I love where Dan Digitaldust is going with this:

“There are 484 million internet users in the world. Maybe half of them own a computer? Most probably have about a 14″ screen. A 14″ screen is about 100 square inches, about 0.064516 square metres. (Err on the conservative if erred on the optimistic before, there’s lots of bigger screens, but also lots of people who are more than doubled up on computers.)

That’s about 31 square kms. Or a square computer screen 5.5 km on a side, or 7.7km diagonal. It would look quite small from orbit and wouldn’t be much use for working with from there, plus the mouse cord wouldn’t reach.

James suggested that they could be used to make the world’s largest particle accelerator.”

A grid-particle-accelerator. A giant internet-scale machine for proton pelota.

Excellent!

Reminds me of something silly I wrote for /play: “The Literature Accelerator” but /play doesn’t have permalinks for good reasons, so I’ll whack it in below:
Read More »

From Saturday’s guardian (I’m loving the digital edition, more on which another time.)

It’s a lovely read and no apologies for pulling out lots of quotes:

The interconnected world of the fairy tale:

“The best single description I know of the world of the fairy tale is that of Max Lüthi who describes it as an abstract world, full of discrete, interchangeable people, objects and incidents, all of which are isolated and are nevertheless interconnected, in a kind of web or network of two-dimensional meaning. Everything in the tales appears to happen entirely by chance – and this has the strange effect of making it appear that nothing happens by chance, that everything is fated.”

Fairy stories have rules:

“An all-important part of our response to the world of the tales is our instinctive sense that they have rules. There are things that can and can’t happen, will and won’t happen… Lüthi brilliantly compares the glittering mosaic of fairy tales to Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. As a little girl I compared it in my mind to the pleasures of Ludo and Snakes and Ladders and Solitaire played with cards, in which only certain moves are possible and the restrictions are part of the pleasure. As an adult writer I think that my infant synapses grew like a maze of bramble-shoots into a grammar of narrative – part of the form of my neuronal web as linguistic grammars are – and mathematical forms.”

On Calvino, and the inifinties that can lie in finite rulespaces:

“Italo Calvino, in his lecture “Cybernetics and Ghosts”, makes the inevitable connection between storytelling and myth. He describes the storyteller of the tribe telling about the younger son getting lost in the forest: “He sees a light in the distance, he walks and walks; the fable unwinds from sentence to sentence, and where is it leading?” To a new apprehension which “suddenly appears and tears us to pieces, like the fangs of a man- eating witch. Through the forest of fairy tale the vibrancy of myth passes like a shudder of wind.” Calvino himself knew a great deal about the workings of the stopped-off, rule-constructed tale, but he also knew that it is haunted by the unmanageable, the vast and the dangerous.”

Finally, on the power of stories:

“We should beware of what stories can do to the way we put the world together. We live in a world very far from woods , castles, and gibbets. We live in a world of urban myths – alligators in sewers, grandmothers on car-roofs, and a burgeoning virtual world of gossip and storytelling, real and fantastic, on the web.”

• Max Luthi’s book “The European Folktale: form and nature” is here on Amazon.co.uk
• A preface to Calvino’s “Cybernetics and Ghosts”, I cannot find the essay online, but it appears to be printed in his collection “The Literature Machine”

I want to find out more about how we play with stories and why. Marina Warner’s book is something I’m going to be reading in January/February I hope.

Any other pointers?

» Guardian Review: AS Byatt: “Happy ever after”

Russell Beattie:

“This morning on #mobitopia we were talking about our WiFi day and I said, “I can’t think of anything to write about WiFi.” Then I started thinking and realized that it’s been a “just” a year using the technology and it’s gone from being Cool, New and Amazing, to just Plumbing I use without thinking about it. I’m actually writing this in the living room connected to the router in the bedroom via WiFi. I hadn’t noticed until I started writing this piece.

