I’m not about to turn into one of those corporate evangelist bloggers, but I have to say this is pretty cool. Nokia have announced GPS snap-on covers for their 5140 model, which has the ability to send annotated GPS waypoints as SMS. Potentially connecting SMS hackery to geowankery.

If they are cheap enough, and could reach a sufficient mass of urban explorers, this could inspire a wave of ground-up collaborative mapping efforts.

The covers even make the jock-friendly ‘active sports phone’ acquire a geek-chic, in a kind of smokey-black Borg way…

Elizabeth has a great post on her blog (which is rapidly becoming a favourite) about the orthodoxy of ubicomp future visions:

“I love the ways our visions of the future never quite see the real changes to come: who could imagine now a world in which female military officers wear miniskirts? We’re always crucially wrong on those small details — and the larger cultural changes that create them.

But one vision of the future seems to remain constant: the idea that somehow computers will magically read our hearts and minds, then respond appropriately”

My shorthand for this sort of thing:

“There’ll be Spandex jackets – one for everyone”

Then Chris finds this neat counterpoint:

“Aaron Marcus: 12 Myths of Mobile Device User-Interface Design

Developers share many illusions and delusions about mobile-device user-interface design. In the UI development world, there are many assumptions or myths floating around about the future of mobile devices. Myths are useful in civilizations. They summarize inherited wisdom and guide us to the future. Some become obsolete, like the ones about the flat earth and the sun as the center of the universe. Let’s make sure our ideas about mobile device UI design remain fresh and useful.A 35-year veteran of user-interface design pops a few conceptual balloons and puts a few new twists on others.

Myth: Users want power and aesthetics. Features are everything.
Myth: What we really need is a Swiss army knife.
Myth: 3G is here!
Myth: Focus groups and other traditional market analysis tools are the best way to determine user needs.
Myth: If it works in Silicon Valley, it will work anywhere.
Myth: The killer app will be games, er, no, I mean, horoscopes, or
Myth: Mobile devices will essentially be phones, organizers, or combinations, with maybe music/video added on.
Myth: The industry is converging on a UI standard.
Myth: Highly usable systems are just around the corner.
Myth: One underlying operating system will dominate.
Myth: Mobile devices will be free-or nearly free.
Myth: Advanced data-oriented services are just around the corner.”

Myth systems and orthodoxies in design and strategy for technology… Hmm. Kuhn I guess talks about it in science – what about design and technology, which goes through paradigmic change far more quickly I’d assume. Any notable thought and writing on this you know of? Peter?

As explored in The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet.

From Eugene Thacker’s review at Rhizome:

“One of the common dissatisfactions with interactivity on the Web is that telepresence is not, well, presence. Certainly some of the more interesting new media projects have deconstructed our assumptions concerning presence and the sense of “really” being there. But, when it comes down to it, we are faced with the experience that you and I in our separate computer-hovels chatting over CU-SeeMe, is not the same as you and I having drinks in a cozy bar. This difference has prompted talk of a qualitative difference between two essentially different modes of communication and interaction, each contingent upon a variety of factors (technology, class, cultural difference, race, geography, language, etc.). The “noise” that often comes through is not just technical, but
can also be social.

Part of the problem of computer-mediated communication has to do with the status of the body in the interaction–or rather, the state of “embodiment.” We all want our communication and interactions to be as transparent as possible, and there is a sense in which physical presence plays an important part in giving us that feeling of authenticity, of transparency. But how do we address the importance of embodiment when dealing with technologies such as the Web?

This is one of the main questions in Ken Goldberg’s new anthology, “The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet” (MIT Press, 2000) Using the term “telepistemology” to talk about how knowledge is transmitted, produced, and circulated on the net, Goldberg has assembled a collection of different perspectives on tele-robotics, as both a technological and a cultural issue

Warren Ellis’ Bad Signal:

“If you believe that your thoughts originate inside your brain —
do you also believe that television shows are made inside
your television set?”

I promise this is the last space post, honest, but a stupid thought popped into my head that I needed to write down. Not an unusual occurance, but hey.

I was reading a story about the BBC and it’s annual budget, as guaranteed by licence fee collection:

“The BBC spent �280m last year on its digital channels, but this is dwarfed by the corporation’s total budget of �2.5bn.”

The BBC is about to enter a period of scrutiny, examining it’s mission and output in order to review whether it should keep that guaranteed income. So my proposal is for them to radically reassess their mission – working from the money back, and The Earth outward.

The BBC should devote all their resources to conquering Space.

The chairman of the BBC, Gavyn Davies should nominate Dr. Colin Pillinger as the next director-general, and announce that from the end of 2004 there will be no more TV, no more radio, no more internet services. All of the licence fee income will be ploughed into space exploration.

