Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…
Now this, this is excellent: Don’t Click It! – an experiment, a work of art, a thesis. Go there – now – and try it out.
I particularly enjoyed hearing Orson again – just in time before a new incarnation comes via Spielberg…
And the mousewrap is the perfect solution for all you masochists out there!
Following on from the last post, I now have 2,083 books – another package from Amazon dropped through the letterbox today.
And, joy of joys, it’s "The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth" by Malcolm Pryce. This is the third novel by Pryce set in an Aberystwyth that hails from some parallel universe to our own. Reading the books is like reading Raymond Chandler crossed with The League of Gentlemen – noir, bizarre, and laugh-out-loud funny. The synopsis of this book will give you an idea:
There was nothing unusual about the barrel-organ man who walked into private detective Louie Knight’s office. Apart from the fact that he had lost his memory. And his monkey was a former astronaut on the Welsh Space Programme. And he carried a suitcase that he was too terrified to open. And he wanted a murder investigated. The only thing unusual about that was, it took place a hundred years ago. And he needed it solved by the following week. Louie was too smart to take a case like that but also too broke to turn it down. Soon he is lost in a labyrinth of intrigue and terror, tormented at every turn by a gallery of mad nuns, gangsters and waifs and haunted by the loss of his girlfriend, Myfanwy, who disappeared one day after being fed drugged raspberry ripple…
Pryce has a knack of writing sentences that become instant aphorisms, or that immediately conjure up strangeness – like looking at life in a mirror that ever-so-slightly distorts – or putting your foot down expecting a step that isn’t there… Examples from the first few pages in the book:
"…there’s nothing lonelier than the bought smile of a harlot."
"She was a small monkey, and very old, with fur turning white around the muzzle and deep sad dark eyes, like two wishing wells that hadn’t seen a penny in years."
"I wouldn’t go so far as to say she smiled – she was a capuchin monkey and they generally keep their cards close to their chest – but a look of heightened interest was evident."
Oooh, I think I’m going to like this novel as much as the first two…
As you might know, I like books. At the moment, I have 2,082 of them – a few dozen which I can hear calling out to me: "Read me, read me!" – while many more are whispering "No, re-read me!".
I simply cannot imagine being someone who doesn’t read books if they have the opportunity to do so. And to be someone who actively disdains books – well, Farenheit 451 cannot be far away.
And so, when I read Flea’s Too Many Books Isn’t Enough over at One Good Thing, I knew instantly what she meant.
There was an interesting article earlier this week in The Guardian about the consultancy firm of McKinsey, and the influence it is having on the UK government.
There is no doubt that McKinsey has a very strong organisational culture – as the article states, McKinsey has nicknames such as The Brotherhood, The Firm, or the Jesuits of Capitalism. During my working life, I encountered McKinsey on a couple of occasions (and also their kin, Accenture, on more than a few occasions), and I can attest to the sense that I was working with people with a very particular worldview.
The Guardian article questions whether in fact the McKinsey culture is a totally benign influence on the UK government, and of course we shouldn’t forget that Enron was regarded as "the house that McKinsey built". For my own part, I believe the influence of such a monoculture to be pretty baleful, and I have commented before on my impression that the Labour party of Blair has no soul, and disturbingly few principles that chime with me.
I use the term monoculture, because that is the strongest impression that I have of McKinsey – you have to fit with the culture, or you’re out. I’m sure that they view this as a source of strength, but having a lack of diversity can be a weakness. In fact, there’s been work to demonstrate that diverse teams outperform monoculture teams, providing that the diversity can be managed properly.
Dr. Carol Kovach has done research at the Graduate School of Management at UCLA that demonstrated that cultural diversity can have both positive and negative impacts on teams. Diversity has been shown to augment potential productivity, but it also increases the complexity of the processes that must occur for a team to reach its full potential. Highly productive teams differ from less productive teams in how they manage their diversity, not, as is commonly believed, in the presence or absence of diversity. When well managed, diversity becomes an asset and productive resource for the team. When ignored, diversity causes process problems that diminish a team’s productivity. This is illustrated in the simple diagram here.
And I know from my own experience that the most exhillarating (as well as at times, the most frustrating) team I ever worked with was one that by design was set up to be as diverse as possible. When we learned how to manage our diversity, we were extremely productive, and came up with great results.
