GENOMICON

So a couple of weeks ago, I got drunk and had a fracas with Umair Haque on twitter, in which I said:

All of your b-models are vague bollocks . Face it dude, you’re pretty much only good at criticsing the obvious.

and he replied

those aren’t my b-models. they’re everybody else’s. you just called about 100 smart people idiots. now crawl back into your hole.

Now Hemingway always used to say to me “always keep a promise sober, that you made drunk”. So I do.

A word about Umair.

I stumbled across his blog thing a couple of years back (at the height of the Bush insanity) and was so impressed that I sat down and read the whole thing from start to finish. I’ve never done that with a blog before or since. He had an amazingly prescient, articulate and refreshing take on what was going on.

Something you notice though is that… in the comments, people were (increasingly) asking “So what do we do about this? Tell us master, what must we do?” – and no answer was forthcoming.

So I think what Umair has done (see Bruce Sterling talk from a couple of days back). He’s taken the Richard Feynman 2.0 approach to problem solving – which is basically to crowd-source it.

And maybe this is the best approach… but what’s it come back with?

Looks to me like a series of manifestos with names like “Wisdom Manifesto“, “The Awesomeness Manifesto”

“Awesomeness”? What is this? Bill and Ted? Please.

The content of these manifestos looks to me like a touchy-feely feel-good fest for this emergent tribe of “Smart People”. Or Umair’s Army of Textarea Sycophants. Whatever. The content of these manifestos looks to me as much to do with what the audience want to hear, than what will actually wind up being used. Everything is memetics – but the memosphere for Umair’s “Solutions” is different from the memosphere where any solution will need to take hold.

–

It’s not that easy.

Umair like my other greatest fan, Douglas Rushkoff has this truly inspiring talent at pointing out what’s wrong, but when it comes to creating solutions…? Meep.

All that comes back is a selection of anecdotes that people have tried which have sortof worked… but which aren’t (as you may have noticed) exactly spreading like Islam in the Desert.

Because I think… ideas can be smart (ie: well adapted) – but people? Some of the stupidest people I know are smart people.

There seems to be this repeating pattern of someone writing a book that becomes famous, based on a single “smart” idea – the author acquires the laurels of Smartdom, and then they have to write another book.

And it kindof sucks. A bit.

So you start to get an inkling that maybe this person isn’t quite as smart as was once supposed – and really the difference between the Rock-Stars of Smart, and the less exalted tiers of suffering humanity comes down to… luck.

Everything is memetics. Any “solution” to our problems won’t emerge from “smart people” figuring them out on behalf of the stupid, they’ll precipitate out on their own, as adaptations to changing conditions – and they’ll be as easy for an illiterate living in a bullet-holed breeze-block shell in Turano to figure out, as some Ivy League Professor, and his flock.

In fact my guess is that it will be the Turano-dwellers who figure it out first.

–

Because I think Smart People are over-rated. You hear a lot about them: “Smart People”. It’s become the TEDoid-memosphere’s stamp of quality. Smart People are the Intel-Inside.

Check this out.

Those are smart people. I know who almost all of those people are. That whole thing fills me with a deep sense of foreboding – because although these people are all famous multi-millionaires/billionaires etc etc, I don’t have a lot of faith in Smart People. I have more faith in Local Knowledge.

Experience. The well-spring of human existence. You will learn more from getting drunk and going out on a crack-bender with a homeless Iraq-war veteran than you will by networking with smart people. I know this because I’ve done both, and I know enough to know that I know fuck-all – and in a lot of really important ways, I’m less smart than the homeless crack-addict vet.

Smart people thinking up smart solutions for the rest of us. You see that photo at the top? That’s a 12 year old kid who’s made a shelter for homeless people – because he’s never actually sat drunk on a shop-front in Parkway in Camden, and found out that if you’re begging there, some cunt with a Stanley knife comes by and collects “tax” from you.

Maybe the new boss will be better than the old boss. Maybe these Empires of Intelligence will see us all… able to… “live”. But I have my doubts, because (as Vinay Gupta points out) The Internet isn’t democracy, it’s meritocratic feudalism. Once again, the people who are making decisions, are sheltered from the consequences of what they decide. As Vinay (kindof) says: “you really need to live in a Hexayurt for a year” etc – and none of these smart people are living in hexayurts.

That’s part of the reason I like Bruce Sterling I think. He moved to The Favela – if that’s what Belgrade was back in the day – and he’s got a wonderful habit of not telling people what they want to hear. I love him for his lack of hope.

So um… give me local knowledge any day.

A load more stuff etc. Bits and bobs.

1) 3D Printed Alumide Things

Quite impressive if you like that sort of thing.

But like, what’s the background? Is that a dead (or wintering) vineyard or something? It looks like an American version of what Russia looked like when no one had painted it for 20 years. The New Frontier.

2) Inflatable space-habitats

Apparently stronger than the existing ones – and has the added advantage that if it falls into the sea, it’s already a sort of massive water-wing. Just remember – these are the people who invented velcro.

3) A bunch of toy robot things

Light-seeking snakey thing

Spiderying thing obediently (for the moment) obeying a smartphone

Lego robot arm

4) That OK Go thing.

Everything’s raving about this, but I think it kindof sucks

Why do I think it sucks FFS? It’s the greatest Rube-Goldberg machine ever made.