2.5billion pounds a year is 4.55billion dollars at today’s exchange rates. In one year, the newly rebranded BSC: British Space Command, will have outstripped Bush’s recently-announced 5 year NASA budget increase.

By the time the ISS is complete and the Shuttle retired, we could have an operational chemical rocket launch system, and we could flog launch rights back to NASA. More cash. If we wanted to that is.

The first ten years budget of 40-50 billion dollars instead gets building something far cooler than that. The 8 billion of the first couple of years gets sunk into the successful production of kilometer-long carbon nanotube hausers amongst other nanowonders; the patents from which are owned by the british public (they pay the licence fee, remember) meaning every household recieves back 10s of thousands of pounds in dividends.

The UK public might not know much about material science, but they know what they like. The nation is more united than they have ever been by a live broadcast of a wedding of a minor royal or an EastEnder.

By 2010, the BSC has built a space elevator (invented by a Brit, of course) and start shuttling stuff up-and-down in 2012 to the ISS, which we renew and expand into a launch platform.

The gossamer-light probes and manned exploration vehicles that have been on the drawing board for a couple of years get shifted into microgravity production. British astronauts, reared on MaxPower and TopGear, are warned to stop the taunting buzzruns they’ve taken to doing around the slower American ironclads.

The money’s rolling in by now, from tech spinoffs patents and space elevator usage – and so the government asks the UK public if they want the telly switched back on.

The public, being shareholders in the most wildly-successful commerical adventure since the East India Company, and wanting for nothing, say “nah it’s ok… anyway, we’re enjoying the live feeds of our Wayne mooning the yanks at MACH 22”

Still good friends with NASA, the BSC undertakes to start building the foundation s of the international moonbase in 2018, two years earlier than planned, on the condition that it be named “Anderson-1”

Now I realise why he’s so keen on going to other planets:

“The extended human presence on the Moon will enable astronauts to develop new technologies and harness the Moon’s abundant resources to allow manned exploration of more challenging environments.”

There’s oil in them thar craters!

» President Bush Announces New Vision for Space Exploration Program

…the reaction of a 3 year old kid who has never known linear, broadcast TV on encountering a Tivo-less household. Via Clegg, Martin, and Foe who have more commentary.

My reaction to having to give away my Tivo (on moving to Finland) has not been to go back to watching linear TV – and not because there isn’t any to watch. We have cable here, and there is plenty of english language with finnish subtitled programming.

I watch DVDs and play games on the TV in the living room, almost exclusively; and listen to a lot of internet radio on our various PCs. Watching my favourite TV series on my PC that I’ve acquired from p2p networks such as bittorrent is of dubious legality, so of course I don’t do that at all.

Radio has taken the place of the TV for unscheduled, ambient enjoyment. Radio 4 and 6music are left on most of the day; with some shows played on-demand, such as The Blue Room (seek out Skeewiff – ‘Skeewiff Where Art Thou’ [realmedia sample]), Late Junction and “Thinking Allowed”.

Unless you are still watching a broken TV, what is your A/V media mix?

» Eintagsfliegen: A life where TiVo has always existed

More “Why starfleet?” evidence from Michael Benson in The Atlantic Monthly:

“In the evenings, when my particular piece of Earth has turned away from the Sun, and is exposed instead to the rest of the cosmos, I sit in front of a keyboard, log on, and seek out the windows that look down at the planets and out at the stars. It’s a markedly different experience from looking at reproductions on paper. What I see is closer to the source. In fact, it’s indistinguishable from the source.”

Found via John Naughton who remarks:

“Beautiful essay by Michael Benson in The Atlantic which brilliantly captures the sense of awe and wonder about the Net that first prompted me to write my book.”

It seems it is the “awe and wonder about the Net” and the infinities of cybernetic inner space rather than outer space that have caught our imagination.

On BBC Radio 4’s excellent “Thinking Allowed”, this replacement of the exploration of outer space with the introspection and interconnections of inner space in the zeitgiest was recently discussed.

Next week, it looks like Dubya is going to try and make us flip our focus to look “out there” again. Why him! Gah.

Whether it’s stories of inner or outer space, the goal is the same. “Awe and wonder” at the immense.

Whether it’s the dark infinity of The Matrix or The Filth, or the cumbyas of “emergent democracy” and “The second superpower”. The Moon or Mars.

Gaston Bachelard, from an article by Giles Foden:

“Immensity is a philosophical category of daydream. Daydream undoubtedly feeds on all kinds of sights, but through a sort of natural inclination, it contemplates grandeur. And this contemplation produces an attitude that is so special, an inner state that is so unlike any other, that the daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.”

I’m a trillion dollar sucker for it – are you?

^ Diagram from DefenseTech

Gizmodo:

” The US Army is working on an Aibo-like robotic soldier dog designed to help carry some of the up to 100 pounds of gear that today’s soldiers are issued.”