That in itself is probably the most amazing part of WiFi now. “

I like the title. “From amazing to plumbing” is probably the dream goal for a lot of conscientious experience designers, but a nightmare of commoditisation for any company.

Unless of course they can be confident in the value of great design to create positive lock-in; come up with amazing, delightful plumbing, cf. Apple.

» Russell Beattie: From Amazing to Plumbing: A year of WiFi

Off to London for Foe‘s birthday, maybe go to some of the Future Cities conference at the LSE and to weave some Urban Tapestries. So here’s some links:

• The spool (they’re back! yay!) look at The Pharcyde of my new phone
• Laura Trippi’s Power Laws, Discourse, and Democracy found on PLSJ
• On one side, “the purity of words is not my battle, or my passion. “, and OTOH, I’ve just started reading “Metaphors we live by”
• Also started “The Existential Pleasures of Engineering”
• Michael Beirut on Mark Lombardi. Andrew Zolli also covers the exhibit, but he doesn’t have permalinks.

Snapped on The Strand on Thursday for my photoblog.

Cybermen weren’t like the Daleks. Daleks were frightening, but Daleks were meglomaniacs – bent on destruction and dominion. You couldn’t reason with them, and they were totally bonkers but you had to admire their zeal and passion.

Cybermen were destructive and terrifying, but they were also technocrats. The coldness of their approach to their enemies and allies, their willingness to lose a battle if they thought it would help win the war. Their almost managerial bureaucratic approach to problems.

Yup – the Daleks and the Cybermen: the Tories and New Labour of the cosmos.

[via chris, via 2lmc]

Telewest come and take the internet away from me today, so I’ll be taking a break until I get set up in Helsinki. Apologies if the usually-shoddy-email-response-time-lag gets even greater. I leave you with this from the Buckminster Fuller Institute:

Joshua Kaufman, studying in London, has a great post about HCI being discussed in terms of the philosophy of science, specifically Popper and Kuhn:

“…according to Popper, if HCI is a science it must have falsifiable universal laws. There are a few examples of universal HCI laws such as GOMS and Fitts’ Law, but compared to the established sciences, we find HCI generally lacking in such laws.

So if HCI fails both Kuhn’s and Popper’s definition of science, what is it?”

Also via Joshua’s site, I discovered OK/Cancel – a HCI/UCD focussed comic book and blog – I feel I am witnessing the birth of a new genre: usability infotainment!

From a treasure-trove of semiotic fun found by Peterme and Andrew Zolli:

“We know that as an agrarian society could be represented via the conventions of the landscape – so too were the industrial era and the modern era. But how might we begin to conceive of the era that has been variously referred to as hypermodern, postmodern, supermodern, global, or turbo-capitalist? What landscapes can we turn to here for enlightenment and deconstruction? We offer television advertising as a source of landscape images to study. What can be said about how Capital conceptualizes spaces as landscapes in its advertising?”

It also remarks on Monking – a name I’ve tended to give to the practice of inserting Tibetan / Oriental / Zen Buddhist monks into fictions and images to signify that something timeless and wierd and other is goin’ down. Alias was guilty of this, as was Tomb-Raider#1: the narrative played on – no real dependence on the monks or their beliefs other than to give a backdrop of kindly enlightenment – a thin Zen-eer atop the story if you like…

“An orange-robed Tibetan monk – currently the numero uno universal signifier of knowledge in the information age (the use of the monk as a signifier is similar to how the green-eyed tree frog was used to signify the environmental movement in advertising) — is joined to the word “knowledge.”

» Landscapes of Global Capital: The Infolightenment

Space stuff. When I left architecture skool, the web beckoned – but for a mad month or so I was trying to apply for a masters programme in Space Architecture and Engineering, which I seem to remember was in Houston.

• The awesome Chris Weston imagines London as it should be.
  [via BadSignal]

• NASA thinks about getting itself a fleet of International Rescue-style flexibility.
• My favourite fictional spacecraft design, rendered faithfully: the Eagle Transporter.