It sucks because they’re piggy-backing on Maker Culture (aka what nerds do to get attention), not by making something but by just fucking buying it. Something that’s all about tinkering about and doing something for yourself – labours of love has just become a great big spend-fest.

It worked – that video has had over 2 million views already. But like… whatever. It looks to me like cool kids with money getting attention by nicking the uncool kids… thing. What Nike (and everyone) have been doing to Black Urban culture forever. Sorry. Once the mainstream gets hold of it, it sucks.

But don’t mind me, I’m just some twat shooting his gob off from the safety of the cheap seats.

This on the other hand is beautiful.

A labour of love – rather than something that someone’s bought so they can advertise their single, on behalf of EMfuckingI, who don’t deserve to live.

5) Beautiful Tilt-Shift thing of New York

I went to New York for a week once, and didn’t see daylight the whole time. It rocked.

6) Petri Dish Bacteria Soap From Etsy
(via)

AND YOU CAN GET GLOW IN THE DARK ONES!!!

There’s a nice circularity to de-bacterialising yourself with a petri-dish.

When Etsy first turned up it looked a lot to me like a load of tedious crafty tat, but the quality of the stuff (well, some of it) on there truly gob-smacks me now.

I’m not sure how it’s happened – whether it’s the community… or competition… or what, but there seems to have been a really radical bar-raising. In London in the 90s, Camden Market went from being a couple of hundred yards of knock-off Goth stuff (and hippie-wigs), to miles and miles of really high-quality, up-market… everything.

Etsy has done the same thing in a fraction of the time – except that instead of starting out as a goth thing, it started out as a 1970s local-church craft fair. Now it’s all boutiquey and designery. Well… some of it.

That Umair Haque bloke who I’m going to slag off in the next post once said that Etsy was probably going to be The Next Google. No one knew what he was talking about. And they still don’t… but… it’s looking a whole lot more convincing than it once did. He’s not just a pretty face.

7) Military Androids.

Looks like DARPA are attempting to make an “Apps Store” for military… applications. What could possibly go wrong?

Not much probably – if it introduces diversity/resilience into the mix of stuff being used – though I imagine the main reason to do it is to co-opt the collective intelligence of the great-geek-unwashed, and get them to dream up more stuff to sell to the taxpayer.

The problem isn’t imaginary enemies, or forn terrsts. The problem is the military itself. It’s destroying the country by taking about 1/2 of the tax revenues. Remember kids. Spending money on the military is like breaking windows in 19th Century France. When you need it, you need it – 50% of your tax? Come on. It’s out of control.

But forget about all that. According to the article, it’s specifically targeting Android phones. Which I find interesting.

8) The Bible

Have you read it? It’s mental.

Most Christians haven’t apparently, so it’s worth slogging through it to piss them off etc… but anyway, things I have noticed so far:

a) There are numerous references to other gods (eg: Exodus 18.11)

b) There is an incredible amount of Christian Lore that isn’t actually in it. Stories surrounding the Tower of Babel, and the Ark and whatnot. Still… that whole business surrounding Sodom and Gomorrah – did you know that the only “pure” person to escape, wound up procreating with his own daughters? It’s ok though – because (although) they were virgins at the time, he was drunk. The Bible does actually frame this as an excuse.

c) Any experienced programmer will immediately see it for what it is. Really badly written legacy code. It’s filled with bugs, contradictions, repeated code, lack of structure etc. It’s like an old version of Oscommerce or vbulletin or something. Nightmare.

If this is the source-code of the OS of the Christian Religion, no wonder it’s so fucked up. It needs more than an upgrade, or more patches (The New Testament was a patch, attempting to correct the hysterical bug-fest that is the Old Testament)… it needs a total rewrite from the ground up – starting with a a re-think of the core principles, because… well, let’s face it possums, the New Testament Patch didn’t really work. The world is still being fucked up by people employing Old-Testament morality.

d) It’s interesting from an historical perspective, but The DaVinci Code is easier to get into.

e) Don’t even think about reading anything other than The King James version. The others are for thick people.

9) Robo-thesp

LOL

Yours for $82,000

10) Yea, whatever, I’m not wearing that

Brain controlled pimball innit. Def dumman blinekid.

11) White House Cyber Czar: ‘There Is No Cyberwar’

“I think that is a terrible metaphor and I think that is a terrible concept,” Schmidt said. “There are no winners in that environment.” – Howard Schmidt

Mon Dieu, the voice of reason. Where have you been all my life?

Similar logic ought to be applied to “The War on Drugs” and the “War on Terrorism”. Whenever you hear the words “War on…” you know the originator is after one thing: Money. And manpower. And unquestioning political support. And a remit to attack the general population.

12) Google’s Auto-Subtitling (you’ll need to click through to get the actual CC controls)

LOL – in which google attempts to a) censor the Irish… language and then b) figure out what the fuck they’re talking about. No chance. Dylike Dags?

13) Ronald Searle

I’ve been a fan of this guy forever. Another 3rd Culture Kid. One of us. One of me.

14) At Last !!! An Instrument that sounds worse than the Stylophone

But which is kindof cool regardless. A lego sequencer.