Obligatory link to Patrick Farley’s Spiders. If you haven’t read it yet, do. Also, Natalie J’s feral robot dogs, which might well be the fate of misfit veteran dogbots; and my essaylette “Superpets last all autumn long”.

» Gizmodo: Aibo goes to war

Boyd’s forest dragon grabs the top story slot on BBC News (World Edition):

“Climate change could drive a million of the world’s species to extinction as soon as 2050, a scientific study says.

The authors say in the journal Nature a study of six world regions suggested a quarter of animals and plants living on the land could be forced into oblivion.

They say cutting greenhouse gases and storing the main one, carbon dioxide, could save many species from vanishing.

The United Nations says the prospect is also a threat to the billions of people who rely on Nature for their survival. “

Over at diepunyhumans, Warren features a fascinating, concurrent event of some relevence. This coverage from BBC News also:

“Scientists are studying possible ways of using engineering to help the world to adapt to increasing climate change.

A conference in Cambridge, UK, has been convened to consider possible options while ignoring “political correctness”… The meeting, on 8 and 9 January, is entitled Macro-engineering Options For Climate Change Management And Mitigation.

One speaker is Professor James Lovelock, begetter of the Gaia Hypothesis, which holds that the Earth functions as a single organism which maintains the conditions necessary for its survival.”

Me, here, in May2002:

“we have moved into the stage where fixing the planet is a design problem.”

Greg Egan‘s awesome “Permutation City”, page 32:

Maria said, “Define ‘Butterfly Effect.'” A second window opened up in front of the news report:

Butterfly Effect: This term was coined by meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the late 1970s, to dramatize the futility of trying to make long-term weather forecasts. Lorem pointed out that meteorological systems were so sensitive to their initial conditions that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could be enough to determine whether or not there was a tornado in Texas a month later. No computer model could ever include such minute details–so any attempt to forecast the weather more than a few days in advance was doomed to failure,

However, in the 1990s the term began to lose its original, pessimistic connotations. A number of researchers discovered that, although the effects of small, random influences made a chaotic system unpredictable, under certain conditions the same sensitivity could be deliberately exploited to steer the system in a chosen direction. The same kind of processes which magnified the flapping of butterflies’ wings into tornadoes could also magnify the effects of systematic intervention, allowing a degree of control out of all proportion to the energy expended.

The Butterfly Effect now commonly refers to the principle of controlling a chaotic system with minimum force, through a detailed knowledge of its dynamics. This technique has been applied in a number of fields, including chemical engineering, stock-market manipulation, fly-by-wire aeronautics, and the proposed ASEAN weather-control system. Operation Butterfly.

There was more, but Maria took the cue and switched back to the article.

Meteorologists envisage dotting the waters of the tropical western Pacific and the South China Sea with a grid of hundreds of thousands of “weather-control” rigs– solar-powered devices designed to alter the local temperature on demand by pumping water between different depths. Theoretical models suggest that a sufficient number of rigs, under elaborate computer control, could be used to influence large-scale weather patterns, “nudging ” them toward the least harmful of a number of finely balanced possible outcomes.

Eight different rig prototypes have been tested in the open ocean, but before engineers select one design for mass production, an extensive feasibility study will be conducted. Over a three-year-period, any potentially threatening typhoon will be analyzed by a computer model of the highest possible resolution, and the effects of various numbers and types of the as yet nonexistent rigs will be included in the model. If these simulations demonstrate that intervention could have yielded significant savings in life and property, ASEAN’s ministerial council will have to decide whether or not to spend the estimated sixty billion dollars required to make the system a reality. Other nations are observing the experiment with interest.

Maria leaned back from the screen, impressed. A computer model of the highest possible resolution. And they’d meant it, literally. They’d bought up all the number-crunching power on offer–paying a small fortune, but only a fraction of what it would have cost to buy the same hardware outright.

Nudging typhoons! Not yet, not in reality … but who could begrudge Operation Butterfly their brief monopoly, for such a grand experiment? Maria felt a vicarious thrill at the sheer scale of the endeavor–and then a mixture of guilt and resentment at being a mere bystander.

Look forward to seeing what the Cambridge conference [pdf] proposes. Hopefully the proceedings will be published on the web somewhere.

Professor John Schellnhuber, of the Tyndall Centre, told BBC News Online:

“Kyoto is in a very difficult position, and it may be necessary to find other exit strategies. We may find we’re in a cul-de-sac and have to think of other policies which transcend the protocol. But we must think about unconventional strategies in any case, because a back-of-envelope calculation shows we’re unlikely to do the job without them.”

There used to be a brilliant TV gameshow on UK telly in the early 80’s called “Now get out of that” in which two teams of boffins battled through traps and puzzles in the pouring rain; constructing ingenious Heath Robinson [wikipedia, image search] inventions until they ‘got out’ of their predictment.

Somehow this all reminds me of that show…