Saturday 26 July 2008

shoutout for Brad Sucks and Jasper Morello

There is some really amazing stuff out there if you have the time to track it down, or are lucky enough to be pointed in the right direction.

Brad Sucks, is a musician who has made the most of the opportunities offered by the web to find an audience without going through the usual record industry A&R men. He has been making his music available on an open source basis, although he does have material available for purchase now, via CD or iTunes, but he does point out that it is freely downloadable, so people can certainly listen without paying. I really like his explanation, he would love to make a living from his music, but if he could not manage that, then he would prefer that people listened to his music and enjoyed it, rather than it being unheard.

I think that is a far better mindset, than commercial artists under contractual obligations to produce an album a year.

Anyway I heard his track Sick as a Dog on the GeekDad podcast, stuck Brad Sucks into google and found his website, downloaded the album, dragged it over onto my iPod, and was listening to it on the way into work the next day. Quite simple, alternative rather than lo-fi, catchy without being trashy, well put together, without any filler material. Recent favourite bands of mine have been the Mountain Goats and Throw me the Statue, and this is in the same sort of ball-park.

But the bottom line is, it is free, try it, you might like it.

The Mysterious Geographical adventures of Jasper Morello, was likewise cited in a Wired listing. It is a short animation, a sort of steam punk Noggin the Nog. Every frame is a work of art, beautiful gothic extravagances of clockwork transports, iron airships, populated with stock Victorian characters. It is all rather Edgar Allan Poe, or Jules Verne, or the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Laputa - City in the Sky, depending on your reference points.

There is a fantastic trailer on the website, but the short film itself seemed difficult to track down, a CD for sale in Australia, or part of a US compilation. Finally, almost by accident thought to look on iTunes, and it was there for £1.99, which is a bargain in anyone's money. The first short film is number one in a short sequence, it would be amazing to track down the others somehow, or manage to persuade iTunes to distribute them.

Maybe there have always been amazing people out there, doing amazing things, but now the web lets us find them, rather than the bland homogenised entertainment that commercial channels insist on. The traditional media have lost their way, and it will take more than a website and some phone in competitions to bring the impact of web 2.0 to them.

The broadcast is dead, long live the podcast.

gathering bilberries

Yesterday I managed to add another crop to my list of grown and gathered edibles. I was aware of some bushy plants covering some banking in the woods. More recently I spotted some small berries on them, which confirmed that they were bilberries. I think that American Bilberries might produce larger berries, ours produce berries larger than pepper corns, but smaller than grapes. They are the black blue that blueberries are, perhaps blacker than that. It is worth pointing out that gathering a crop is time consuming, I must have been ten fifteen minutes to gather a cup full. If you were to make jam, then you would be looking for about a kilo, so unless there is an army of you, and acres of bilberries, it is probably best to find something else to do with them.

We fell back on that old staple of sprinkling them on ice cream, which was really nice. They did not have any particular flavour, possibly sweet, certainly not sharp, the pleasure was in the crisp crunch of their skins, like little grapes being broken by your teeth. I suppose you could also add them to a plain yoghurt to make you own yoghurt.

We are descended from hunter gatherers, so it seems obvious that we must have evolved to survive on a rich mix of opportunistically gathered wild crops. There is certainly a school of thought that berries are the nutritional super-food. I'm not sure I believe in super-foods, but a really diverse and seasonal diet must be a good thing.

The classic text on wild foods is of course Food for Free by Richard Mabey, which now comes in a rich mix of different editions. He describes Bilberries as

widespread throughout the British Isles, except the south and east of England, and locally abundant on heaths and moors. An erect shrub, growing 9 to 18 inches high, with hairless twigs, and oval, slightly toothed, bright green leaves. Flowers; solitary, drooping, greenish pink globes. Fruits from July to September, small round and black, and covered in bloom.



I suppose that what is distinctive about it is how it forms a shrubby mass, not high, but expanding out, rather like a wild and slightly shaggy cousin of box, or a more erect version of the cranberry, to which it is of course related. As with all the vaccinium, it requires acid soil, so don't even think about trying to grow it if you cannot offer acid soil. I'm not sure how worthwhile it would be for cropping, it is a fairly modest crop that is a lot of work to find, but it does seem to act as a decent ground cover over banking so it might well earn a place in my garden on those grounds.

Friday 18 July 2008

so what do we want, when we have everything we want?

Capitalism is based on wanting things, rather than needing things. Communism presumed that it was based on needing things, and that if the state could just provide for needs, then the people would be happy, but they looked over the proverbial fence and saw people getting what they wanted, and found that they too wanted it.