My Brother used to make models for advertising/movies… everything from animatronic sheep to model cities, to Treebeard off LOTR to… Hellboy’s Gun…

… and something really noticeable about these things is that they only need to be used once – often only need to look good on one side. Miracles of invention happen, then they’re thrown away, or stored. The latex stuff doesn’t actually last all that long apparently.

Seems like a similar sort of effect, if not intent with a lot of this maker stuff. Someone goes to a huge amount of trouble to make something – and then… what? It’s “stored”? Because it sure as shit ain’t going to be used. Take a look at the stuff that people are making that’s getting attention – most of it will be shown off a couple of times… and then… next project. It’s an incredibly ephemeral culture. The life-span of the average Maker project is shorter than the life-span of a 20th Century pop-single – derided in the early years as “Wallpaper music”. A throwaway culture.

So much innovation is going into things who’s only purpose seems to be a) Because I can, and b) Awesome! Put it on Youtube!

I’m not complaining mind. But there is a weird strand of truth in Karl Pilkington’s assertion that “everything’s been invented… and now we’re just messing about”.

Check this out. Mega-Virii

Every once in a while I come across something that tells me “Nick, you have no idea what’s going on”. This is one of those things.

Another bunch of stuff. I’m having difficulty keeping my shit together of late. I always think these things are cop-outs etc – but they generally take longer to put together than normal blog-posts, so you can stop your moaning.

Anyway, the week that was:

1) How to make glow in the dark stuff

“WARNING” It says (in a voice like a droid), “This procedure should only be performed by, or under the supervision of, an experienced chemist”.

Is that the sort of thing I should be doing? Yes, I think it is. This is exactly the sort of thing I should be doing.

Although in today’s wack-job paranoid world you’d probably find yourself trying to explain how it wasn’t a drugs lab to some spotty 14 year old policeman with a moustache. You’d get your stuff back after 6 months of hassle, but you’d be “flagged”. Put on a database, and for the rest of your life you’d hear funny clicking sounds whenever you picked up the phone.

2) Aviary have made all their stuff free

I like Aviary – never use their stuff mind, but in principle… I like them. I went on about them last year I think.

When web-companies suddenly release all their content for free, it generally means that the subscription model has failed, and that they’re going to try advertising. Aviary claims that the subscription model hasn’t failed, and that they’re just doing this because they’ve got a load of venture capital – which may be true. I mean the VC bit is almost certainly true… but… the subscription model bit? Partly true I’d say.

3) Crowd-sourced funding for stuff

Indiegogo – which is a much-needed alternative to that other one which is US-only. It seems that people mainly want movies funded.

Which is sortof interesting – because I was reading this thing the other day in which the Jumping-On-And-Off-The-Treadmills band was bitching about EMI not letting them repeat the thing that made them successful in the first place… but at the end they said that the role Record Companies used to play was as Risk Aggregators – and I can’t fault the writer on this. They did… and even though the other problems that record companies used to solve no longer exist, this one still does. We still need risk-aggregation I think… but we’ll have a far richer and more inclusive culture, if we can crowd-source this… than if we have…

… well, Daryl Hannah said it best “What’s the greatest threat to film-making today?

The same as always: the fact that there’s a bunch of guys in charge, with sometimes questionable tastes, who dictate what gets seen.”

4) Google Goggles

The most convincing (in fact possibly only convincing) description of augmented reality I’ve seen so far

The same article had a thing with real-time voice->voice language translation… which is pretty impressive.

5) Kids spied on by schools through remote-controlled webcams on their laptops

I have mixed feelings about this one…

a) What is it with hierarchy these days? Are they fucking insane? Why is it that every single time I read the internets (or even turn on the TV news) there’s some example of top-down control completely over-shooting the bounds of what any sane person would regard as acceptable?

I mean how do you get to the point where you think it’s acceptable to do this?

b) My mum and dad are teachers. Most of their friends are teachers. I spent my childhood surrounded by teachers – and I can’t imagine any of them actually having the time, let alone the will to do this.

Then again, some of the teachers that taught at schools I went to were total cunts and should never have been allowed near children at all. They weren’t child molesters… they were just violent, blinkered disciplinarians.

6) Laser-Cutting is a lot more expensive than I thought it was… and I can’t really afford to experiment with this stuff (that much) any more.

7) Bloom Boxes – Looks like Bollocks to me.

Or just incredibly bad reporting.

People seem to be falling all over themselves to sing the praises of this science-free innovation… which costs about a million dollars per unit, and still needs gas as an input.

“Gas”? Any kind of gas? Yep, Apparently any kind of gas. Well I guess that’s good but… what if you haven’t got any gas?

There are some fairly major-profile names behind it, but I have my doubts. It follows the Bullshit Template to the letter. Apart from the major-profile names.

8) Chatroulette?

Well I don’t have a webcam and I suspect that the internet is too slow in New Zealand to actually use it.

But there’s been a load of excitement and hype etc, so it would be remiss to leave it out… and according to this, it looks like fun.

I’ll ask twitter if anyone’s managed to use it.

9) Android Controlled Lego Thing

I can’t believe that Lego nearly went bust recently – and my Brother pointed out the range of toys that brought it back from the brink… and they’re kindof pre-made-transformer type things which… um… kindof seem to me as though they require (or invite) less imagination than common or garden lego.

