doubt whether they are up or down, rich or broke, winning or losing, dead or alive. The going was crunchy for Captain Scott as he plodded southwards across the sastrugi. He was either on top of the snow-crust and smiling, or floundering thigh-deep. The farther south he marched the crunchier his predicament became.
Sogginess is comfortable uncertainty. The modern Scott is unsure how deeply he is in it. He can radio for an airlift, or drop in on an American early-warning station for a hot toddy. The richer a society becomes, the soggier its systems get. Light-switches no longer turn on or off: they dim.”
» FT.com/The economist: Crunchiness By Nico Colchester
[thanks Tom]
» A Cultural Ecology of Nanotechnology : Bonnie A. Nardi
[thanks Alice!]
This is incredible stuff, found via boingboing:
“I was at a conference in Washington, DC on Friday and Saturday. Participants included some people who are reasonably plugged in to the Washington political process. I was stunned to hear one of these folks sum up the Washington conventional wisdom like this:
“The political dialog today is that the general purpose computer is a threat, not only to copyright but to our entire future.”“
Now, that’s a powerful statement. Mr. Felten, who’s blog this features on, goes on to say, quite rightly I believe:
“If I could take just one concept from computer science and magically implant it into the heads of everybody in Washington — I mean really implant it, so that they understood the idea and its importance in the same way that computer scientists do — it would be the role of the general-purpose computer. I would want them to understand, most of all, why there is no such thing as an almost-general-purpose computer.
If you’re designing a computer, you have two choices. Either you make a general-purpose computer that can do everything that every other computer can do; or you make a special-purpose device that can do only an infinitesimally small fraction of all the interesting computations one might want to do. There’s no in-between.”
I’ve stumbled around this exact topic here before… and like Mr. Felten, I’m still struggling with how to make tangible and explainable what would be lost to us all if we don’t defend the notion of the universal machine.
When I was a kid in Thatcher’s Britain of the mid-eighties, there was a societal pressure on parents to buy computers, to understand the new technology, for kids to hack and fiddle and type-in pages and pages of BASIC into their machines in the expectation of playing a poorly-rendered Frogger knock-off, only to be frustrated when a syntax error in line 126 scuppered hours of data entry…
This from the excellent ZXGoldenYears on the ‘year zero’ of 1982:
“Regardless of the belief of parents that computers in their homes would be used for educational purposes, the eventual use that nearly all of them were put to was games. Unlike the rigid forms of genre that were found in the arcades, home computers offered an opportunity to experiment with new ideas. There was an ?anything goes? attitude that was exhilarating and liberating.”
Is that climate possible to recapture? These days, computer games are big, technically complex acts of creation and occasionally have as much, if not more riding on them as Hollywood blockbusters. Computers themselves are complex to operate just at an everyday level of working with applications and documents, let alone creating or coding.
To most people, myself included, they’re pretty much unfathomable.
Give us consoles and consumer electronics and they’re more than satified in the main. There’s a yawning chasm between their user-experience of partially-universal machines and universal machines.
Where am I headed? Well – maybe there’s some ways back to making the potential of the universal plain and making people passionate about protecting that. Above and beyond the education and promotion of the concepts through the skills of visual explainers and storytellers, that is.
Some threads:
So here’s the thing…
Is this just the web? Ach. Time for the pub. Also – I really have to stop using the word ‘redux’ in as the titles to my posts. Lazy git.
» Freedom-to-tinker.com: The Fallacy of the Almost-General-Purpose Computer
This is great – an entire book on trust, cooperation and social systems from the University of Oxford Dept. of Sociology has been made available for download: “Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, edited by Diego Gambetta.”
“The editor and contributors have decided that the book should be available to download free of charge. One of the original reasons for the volume was to try and understand the difficulties of developing economies, and we therefore feel that the volume should be accessible to scholars and students of less privileged countries. Given that we incurred some cost in producing the digital version, and would like to fund further electronic publishing, we would be grateful if those readers who find the volume of value (and can afford it) would send us a contribution of $10.”
Random, sample chapter headings:
You get the picture.
» Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, edited by Diego Gambetta. [thanks Dan!]
From McSweeney’s interview with Kurt Vonnegut:
‘Q: It is a weird moment in history, don’t you think?
Kurt Vonnegut: Well, my late brother Bernie, who was a great expert on weather at one point he knew more about tornadoes than anybody else on the planet, I imagine was always approached by people who knew his background and wanted him to be an expert about it. “Bernie, isn’t this weather unusual?” And he would say, “The weather is always unusual.” I mean, this is a very special time in history, but every time is.’
» McSweeney’s: The best jokes are dangerous: interview with Kurt Vonnegut, pt. 1
I’d be very scared of Matt Webb. A long and thoughtful post about games and rulespaces at interconnected.org/home
From the excellent growing debate and commentary section “The People Vs Copyright” at Opendemocracy.net:
“Quite simply, then, copyright turns symbolic forms into property, and market conditions ensure it is held and exploited by corporations. But this is not a reality which sits very easily with public opinion. For while the concept of private property in tangible goods, or chattels, is deeply ingrained in Western societies, the same cannot be said about symbolic works. A strong consensus, emerging first in the Enlightenment, has it that culture should circulate freely. The Romantic movement then contributes the idea that art and commerce are opposed, that the artist is in heroic opposition to the drive for profit.
It is something of a contradiction, then, that in the modern era the figure of the Romantic artist is invoked to justify copyright the very basis of commerce in culture.”
Petafloptimism 