UK Students, aged 13-16, were asked to name a famous scientist in an online survey carried out by an examination board. Depressingly, only two out of nearly 1,000 students managed to name a living scientist, and even then it was the highly suspect David Bellamy.
Bizarrely, other students cited Madonna – please tell me that was a teenage joke?
The Guardian carries a full report on the survey.
Gizmodo reports that Kodak will cease production of Black and White paper in 2006. Digital photography marches on.
Sorry, but how could I resist this story in this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian?
Echidne of the Snakes writes about life. I empathise totally with how she feels, and her philosophy of how to live one’s life. Go and read it, and think about how you can make a difference.
Carlo Maria Giulini has died at the age of 91. There’s an obituary in today’s Guardian.
I never did have the experience of being present in person to hear Giulini conduct. I have only ever heard his work via the medium of radio or recordings. I still have, and treasure, recordings by him of Verdi’s Requiem (with Schwarzkopf, Ludwig, Gedda and Ghiaurov) and Verdi’s Don Carlos (with Domingo, Caballé, et al). I’ll be playing the Requiem today in memory of him.
Another post that deserves multiple categories: Science, Politics and Society. I’ve chosen the last, because the impact of the scenarios are likely to be so far-reaching.
Data point one: Interview in today’s Guardian with Lord Ron Oxburgh, chairman of Shell:
The basic facts of climate change: since the industrial period carbon dioxide levels have risen from 270 parts per million (classical for all previous warm periods) to 379ppm today, and are rising at 2ppm per year. In 10 years’ time they will be at 400ppm; at 500ppm, Greenland’s ice will melt entirely – it’s already receding by 10 metres a year – and the sea level will rise, drowning coastal cities and entirely changing the contours of the earth. Most scientists now agree that unless we stabilise the earth’s atmosphere by 2050, there will be no way to halt the disaster.
Lord Oxburgh: "We have roughly 45 years. And if we start NOW, not in 10 or 15 years’ time, we have a chance of hitting those targets. But we’ve got to start now. We have no time to lose."
Data point two: Peak Oil, Beyond Optimism and Pessimism – article by Jim Hill:
Statistically speaking, I am due to live another 40 years. During that time, I will witness the complete collapse of free-market capitalism. The project of globalisation will fail, and the consumer culture within which recent generations have been raised will end. A massive reduction in living standards, unlike any other readjustment in history, will be experienced by 99% of us living in the industrialised world. A hundred thousand things that we all take for granted today will have ceased to exist by the time I reach my allotted lifespan. This will happen.
(hat tip to Chicken Yoghurt for the pointer)
Data point three: The advisor to the Bush Administration who fiddled with the scientific report on climate change has landed a plum job with ExxonMobil. No surprise there, then.
Why do I get the feeling that, despite the "crisis, what crisis?" mentality of ExxonMobil, climate change and peak oil are the Scylla and Charybdis of the 21st Century?
A running motif through the new Doctor Who series has been references to "Bad Wolf". The Beeb’s even set up a web site devoted to this great piece of viral marketing. It’s no use asking me – I haven’t a clue. All I can say is that Russell T. Davies had better reveal all this coming Saturday, or he’s going to be hunted down by angry fans…
He and his team have done a great job at re-inventing a classic series. Kudos!
And what’s that all about at the end of the disclaimer on the Bad Wolf site:
If you’re concerned by the thought that the universe has been irrevocably altered by an enormous experiment in neuro-linguistic programming, then just tell yourself "The Bad Wolf is not real. The Bad Wolf is not real. The Bad Wolf is not real."
Hmm, what’s the old spell – first revealed in the Hunting of the Snark by the Bellman: "What I tell you three times is true". For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.
nice site Geoff 🙂 nice pics aswell
Thanks, Lisa! Oh, and you can see some of my pics over at Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/gcoupe ) in better versions than MSN Spaces can currently manage…
As you may have noticed, every now and then I have a little rant, to get something off my chest. I do enjoy having a rant, there can be something quite orgasmically satisfying about doing it well. However, it’s not often that I can reach the heights achieved by No More Mr. Nice Guy in this little gem.
Marshall Brain has an entertaining and wise tutorial/presentation on how to do it. While I was reading it, I thought his name sounded familiar, and then I realised I had read his book on programming the Motif user interface.
Hat tip to Pale Blue Dot for the pointer to the presentation.
…Who else but Microsoft?