Lego is one of those things that if it didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it. And we would. If lego does go bust (and I sincerely hope it doesn’t) people will start making their own – if not immediately, then within the decade.

In a scatty sort of mood today. Can’t concentrate. It’s too hot. I don’t know where I am. In about 2 hours, I’m going to go down to see this band that I’ve almost starting playing with and tell them I don’t want to play guitar, and I want to make a movie instead.

In the meantime… how’s the Second Guttenburg Shift coming along?

1) Where’s all the Science Fiction I was promised?

Oh Cool! it’s a… it’s a…

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!! NOT ANOTHER DISHWASHER!!!

In the future, everything will be designed so it looks like something even further into the future, even though it’s not really. The Packaging Goes Deep man, The Packaging Goes Deep.

But it’s a very… singular vision of what futuristic design is actually like. It’s all blue-LEDs and streamlined shapes and see-through bits. When was the last time you saw a (new) sci-fi movie that didn’t have transparent computer screens?

Now we’re making them, and as far as I can see, the ONLY reason for this is that they’ve appeared in so many sci-fi movies. I mean a laptop where you can see through the windows doesn’t actually make it easier or better to use. Does it? It would be quite cool though. I’d get one.

This is what Sci Fi looked like 40 years ago

They actually use slide-rules in this series… because they hadn’t thought of calculators. Ten years after this was made, I bought a calculator on a watch in Hong Kong.

I mean it’s rapid rapid rapid, although for some reason (maybe because it’s so close) it seems achingly slow… but if you look at old sci-fi, a lot of the design ethics have carried through. It’s like the technology has advanced rapidly, but our future tastes have kindof stayed the sameish.

Apple bear a lot of responsibility for this – they bought the retro see-through thing back with a bit of a bang. But never mind about that, here’s some steampunk mice

2) Dude Climbing up Wall a bit like that thing off Spider Man

3) Printing in Clay

I find this one interesting because of the historical echo – the process of 3D printing is essentially the same as coil-pot making… only with much higher resolution – and the ability to make pots was one of our earliest (and therefore most important) innovations. The ability to store food/seeds meant we could stop being nomadic. Agriculture is probably the biggest/most profound innovation that humanity has ever accomplished. Everything changes when you invent agriculture. Your gods change.

4) Robots that make robots. Completely.

Cool! We don’t have to outsource labour to the 3rd World anymore.

Is there still a 3rd World? Seems like kindof an 80s concept. There are slave-cultures, crime-cultures, islands of stability, bubbles of… cancerous excess – but I’m getting the distinct vibe that everything’s gone a bit transnational.

On TV the other night were two quite good programs – Breaking Bad, and Hung. One is about a teacher who decides to become a drug dealer, the other is about a teacher who decides to become a prostitute.

As entertainment it’s not bad… it seems… realistic. These decisions almost seem like positive steps – unusual second jobs… people self-improving etc… rather than a society that the bottom has fallen out of. All this wailing of late about rates of unemployment… unemployment isn’t the problem. Cost of living is the problem. The market has driven wages down and prices up to the point where people are only just surviving.

Still robots. Cool!

5) Verizon allows Skype on Smarphones

There isn’t an iPhone app for that.

The battle of the killer-apps begins. Wasn’t there something about Google launching its own fibre network – about 1000 times faster than current offerings – as a massive STFU to telcos who are always winging about how hard it is?

This is along side tools that Google is offering so you can test if your ISP/Telco is throttling your connection:

www.measurementlab.net (from last year)
youtube speed test

And yes, my connection is about 1/3 of the global average.

6) Dude makes Snow-Slum in parent’s front yard, earns 15 minuts of fame

7) 6 Armed Hexacopter

Mind you, if it didn’t have 6 arms it wouldn’t be a hexacopter would it? Unless one of its arms were missing I suppose.

From the same place, an 8 armed Octocopter

Which I expect you could probably convert into a hexacopter quite easily. See… that’s the advantage of the self-teaching software that I was on about a couple of days back. If your dog gets hold of your octocopter and converts it into a pentacopter, it could still learn to fly.

The remaining tricopter would be a bit fucked obviously – I mean it probably wouldn’t be a copter at all – rather a mangled mess of chewed and slobbered on plastic… but genetic algorithms are genetic algorithms. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

I seem to have scrambled recollections of this economic theory / parable thing – which was invented in France in the 18thC or somewhere… where people theorised that going out and breaking all the windows in Paris would be good for the economy, because all the glaziers etc would have something to do.

Then some other people got busy with their abacuses. Abaci… and figured out that this actually represents a net loss to the entire system. Breaking windows does not create net-value.

–

So this thing turned up the other day (in the um… WSJ)… the idea of Guard Labour… and the idea that the more extreme the social iniquity, the more Guard Labour is needed…. social inequality actually creates a drag on the economy.

Apparently some people have gone away with their abaci, and managed to figure out that about 26% of the US workforce is employed as Guard Labour – some of the measurements (ie: unemployed / prison, but not lawyers) are a bit dodgy in my opinion… but it’s an interesting idea… and once you get it inside your head, you see it everywhere. Especially on TV… because almost every TV drama either seems to be based in a hospital, or involves some sort of guard labour. No value is being created.

