Steve Bowbrick reports on the Mizz Magazine Special Flowchart Edition (Guest editors: Edward Tufte, Richard Saul Wurman, Hugh Dubberly and Justin Timberlake)

Phil Greenspun does an Anne Robinson:

“After two days of touring Wales, a country that apparently has yet to discover the mixing faucet, it has become apparent that there is better mobile phone coverage in the remotest sheep pasture or coastal outcrop than in downtown Boston. How can such an otherwise backward place be so far ahead of the U.S. technologically?”

Humph

He makes a nice case for the wireless commons, though.

» Phil Greenspun: Wireless Internet in the US = Neo-Feudalism?
[via onlineblog]

Consistency

or

Coherency?

A.C. Grayling reviews The Matrix Reloaded.

In a nutshell, he digs the action, finds the philosophy “incoherent and shallow”. He prefered the first movie which was lighter on pretensious exposition, and quotes/paraphrases Wittgenstein:

“Showing is better than saying”

Reminds me of Alan Kay’s “Point of view is worth 80 IQ points”. Anyway… Anthony Grayling getting over-excited by car-chases was great to wake-up to.

» BBCR4: Today: Philosopher A.C. Grayling comes to grips with ‘The Matrix: Reloaded’ [Realplayer required]

Proof that the googletruth being ‘swamped’ by blognoise* can sometimes be a good thing. While looking for stuff by Seth Sanders (see previous post) I came across this:

“In the Tarot, there is a guy called The Emperor. This guy is your mega-implementor. He is the guy who gets things done. Other people are standing around thinking of good ideas. This guy is prototyping the shit out of an idea – maybe an idea not nearly as good as yours – but he’s DOING IT… …Of course, all Emperors can look forward to most people in the world hating their guts. “

An oft-heard business cliche is that your place of work might have “too many chiefs and not enough indians”. I reckon I need a few more emperors.

» Halley’s Comment: “The Emperor”

Andy Hertzfeld on Chandler:

“We have a commitment to lowering the bar for scripting by using a graphical front-end for scripting. The hard part of programming has traditionally been keeping the universe of possibilities in their head, but programming is actually pretty constrained. We want to have a graphic front-end to the script so that users don’t have to keep in their head all the vocabulary, all the verbs. (Audience interruption: Like Frox? A: Yeah, like Frox, which was a project I worked on a long time ago. I actually think of it more like Hypercard. It’s a shame that the state of the art is now 15 years old.) Users should be able to basically select things from menus to write scripts, instead of having to be a programmer.”

This is great. Downloaded Squeak and was taken-aback to see a shrinkwrapped copy of Hypercard at the Apple store last week… Correct me if I’m wrong, but here’s little or no “consumer”-friendly programming applications or langauages being offered, let alone pushed these days?

How can we work to drop the barriers to being a builder? Alan Kay referenced Seymour Papert in his talk and came up with this great line:

“point of view is worth 80 IQ points”

…in relation to idea that it’s far easier to learn how the world works by building models of it.

Mentioned the idea of B-Logo before, perhaps it’s time to think harder about it.

After all the BBC sponsored the development of a programming language once before…

At EtCon. Editing the slides for the talk that James and I are going to give this afternoon about the use of ethonography to drive a social software project, the backlight on the screen of my powerbook suddenly gave out.

The tech support, http://techitsolutions.com at the conference saved my life. The gave me an old monitor for the night to connect as an external screen so I could continue working. The hero of the hour gave me his business card. Looked at it this morning, and his name is Mike Tyson.

Blimey.

Last night attended the Social Software BOF, where talk of the philosophy, implications, social-science, human-centred side of the field or practice was dismissed in favour of the “meat”: protocols, standards, technology.

The rage has subsided, kinda. Alan Kay’s humane, humanist view of innovation and technological exploration has cheered me up no-end.

Clay is about to speak on the subject of “a group being it’s own worst enemy”… in the meantime here’s Will Davies on the trivial problem of human nature and societal implications of social-software which, as I’ve now been informed by last night, needs no attention by those working on emerging technologies.

A sweeping generalisation, but it seems the discussion in the field in the UK seems to be much more driven by the social sciences and concerns of human(e) and inclusive design; even by the technologists.

Being sent Hydra in a heartbeat over wifi/rendezvous in order to participate in a collaborative annotation of Eric Bonabeau’s biological computing talk. Tom has a screen grab of the document and notes on the experience.

Phil tried to explain it. Simon still doesn’t get it and asks the lazyweb to explain itself. Stef slaps the lot of us for trying to baffle his mum.

“I’m an unashamed populist. If my mum can’t use it, if a complete web novice doesn’t get it straight away, I’ve failed.

And the Trotts, and all these people writing more endlessly self-referentially feedback mechanisms for staring up the arse of your referrers, are failing too.

Why do we keep making the web harder instead of easier?”

» Whitelabel.org: Survival of the easiest: Trackback