Yet another of my "shooting fish in a barrel" posts, but this time I’m not taking aim at Microsoft, but at the lazy thinkers who have tut-tutted over the story that Microsoft is "Helping China to Censor Bloggers". At first blush, you might think that the protesters have a point. I mean, just look at the opening of the story in The Guardian, for heaven’s sake:
Civil liberties groups have condemned an arrangement between Microsoft and Chinese authorities to censor the internet.
The American company is helping censors remove "freedom" and "democracy" from the net in China with a software package that prevents bloggers from using these and other politically sensitive words on their websites.
The restrictions, which also include an automated denial of "human rights", are built into MSN Spaces, a blog service launched in China last month by Shanghai MSN Network Communications Technology, a venture in which Microsoft holds a 50% stake.
Gosh, open and shut case, right? Nasty Microsoft! Linux rocks!
Well, let’s just read on shall we…
Users who try to include such terms in subject lines are warned: "This topic contains forbidden words. Please delete them."
Er, what was that? The "subject line"? What about the body text of the blog, then?
Even the most basic political discussion is difficult because "communism", "socialism", and "capitalism" are blocked in this way, although these words can be used in the body of the main text.
Ah, I see, so Chinese bloggers can actually use these words in the body text? So perhaps it’s not quite as simple a story as it might seem? As Dare Obasanjo points out on his blog, this "story" is not new – every localised version of MSN Spaces has its unique list of prohibited words for the subject line of blog entries. And while US bloggers are pointing the finger at the Chinese version of MSN Spaces, they could do well to ask themselves why the list of prohibited words for the US version of MSN Spaces includes such dangerous words as "Chicken" and "Thrush". Clearly there’s something about those words that Microsoft felt would, in the current US political and legal climate, be asking for trouble.
To my mind, there’s a good case here of "let him who is without sin cast the first stone" – a point well made by Shelley over at Burningbird.
And while I’m having a Victor Meldrew moment, Butterflies and Wheels comments on a recent Polly Toynbee article in the Guardian (Toynbee’s article is here). As Stephen Fry said at the Hay Festival, the words "Respect" and "Offence" are taking on creepy overtones. Respect should be earned, it ain’t automatic.
I’m certainly not going to automatically respect someone who acts on beliefs that are clearly barking, and if they take offense at that, then really, in an adult world, that’s their problem.
Speaking of barking beliefs: http://www.csicop.org/scienceandmedia/evolution/
Thanks for the pointer to that site – I’ll bookmark that one for future reference. Talking of surveys, did you see this one: http://spaces.msn.com/members/gcoupe/Blog/cns!1pfnKMM_BORf8-PhonbrwGoA!586.entry
I feel another Victor Meldrew moment coming on… Apparently, genealogists want psychotherapy to be made available for people who stumble across unpleasant discoveries while researching their family history, according to a story in the UK’s Daily Telegraph newspaper.
An example of this is provided by Diane Mattinson, 48, an office manager from Bicester, Oxfordshire, who discovered that her great-grandfather, James Phillips, had never married her great-grandmother, Elizabeth.
"It was a bombshell," said Mrs Mattinson.
Er, excuse me, a bombshell is what happens practically every day in Iraq, and the result is blood and death. Discovering that your great-grandparents weren’t married doesn’t even register on the Richter scale of bombshells. It might cause an ant to stumble, but that’s about it, Diane.
Physical and mental abuse may call for counselling, but genealogy? The world’s going mad, I tell you.
This is the next stage of taking photos – as well as EXIF data, having every photo tagged with GPS data. The end result might be something like this. It was produced by Kord Campbell, and he explains how it was done here.
Today, you’ll need a separate GPS device, but in a few short years I’m sure that digital cameras will have GPS built in as well.
Wikipedia, in case you didn’t know, is an on-line encylopedia. What makes it different from, say, the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica, is that anyone – anyone – can edit the entries. It does not have a closed community of paid experts who are responsible for the accuracy of the contents. Wikipedia itself makes no guarantee of the validity of its content. At the bottom of the disclaimer page it even points to alternative sources of online encyclopedias whose content is produced by professional, peer-reviewed authors. Now, this might seem like a pretty scary thing, and indeed some folks scoffed that Wikipedia should not be trusted. Famously, Robert McHenry (former Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica) published a snide article in 2004, in which he likened using Wikipedia to visiting a public toilet:
The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.