–

So the picture at the top is a system of robotic water-cannons for fending off pirates.

Now you know whenever you hear the word “Pirate” there’s more going on than meets the eye – and this has always been the case. Back in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” days (and earlier), pirates were often covertly state-sanctioned entities. Often they were little floating islands of democracy escaping from a the brutalising hierarchy of the military of the day… today they’re people who’s livelihoods have been destroyed by Western over-fishing, and who feel at least some justification for what they do due to Western dumping of toxic and nuclear waste in their backyards.

And then there are digital pirates as well, but that phrase is a semantic misappropriation… specious propaganda produced by… well, the Guard Labour hired by the old copyright cartels.

So that’s the perspective that I tend to see the list of wonderful weapons that the UK police are planning/considering attaching to unmanned drones, paid for with our taxes, and used to “guard” us. To guard one section of society from another.

That’s the perspective that I tend to see the news that although crime is falling, people generally think it’s getting worse.

And ACTA is just Guard Labour lobbying governments to bypass the democratic process and turn the entire fucking planet into… archipelagos of walled gardens, so tightly controlled and locked down that they actually look more like catacombs. Selling daylight by the pound.

The walled world

and the distance kids are allowed to roam…

And so on and so on… Guard Labour… The Guard Economy appears to be this massive collective delusion…

(Gets Nasty? Get down to business)

… that has been to a greater or lesser extent, internalised by society at large.

So that’s my thought for the day.

Stop guarding stuff (especially other people’s stuff) and start giving it away. We’re all going to die anyway. We might as well die happy.

(via)

Significant Objects is an art project where people buy cheap second hand stuff, then embroider wonderful stories about it, then sell it on ebay.

1) The experiment’s curators purchase objects — for no more than a few dollars — from thrift stores and garage sales.

2) A participating writer is paired with an object. He or she then writes a fictional story, in any style or voice, about the object. Voila! An unremarkable, castoff thingamajig has suddenly become a “significant” object!

3) Each significant object is listed for sale on eBay. The s.o. is pictured, but instead of a factual description the s.o.’s newly written fictional story is used. However, care is taken to avoid the impression that the story is a true one; the intent of the project is not to hoax eBay customers. (Doing so would void our test.) The author’s byline will appear with his or her story.

4) The winning bidder is mailed the significant object, along with a printout of the object’s fictional story. Net proceeds from the sale are given to the respective author. Authors retain all rights to their stories.

And lo, they sell for massively more than they were bought for. Sometimes hundreds of dollars more.

Now whether anyone can do this… or it’s working in this instance because the writers in question are pretty talented… or people are buying off the back of the kudos of the project itself… well, that’s an unknown, but I’m pretty sure the principle holds generally. People buy stories.

This is what drove Kiva (notice how I’m using past-tense, even though I still have $100 with them) – Kiva kindof blew it (for me anyway) because it transpired that the stories were being told, were stories that had already been “solved” and really, your money was going instead to the microloan bank, doing the lending – and they decided who got what.

Interesting how authenticity is required in this instance, but not (and it’s a specific ‘not’) in the case of the significant objects.

We have a really ambiguous relationship with story. Just look at Sarah Palin. Ok, don’t. Look at the people who support her. These are people who can (as far as one can tell), tie their own shoelaces… feed themselves etc. The US is really seriously, fucking itself up because to a massive chunk of the electorate, “What is True” has become less important than “What Should Be True”.

And this cuts both ways I think. When Obama got his Nobel Prize, twitter was filled with tens of thousands of people falling over themselves with congratulatory spiel-ettes, still going on about ‘hope’ – and meantime both wars are still going, and people in Guantanamo are still “awaiting trial”.

What’s changed? I mean really, what in Actual, Knock-on-Wood Reality (with a big R) has changed?

Because the only thing that I can see that’s changed is the story.

Ok – the last one was only 1/2 a… latte. This may be another 1/2… or not, depending on whether or not you see things as being 1/2 full or 1/2 empty – or simply that your glass is twice as big as it should be, and basically one big UI fuckup.

1) DIY (kindof) Plush Toys.

In which kids draw random and disturbing monsters etc, and talented people turn them into really rather good cuddly toys.

Only the blurb says “Shidonni is based on unique proprietary patented algorithms and using Microsoft Silverlight“.

Idiots.

I think this is possibly an indicator of the way digital fabbing might go though – some sort of lego thing in software that allows people to skip the learning curve that it takes to acquire the talent that it takes to do these things using a CAD program. The Catalyst in this example though is the talent of the person actually making the things. Cheating a bit – that needs to be a software task.

2) iPhone Planes

In your mind, dude:

Basically a program that makes WWII fighter plane noises based on the pitch/yaw/acceleration/whatever of your phone.

I can’t believe you did that. Brilliant. Kindof.

3) What the future will be like in 2010

Which is a scanned/photographed/transcripted kid’s book from 1972. Presumably putting it on the web like this is illegal. Presumably the author doesn’t care because he’s a sane human being with a sense of humour, and besides, people don’t buy this one that much any more. Presumably, the publishers will use this as an example of how the internet is killing their business, even though this is free advertising for something they a) don’t sell any more but b) want to stop anyone else from making copies of…

… reminds me of a cat that I used to have that ate frozen peas… to stop the other cat from getting them, even though he hated eating frozen peas and grimaced through the whole ordeal.

