The Complex Christ

Backside Cache | Dirt and Computing

Great article in Wired at: http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71763-0.html?tw=rss.index

At first sight, a computer is a system that seems "clean." Early mainframes were housed in dust-free rooms bathed in unvarying white light. Nobody ever got physically dirty handling a laptop. The computer-using proverb "garbage in, garbage out" is just a metaphor; nothing physical goes into a computer, and nothing physical comes out of it.

Then again, why would a "clean" system require so many filters? Spam filters, search filters, surf filters? Why would stuff we encounter on a computer screen be capable of making us feel dirty, or "infecting" our clean machines with a virus?

Just as every animal has a mouth and an ass, with processing stuff in between, a computer operating system has inputs, processing and outputs. We input content through a keyboard, a modem, a drawing tablet, USB or Firewire ports. Useful stuff is output via screen, printer, speakers or over the internet. The useless stuff -- dirty old computer waste -- leaves the system via a little desktop metaphor called the Recycle or Trash bin.

It might be refreshing if, one day, the people who made your computer's OS would call a spade a spade. In a section of his conference talk titled "The Geometry of Filth," Adam Jasper Smith gets to the uncomfortable yet unavoidable nub of the matter. "Dirt radiates out from us," he says. "The primal form of this dirt -- the perfect dirt -- is shit."
 

Not At My Table

"What if the next burger you ate was created in a warm, nutrient-enriched soup swirling within a bioreactor?"

Does anyone actually want this?

Would a vegetarian eat it on absence-of-animal-cruelty grounds?

Can they really replicate that bacon-sandwich smell?

Technorati Tags: Science, Technology, Vegetarianism

Surface Tension | Lost Worlds

"One of the great losses of the Information Age is texture. Consider the pre-computer desk: a litter of papers, large and small, handwritten, printed and typed, course and fine; letters in varying hands, envelopes of various sizes bearing stamps from all over the world. Here are books, annotated and bookmarked; here is a typewriter with its ribbon and its heavy steel frame. Here are photographs and drawings, coins and banknotes, documents bearing seals and counter-signatures, pristine originals and faded carbon copies... Papers lie in piles, navigable vertically according to what has been most recently consulted; some are turned sideways-on to mark the stack.

"Now consider today's equivalent. All is stored on the network and accessed via mouse-clicks on a clean glowing screen. Everything is the same: an image seen through glass. We touch nothing, mark nothing, smell nothing. In the new world of I.T., it is not just the desktop that is a metaphor: everything is a metaphor, where nothing yellows with age and everything is clean and new. We are become creatures of sight alone, our whole attention focused on a hundred and fifty square inches of expensive glass.

"We have lost something in the process. Not just texture. Something more. The computer makes everything retrievable; but it doesn't retrieve everything. Only the surface. Scratch the surface and - look! - more surface. The rest is lost."

From Michael Bywater's excellent Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost, & Where Did it Go?

Technorati Tags: Books, Lost Worlds, Technology, Work

When Web2.0 Doesn't Work | Blogging 2.0

Perhaps I'm being professionally defensive here, but having looked at RateMyTeachers.co.uk I was left wondering whether this was actually a project that had any use. Part of the beauty of the 'ratings' section of sites like Amazon and Flickr is that they actually allow you to make decisions - which seller is reliable, which photos are 'interesting'. But there appears to be no end use for rating teachers. Children cannot decide who is going to teach them, and parents' choice about which schools they send their children to is often very limited.

There are also other problems. For ratings sites to work there needs to be an element of trust in the rating. Having messed about with RateMyTeachers (ie putting stupid comments and shockingly bad ratings about other teacher friends ;^) it appears to be a total free-for-all. No questions are asked to prove you were actually taught by the person, nor could any proof be given. Sites also rely on the number of 'negative' users being outweighed by the number of 'positive' ones. And as [ this ] article in the Telegraph recently showed, there are naturally a lot of mischievous kids out there looking to have a bit of fun. Who wouldn't. (Then again, when a parent logs on and writes that a teacher is 'evil' there is perhaps something more worrying.)

Connectly, I had a very interesting conversation with a guy (a psychologist by trade) who works in the web research department of the Open University. He was saying that the stuff they are working on is 'Blogging 2.0'. What he meant by that was, how to create a system that goes beyond tagging and comments and actually allows interesting posts to come to the fore more easily - using some kind of distributed rating system. I think this connects very well to the previous posts [here and here] on the problems the blogging is facing: the massive volume of posts, and the enormous task of sifting through to find the good conversations. They are currently running initial experiments, but I look forward to the final product.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Blogs, Complexity, Education, Technology, Web 2.0

A Message From My Publishers

Save the SPCK!

So say's Dave at CartoonChurch. Their shops are threatened apparently. So don't buy Pete's book online. Get down your local SPCK and make the men in sandals happy.

SwarmSketch

"Collective sketching of the collective consciousness."

Via Wired.

Emergence-y question: will the sketches get better and better with time, or will they need chasing down from local peaks to properly improve?

Technorati Tags: Art, cartoons, Complexity, Emergence, Swarm, Technology

Nic's Blog | Haunted Geographies

Nic is/was/shall always be a co-conspirator. He's a very fine designer, and is graphing a complex and beautiful path on the axes of spirituality and design. He's finally relented and started a blog. I've added him to my Blogs list, and encourage you to click there often.

Technorati Tags: Art, Blogging, Design, Spirituality

Self-Organizing Island Community informs Organizational Software

Article in Wired, here.

"If Friday's boat from St. Mary was cancelled, there might be six people in the village that needed to know. Armstrong found consistently they would all have that information within hours, even without a formal distribution system, and few uninterested people would be burdened with the knowledge."

Technorati Tags: Technology

Platial: Flickr for Maps

Nice Web 2.0 idea. Think Google Earth and Flickr's lovechild.

Technorati Tags: Platial, Technology

Buying (sic)

Thanks to Jonny for the heads up on (sic).

Just a note - if you're in the US the prices, including delivery are approx $23 for hardback and $15 for paperback.

From the UK the postage can be a lot. (Hardback $30 inc. delivery and $22 for paperback, about £18 or £14)

However, I can bulk order and get free postage. So if you'd like one in the UK, email me on kesterATthecomplexchristDOTcom and I'll be able to do them for £15 hardback and £10 paperback (inc delivery in UK).

Technorati Tags: Blooks, Books, Plogging