There was a rather robust reaction to this pomposity, but clearly McHenry sailed on, full of the same pomp and circumstance, when he commented on the reaction in another article some months later. These references, together with references to other articles, both pro- and anti-, are collected on the Wikipedia page devoted to Wikipedia itself.
I’m reminded about all this, because today I saw that Dave Winer is pissed-off because someone has removed his name from the Wikipedia entry on podcasting (Winer is generally reckoned to be one of the fathers of podcasting). But as Jon Udell points out, Wikipedia does have a framework in place to mediate in the social construction of its content knowledge. And despite Mr. McHenry claiming that a visitor "does not know who has used the facilities before him", Wikipedia does have a very clear audit trail that is visible to anyone. In fact, Jon Udell also provides a fascinating example of this in action here, where he shows how a page has evolved over time.
As for me, I use Wikipedia extensively. Nothing is perfect, but Wikipedia often comes close, and certainly it is more responsive than the lumbering dinosaur that Britannica has become.
I use wikipedia extensively as well, and it is surprisingly accurate on non-controversial subjects. But it is interesting to see some of the edit wars that happen on subjects like creationism and the conflict in the Middle East. The discussion pages of those articles make for an interesting read.
Yes, but I think the fact that the edit wars occur, and that what emerges is still close to the ideal of NPOV (the Neutral Point Of View) is a tribute to the strength of the Wikipedia process.
I’m currently reading Carl Zimmer’s book: Parasite Rex. If, like me, you tend to think that parasites are not Nature’s noblest creations, you should read this book. You may not actually fall in love with parasites (one researcher wrote: "Trypanosoma bruceii has many enchanting features that make this parasite the darling of experimental biologists"), but I’ll wager that you’ll come away having a new-found respect for them.
Zimmer puts a persuasive argument that parasites have been a dominant force, perhaps the dominant force in the evolution of life. He documents case-studies that demonstrate how parasites influence ecosystems, often by affecting the behaviour of the host organisms. He writes well, too.
I was wondering today why I blog. I suppose partly it’s because I want to capture something in the stream of life. The modern day equivalent of keeping a diary. But there’s also a bit of vanity going on. I confess that I keep an eagle eye on the statistics of my blog – who’s been looking, or whether anyone has left a comment.
Frankly, and in the long run, who gives a toss? It’s really not important.
I got started on this thought by reading Tom Reynolds’ entry today, talking about his reaction to attending the recent Reboot conference. He writes:
‘A-Listers’ are A-listers for a reason.
Determination, focus, and the ability to prioritise people into those of value, and those not of value.
At first I thought people were being rude to me. Nothing explicit, just that while I was talking to them they seemed to be ‘elsewhere’, always casting their eyes around looking for other people to talk to.
But they aren’t being rude – they are being direct to the point of being abrupt. While I might happily chat away about random subjects with someone I’ve just met, for however long the conversation lasts – ‘A-Listers’ seem to evaluate whether you have anything important to say, anything that they can use to advance their own career or if you are a potential ‘customer’.
If not, then they consider the conversation of little value, and look for something of more value.
He points out that he is not being judgemental about this, merely acknowledging that some folks do this and he (and, I think, I) do not. It’s that "people who are of value and people who are not of value" thought that makes me feel hollow inside. It’s the "I was only following orders" thought – the cry of man’s inhumanity to man down the ages.
But then I thought of what it is that Tom does for a living, and I thought that I would far rather listen to him than 99% of the A-listers prattling on about the latest gee-whizzery that appeals to their jaded senses. Tom, you make me think about life, and how people behave towards people.
Perosnally I think we all do this, and it’s merely the difference in what we value as being important. Some people wouldn’t bother engaging in a conversation about the latest car or the features in the new Nokia and others wouldn’t bother engaging in a conversation with those who don’t bother with conversations about the latest car or the features in the new Nokia.If I am talking about politics or religion and I find that the other person is getting bored or looking for someone else to talk to, I wouldn’t feel cut by it. Similarly if someone is prattling on about the acceleration the latest Skyline R33 I hope he wouldn’t be offended if I knock him over the head with a brick.We are all A-listers.
Yes, you’re right that we all do this, but I think there’s a difference in the way we do this. It’s the difference between the "I" and the "we". The difference between using other people to advance yourself, or not using people as stepping stones. Thatcher’s "there’s no such thing as ‘society’" and "greed is good" are two phrases that raise my hackles every time I come across their many siblings.
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