Idiots.

Apart from Angus (the cat) on account of Angus being one of the greatest cats ever.

Assuming of course that this is what they’re doing – it tends to be what publishers do.

4) Android to watch, Android to watch…

In which someone has persuaded his Android phone to pick up the data for “next available bus” and transmit it to his watch. This uses Open-Watch software, which is cool because you can use it for all sorts of other things as well.

There’s been a bit of a backlash against the Nexus One launch hype – it’s better at some things, worse at others… as you’d expect. The sales haven’t been great – but open-source was ever a slow-burner. The $550 disconnection charge is fucking reprehensibly criminal…

… but the killer-app with Android is that it’s open. You can do things like this watch hack without having to go begging to Apple.

The data that this watch hack is using has only just become “available” though… ie: until a couple of months ago, a company was sending cease and desist letters to anyone trying to use this data.

Idiots.

5) Bloke in Wheelchair Held up by Police Robot while 10 Police Hide like Giggling Sissies Behind Their Van

Is this “A Good Thing”?. Hard to say. I’m not entirely convinced that this isn’t a bit like conducting
police-work from within the safety of a tank.

6) Avatards

A bit like a good Bacronym… Avatards is one of those names that is so good, that you have to invent something to… fill its shoes, so to speak. In this case, it’s rather easy… avatar fanboys etc… and according to CNN (who destroyed their credibility (forever) during the Bush years)(idiots), audiences are experiencing depression when faced with… reality, when they leave the theatre.

Speaking of reality, I think this picture is particularly funny

On account of the guy on the right being caught mid-nom on a piece of pizza.

Jesus, don’t you people ever stop eating? Incredible. I’ve never seen anyone eat pizza in a movie place before… I mean the distraction of sitting next to some popcorn munching fuck does my head in, but a whole Pizza? Ber-limey.

I think this is quite interesting though – and I’m guessing that at some point in the next 10 years, a convergence of something like this and World-of-Warcraft, will see people choosing The Matrix over their real lives to the extent that their real lives start falling apart and it becoming a real problem.

Back to Copyright… (because who could resist)… apparently Cameron has done what Led Zepplin did back in the day, and allowed himself to be HEAVILY influenced by someone who’s input was not entirely given the credit it was possibly due. ie: He nicked it off the Russians.

Or did he? Guess we’ll never know eh… but rest assured if you try the same trick with Avatar, then Rupert Murdoch’s company (that owns it) will sue you back to the 14th Century, and then lobby the US govt into trying to impose the machinery for police-statehood on all countries that the US would trade with… which is all countries.

Crying all the time that the internet is killing their business, even though they’re making billions more than they’ve ever done before.

Idiots. Enemies of Humanity.

7) Google Decided to Stop Censoring Its Results In China

Which is interesting – because it’s a blow against the legitimacy of state censorship… and as the EFF predicted, Legitimacy is one of the key things that’s going to be scrapped over this year.

That’s what all this ACTA crap is about… Govts and Corporate Lobbyists colluding to try to make control of the root a morally right position for them to take.

It’s not. All power is inherently illegitimate, and needs to justify itself (at every step) to the people it governs. If a power needs to censor, then all bets are off. It’s illegitimate.

No Ifs, no fucking buts.

8) Tacky is the New Brilliant

There used to be this furniture shop in London that sold UNBELIEVABLE furniture… stuff for insane Oil-Sheiks etc. Gold Lions. Coffee Tables made out of a life-sized, nude, gold limbo-dancer holding up a massive bit of glass… and the ever-present New York skyline pictures, painted onto black velvet, and lit up from behind etc. Marvelous.

Here are a couple of others having a fair crack at it…

Glow in the Dark Sofas

And my favourite… wall-sized-digital-pictures

Although they have managed to make them look sortof tasteful, which is a shame – I’m not sure if you can use your own pictures… they have a “portfolio” of cliche-ware images… and one or two that do sortof suggest you might be able to use your own.

It would be brilliant if you could. I’d have photos of me

Or a regular day at the Taylor Household.

Obviously in the future, you’re going to be able to get e-wallpaper, and change it on a whim etc. That would rock. You could actually BE in Harry Potter land… although the Harry Potter Movies are getting darker and darker – I could hardly tell what was going on in the last one – at this rate the next one will be a totally black screen with posh voices clunking about and talking bollocks in the background… and you can already simulate that one just be turning the lights off.

9) Ok, that’s enough for now…

Two short movies to do with lego

(via)

Ok – been away for a bit but have gotten back in one piece. Feel like crap. Trying to give up coffee… which screws me up big-time. I’ll be bed-ridden for 3 days.

Anyway, this week’s Link Latte will be a little different on account of it being about 10 things that I’ve only just found today, and haven’t been storing up over the last week. So you’ll need to read slowly as this will take a little while to write.

Here we go:

1) Metal Printed 3d Puzzle thing

Which is apparently invented by Bram Coen who also invented Bittorrent. Or is it Dracula? Or both? Hard to say. It’s cool though because it is actually quite a nice shiney bit of 3D printery. Things are coming along

2) Egg House

Which looks like a cross between an egg, and some sort of shoe-tidy. Which is… um… cool, but um… maybe you’ve forgotten something?

