“Say… what’s occuring, what goes on?
[it’s the only choice]
IT’S XCOM#1
[It’s the only choice]
So get me some…”

(With apologies to Pop Will Eat Itself)

This Sunday in London sees the inaugural XCOM – a joint production of NTK and Mute magazine. It’s billed as a festival of inappropriate technology, with a stellar line-up of old-skool Spectrum games authors, and luminaries of sci-fi and just plain, uh, sci: George and Freeman Dyson!

The haddock crew are currently brewing up some break-out talks from the main hall, looking at inappropriate tech in practice – bots, blogs and the way-new community will get a thrashing at informal panels in the pub across the road. More as it breaks.

Multi-media “pundit” and big-girls blouse Dave Green gets featured in today’s Guardian talking about the event, and also appearing (and always worth a listen) will be Cory Doctorow and Tom Standage

Tom’s book, “The Victorian Internet” has been turned into a museum (and online) exhibit called “The Once and Future Web”

Anyway – this Sunday should be a blast. If you can make it to London, make sure you get along there.

“When it was possible to have a belief about God and heaven, it represented something we all desired. It had a profound meaning in human life.

“But when it no longer became possible to believe, a lot of people felt despair. What was the meaning of life? It seems that our nature is so formed that we need a feeling of connectedness with the universe. If there is no longer a king, or a kingdom of heaven, it will have to be a republic in which we are free citizens. We ourselves as citizens have to build the republic of heaven.”

» Guardian: Narnia books attacked as racist and sexist : Philip Pullman dismisses work of CS Lewis as blatant religious propaganda
[thanks linkmachinego]

» www.hayfestival.co.uk: Philip Pullman interview in Audio

Excellent. Excellent. My emboldening below.

XFML addresses the following issues:

• It is impractical to create a centralized metadata store for the web. However, we need shared metadata to make the web easier to get around in. XFML takes a distributed approach, yet allows individual authors to connect their metadata schemes by merging topics. Thus it allows for creation of a distributed, loosely connected metadata network that fulfills much of the same functions a centralized store would.
  Taxonomies are labour intensive to create. XFML allows taxonomies to be easily shared and published.

• Taxonomies are created by fallible humans and subject to change. XFML is based around imperfect and ever changing taxonomies: with its strict separation of metadata and content, the metadata in an XFML map can evolve more easily than in most current cms systems where metadata is intertwined with content definition, and where adjusting the structure of the metadata typically involves a lot of work.
• Faceted taxonomies are generally more powerful for websites than classic hierarchical taxonomies. XFML is based on facets.
  Most current content management systems implement a certain level of metadata already, yet there is no standard way of publishing this metadata, let alone make meaningful connections between metadata in different systems. Allowing meaningful metadata connections between separate systems is what makes XFML so powerful.

• Easy to implement standards get adopted faster. XFML is not perfect, neither does it try to be a comprehensive solution for all possible metadata needs. It is designed to be useful in the real world from day one, and easy to understand and implement.

» XFML: shared, faceted metadata format for the web.

Compare and contrast:

• NYCbloggers
• iSee*

[*via Paulpod]

The next space tourist could be a member of a boyband, financed by a reality tv production deal.

Fantastic.

I know the scientific merit of manned space exploration is debatable, but what about using reality TV to power science forward?

Big Brother 3 has just started here in the UK. People I regard as rational and intelligent individuals are in it’s thrall, anxious to get cable installed specifically to be able to watch the live, uninterrupted feeds of people not doing much of anything all day, everyday.

So, why not live uniterrrupted sponsored coverage of science? 24hr, massively mesmerising feeds of centrifuges spinning, cyclotrons humming, tokamaks and toruses ticking over. It would be great!

Pass the pringles someone, I think i just saw a neutrino flash…

» BBC News | SHOWBIZ | ‘N Sync star ‘fit’ for space

Yes, I think it’s that Alex Cox.

‘MPAA executive Fritz Allaway told Bobbie Johnson, “We have seen our future, and it is terrifying.” I – like a lot of other independent directors and producers – would like to see the future get much more terrifying for Fritz and his pals; with a radical reform of copyright and patent law, and a curbing of behemoths such as AOL/Time/Warner, News International/Fox and Vivendi/ Universal/UIP.

Corporate multinationals, wielding unchecked power, terrify me far more than kids with video cameras. In fact, the latter, such as the Norwegian schoolboy who cracked the DVD code, encourage me greatly: their resourcefulness and creativity – rather than the special pleading and restrictive practices of the MPAA – represent a possible bright future for our industry.’

» Monday May 27, 2002: Media Guardian: But who are the real pirates?

Historians Simon Schama and Eric Hobsbawm interviewed by David Frost this past Sunday, were asked about the seeming current popularity of History programming and media in the UK.

SIMON SCHAMA: [in response to Frost’s assertion that “history is the newcookery”] It’s long simmered stew, it’s not fast food. I actually think that history has fed off the restlessness of cyber space, of kind of the frantic, segmented nature of the way we lead our lives. People want to be connected. They want to know where we are, who we are, it gives you a bit of moorings. It slows down time just a little bit, connects you to a longer reach of time. It’s like a, you know, I wouldn’t say it has a sedative effect – you don’t want people to go to sleep, it should be exciting as well – but it’s storytelling and argument, storytelling and thought, and it just does give us a longer span than a five minute segment in which we lead, seem to lead a lot of our life.

DAVID FROST: Eric, do you think that’s true? Do you think that history on television speaks to the restless souls?

ERIC HOBSBAWM: Yes I think it’s a protest against forgetting. I mean our society is geared to make us forget. It’s about today when we enjoy what we ought to; it’s about tomorrow when we have more things to buy, which are different; it’s about today when yesterday’s news is in the dustbin. But human beings don’t want to forget. It’s built in to them.

If you want to watch the programme – then it’s streamed for a week (until the next sunday’s programme) from the page below, where there is also a transcript:

» BBC BREAKFAST WITH FROST INTERVIEW: PROFESSOR SIMON SCHAMA & PROFESSOR ERIC HOBSBAWM, Historians MAY 26th, 2002

Total whacked-out genius.

TOM PAULIN:
Let me then put it like this. I remember a political theorist I know in New York, Floyd Weintraub, saying to me, when Bush won in the way he did, that the Republic is strong.

You take the Jedi. They represent the American constitution, the laws of America. This is what Americans have. It is an affirmation of the Republic, and it’s saying, despite the idiocies of our culture and our imperialism, it’s an extraordinary kind of imperial epic.

MARK LAWSON:
And Jar-Jar Binks is Abraham Lincoln. I get it all now.

[* Tom Paulin is portrayed as “Tom Tortoise” on the ‘Adam & Joe’ show If you’re not in the UK, try and snaffle some copies of The A&J Show… it’s fantastic]

» BBC: Newsnight:Review: Star Wars Episode II – Attack Of The Clones

Intriguing to think that certain urban forms make certain digital formats more viable.

“For many skeptics, imode-type services will never take off in the U.S, for one simple reason: the car. In Japan, the ubiquitous mass transit system is often cited as a primary reason for imode’s success. The transit system creates a lifestyle full of “microniches” of time. There’s a lot of hanging around nearby bus, subway and train stations, usually waiting for friends or for transport. Imode and its competitors have filled this otherwise empty space with well-received services and cutting-edge handsets…”

» Salon.com: “Will Americans go for mLife?”