The site has lots of other photos – the best thing about this I think is that they actually made it – and that is everything. Actual Reality… even if your girlfriend does have to sleep on a shelf… which she isn’t going to like. Oh deary me no.

3) Monocoque

Oooh…

“Monocoque’s structural skin is generated using a Voronoi pattern, the density of which corresponds to simulated loading conditions. The distribution of shear-stress lines and surface pressure is embodied in the allocation and relative thickness of the vein-like elements built into the skin. The prototype model was 3-D printed using OBJET’s Polyjet matrix technology which allows for the assignment of structural properties to multiple 3-D printed substance”

Yes, exactly. Can’t find any other references to it, but I like it etc. 3D printed exoskeletons just like proper mollusks make. It would be well cool if the printer sat on a leading edge somewhere – like a window-cleaner, allowing a building (or whatever) to self-build.

4) Seed Bombs

This has been around as a concept for ages, but at last someone has gone to the trouble of making them in a form that will give our paranoid 21st Century Western police an excuse to arrest you on anti-terrorism charges so their illustrious political leaders can justify their morally perilous existences.

These remind me (alas) of the (quite legal) cluster-bomb design – which is basically an aerial-propelled land-mine scatterer… where the bomblets are designed to look a bit like toys so kids pick them up. There’s something not quite right here.

5) Gene Gun

Which I found on a site about growing magic mushrooms. It says “The gene can be incorporated into the genome, but it doesn’t have to be for it to be expressed. So if you throw a whole lot of DNA into the nucleus of a cell, it will be expressed as long as that DNA is there (which was 3-4 days for the plant and animal cells I’ve worked on). It’s called ‘transient expression’ and it’s pretty easy. If you want stable expression, you just select for the cells that have the DNA (by introducing a herbicide/antibiotic resistance gene) and wait longer than the 3-4 days. Most of the cells will die, but the ones that integrated the DNA into their chromosomes will survive.
So it just depends on whether you want to study the gene or protein product, or if you actually want to create a transgenic organism. If it’s the former, you’d go with transient expression because it’s really easy. For plants you use a gene gun, for animal cells you use a chemical called lipofectamine.”

and as far as I can gather, it’s about getting magic mushrooms to glow in the dark – which would (I suppose) make them easier to find. At night I mean.

Only these don’t look like proper shrooms to me. I wouldn’t eat them.

6) Dope Pipe Art

Speaking of which, some of these are pretty cool

It is sort of noticeable how much art seems to grow in the cracks between what’s allowable, and what’s not.

7) Steampunk Nixie Clock

Because anything to do with Nixie Clocks is instantly cool. They glow in the dark you see. We are a simple people.

8) Robotic Orchestra

Although it does seem to have a human guitar player, playing along to it… which is (in my experience) absolutely typical of guitar players.

Also from Make Magazine, but not related in the slightest are these graffiti bone-china plates, which are incredibly cool

and speaking of which, here’s a Starry Starry Night Cake

9) Nanotech LEDs

Ok – this is really just an excuse for a cool picture… apparently new LED palettes are being created using nanotech… have you noticed how nanotech seems to have become a catch-all description for pretty much anything emerging from this materials revolution we’re in? I thought Nanotech was to do with tiny little robot things that devour the whole universe?

10) See through laptop

So obviously CES or whatever was on last week and a load of new inventions were showcased… and I’ve managed to avoid all of them, except this one – which I find interesting because it’s one of those things that we like because we’ve seen it in Sci-Fi movies, but which in real life, possibly isn’t that useful.

Because… it may look so cool that we can hardly stand it… but look at the screen you’re looking at now (ok, you already are). Imagine if you could see through it. Would that make it easier to use? I doubt it. They talk about using them as head-up displays for cars… yup. They’ve just banned mobile phone usage in NZ (catching up with the rest of the world) on account of people getting distracted and crashing all the time. I can’t imagine this would help terribly. It’s purely about looking cool rather than being useful.

Could be good for glasses though – so you can do that augmented reality thing without looking like a total prannet.

–

Ok – that’s it for now… Only 1/2 way really. God damn things move fast. I wish they’d hurry up though.

In which our hero doesn’t attempt to make any predictions of his own, but rather criticises predictions that other people have made.

(from the utterly fabulous paleofuture.com – Going to the Opera in the Year 2000 (1882))

Ok – the predictions that have provoked my ire are the ones over at Techcrunch, who I’m sure are lovely people and we’d get on like a house on fire were we to to meet socially etc. It is a piece entitled

Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010

1) The Tablet

Forget it. No one can be arsed with tablets. They’d need constant propping up if you used them in bed, on the sofa etc etc… on the train… in the car, they’d rest against the wheel and be constantly setting the horn off. You can really only operate them with one hand while holding them with the other. Everyone with a tablet will need an laptop as well. And an iphone probably.

2) Geo

Bollocks. The only people into this are breathless “early adopters”. No one wants everyone to know where they are 24 hours a day. No one wants to be Geo-Locationally Advertised at. (Or any advertising at all for that matter). It’s one of those things that might be useful on very rare occasions, but the rest of the time it’s a gross intrusion.

3) Realtime Search

Rubbish. Have you seen it? It’s a panicky rumour-mill.

If you suspect something might have happened to a celebrity etc, you can already search with twitter – and find a load of wild, flying rumours… so you know something must be up. Then you need to go to a proper news service with proper fact-checking – ie: the BBC, The Guardian, or Al Jazeera to find what’s actually true… or at least official. Even the Iran Election thing became very suspect, very quickly – which I went on about at the time here.

Truth does not necessarily confer competitive memetic advantage.

Remember, we’re not looking at an information service here, we’re looking at a memosphere – It’s good for finding out what the buzz is… but precious little beyond that. An aggregation of “real-time-search” results is just a broadening of the number of sources… but it’s still basically like sticking your finger into the Tiber to find out what’s going on in Rome.

4) Chrome OS

Not unless it starts coming out on specific devices.

Ok – there’s a killer-app waiting out there : the full-fledged-unfettered web, on smart-phones. That’s it. IPhone’s App Store is an abomination. That degree of top-down control over what a device can or can’t do is as immoral as DRM. It’s a crime against God. Against freedom of information.

Sooo… This could be Chrome’s angle. It could also be HTML5’s angle.

5) HTML5

Yea. Right. You do know that IE6 is still the world’s most popular browser don’t you? And has been for several months?

The trouble with the web as delivered via a PC’s Browser, is that web designers have to code for the lowest common denominator… a fair few sites now are refusing to support IE6… but it’s still out there, and it’s still big… and… HTML5? I think it works in IE8 doesn’t it? Dunno.

So… again, the only reason I can see this coming earlier than the demise of various versions of IE, is if it’s driven by a killer app – and personally, I’d guess that the killer app is bypassing app-store restrictions on mobile phones.

6) Mobile Video

Can’t we already do this? I guess it could improve/get better etc. Streaming protests straight to web could be interesting. I think there are possibly quite interesting possibilities to do with first-personism in robots as well.

Ok – so I don’t really disagree with this one. A basic-rule-of-thumb/law-of-nature is “whatever speeds up the memosphere, wins” and this speeds up the memosphere. Speeding up the memosphere is The Prime Driver of social change, and has been for 1000s of years. Speed of communication changes everything.

7) Augmented Reality

Balls. A solution looking for a problem. It’s coming… in one form or other… but this idea that people are going to wander round tourist resorts holding an iphone up to their faces so they can have the nearest Starbucks location presented to them is utter bollocks. Won’t happen. It’s Boo.com level of imagineering.

One use I can imagine is “product bar-code reading” so you can go into a shop and see which products you’re supposed to be boycotting and why. Possibly useful for on the spot reviews as well. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it took off as the basis of some sort of game – eg: real-life “Hot or Not” for real life stalkers etc.

But the bottom line is that you need to wander round with a cellphone held up to your face. Plonker Alert, Plonker Alert.

8) Mobile Transactions

Maybe – this was attempted with SMS about 10 years ago but the telcos killed it because they were too greedy for it to be viable – wanted an insane commission. They use cellphones for paying parking metres in Estonia, which is a brilliant idea – you get a text when you’re running low etc.

As for Mobile transactions… maybe, there is that dongle thing that’s shown up recently… and somebody described a competing system… maybe as a joke, but it’s not a stupid idea. Not stupid at all.

There’s also the small matter of phones already being used as an alternative currency in Africa – where people read out pay-as-you-go codes over the phone – so you can transfer money back to your family.

I’m not going to be dismissive of this one because a change in the way we do currency is probably going to be THE big way we change in this century – the scale of it is beyond anything like a top-ten list. The ability to make transactions via phone is a very real possibility for how this will work… and is a ripple of warning on the surface… the ability to transfer non fiat-currency value via phone is the tsunami.

9) Android

Yup – I’ve been rooting for this for a while. See 4.

iPhone is the AOL of telephones. You can’t do anything with it without getting some boring fuck’s permission. Fuck that.

But that’s… geek-power against killer-marketing, and most of the geeks I know have already gone for the iPhone. Android is on the rise, but it’ll be slower than… well, it won’t “rock 2010″ – not unless a real curve-ball turns up… something like Google offering pay as you go Android phones for free in exchange for advertising… or something. The future is dominated by curve-balls.

10) Social CRM

Yea whatever. Who cares about corporations?

I don’t know that I want to have anything to do with anyone who knows what “CRM” actually means… if twitter can provide the shortest route to talking to an Actual Human Being (who Actually Knows What They’re Talking About or is Actually In A Position To Help) then well and good… but… twitter is about People-to-People… or Product-to-Fanboy.

So… if the fundamental relationship between a corporation and a customer changes, and becomes much more about two people talking together as people… then this is almost certainly one of the areas which this change will show up in.

I don’t know if this will happen though – because so many corporations are fundamentally evil. Sorry Yes-men, they are… and you can tell they are, because they’re constantly doing evil things. They have evil in their DNA, so their people can’t relate to their customers as anything other than through a type of legal-wall through which heavily excised protocols ring. Scripted Turing-Test Conversations.

So I’m sure that they’ll try… and if I was to make a prediction, it’s that there’s a huge blow-up because a corporation that has committed crimes against humanity or the environment attempts to engage the memosphere, and gets eaten alive.