Consumerism has always been more sophisticated that just supplying needs, then supplying wants. It generates its own demand through means such as built in obsolescence so that goods fail far more quickly than they really ought to. Then there is fashion, which is just a clever way of convincing people to buy replacements for perfectly good clothes. Perhaps it is no surprise that communism had people wearing uniforms, explicitly rejecting fashion. Then there is luxury, a form of conspicous consumption where the consumption becomes an end in itself. And finally there is the whole consumer society, where media shades into advertising and we judge people by what they own, and how they dress. So we aspire to the clothes and accessories, dressing up and pretending to be, just like when we were children.

But we are entering into a post-consumer society. It is now relatively open to people to eat as much of whatever they want to make themselves obese and ill. It is relatively easy to buy more books that you could read in a lifetime, more electronic gadgets than you could ever find time to use.

Our houses are so packed with physical things that now you can pay for people to declutter your house for you. Presumeably giving you the chance to then reclutter it up again, just as you can have the fat sucked out of your belly, ready to gorge yourself afresh.

The consumer society has responded to this by trying to create experiences, bundle them up and sell them. So that now we are paying for intangibles, like mobile contracts, ringtones, and downloads. We pay to go ballooning or race car driving. Going straight past all the tedious learning about something, and working up to it, just diving straight in.

But just as our homes are finite, so is our time and attention. Our lives are full up now.

And what do you do when you life is full up? Do you just liposuction out all that cheap crap, and get ready to gorge yourself again. Do you think of some more expensive way to fill up your life, with basically the same stuff that you had before, the stealth wealth people dressed just like everyone else, but so much more expensively.

If you look at old money, it was never just about stuff. Even a stately home fills up eventually. It was never just about experience, one Grand Tour was enough for most. You stepped back far enough to see things in generations. So that your family name prevailed, so that there was enough money there to not have to worry too much. And looking round now, how many of the best of opportunities seem virtually restricted to the children of first generation meritocrats. Paul McCartney might have went to a comprehensive, but Stella had the opportunities he never had.

For those unfussed with their progeny, there is the wider world, buy into Fair Trade and sponsoring, look at the whole world and try and shove it just that little bit in the direction that you would like to see it move.

The thing about a consumer society is that it is sticky sweet like candy. Designed to tempt and seduce, it fits us likea comfy chair, flattering us and beguiling us. The consumer society has all the best tunes because it pays handsomely for them. But we need to step back, and try to listen to that quiet voice within ourselves, what does it say is that change which we ought to make in the world, what does it say we ought to be doing with our lives. We need to struggle hard to hear that quiet voice, so quiet we might never quite hear it all our lives, until perhaps it is too late.

Wednesday 16 July 2008

Fixing a Hole

With our current house, we inherited one shed, and I bought another one for the top of the garden. The top quite literally, as you climb all the way from the front to the back. Gardening is pretty much a case of constantly climbing and descending. The shed in the middle of the garden has gradually been losing its felt roof. Initially nailing a couple of battens on held the flappy bits down, but that only works for so long. So off the the DIY shed to buy some roofing felt.

Hey how difficult can this be?

I even reckoned it was do-able in about an hour, having assembled a few modest tools.

An hour later the old roof felt had come down, an hour or two later the new felt was on the roof, but...

At this point it became clear that if you were to build a shed then you would be much better doing it properly like everyone else. This shed is idiosyncratic in the extreme. The main point in its favour is that the bulk of it is made of wood not much thinner than railway sleepers. Less appealing features are the fact that you need to bend down to go through the door. And as became obvious on trying to fit felt to the roof, it, the roof, is basically four oddly shaped pieces of plywood, nailed onto the incredibly robust framework. Being entirely lacking in any of the normal roofly accoutrements like some form of ridge, or any bracing, it is impossible to nail anything to the body of the roof, because if just bounces in and out. Hence fixing the roof felt involved using battens at the edges where there was enough rigidity to nail on battens with which to at least hold the felt on.

That was about as far as I got a couple of weeks ago, so there has been some more flapping about in the wind, before I could spend today trying to finish the job. I was intending to reinforce the roof internally, in order to allow me to nail on the roofing felt, but that would have taken forever. So, a complex sequence of fixing sides, taking off battens, layering on strips, heftily fixed with a thick bitumen glue, from “evo-stick”, rather than the more exciting “evil stick”, that my daughter thought.

The felt is now three layer deep in parts, and there are two litres of evil stick holding it all together, as well as countless galvanised clout nails, and a whole forest of battens.

Will it leak?

Probably, but it should last a year or two, and hopefully I might even be a bit more organised about it all next time.

What have I learnt?

Roofing felt is the most insane material to work with. It is like some giant piece of wet kitchen roll. Sure all is well when it is rolled up, but trying painting it with evil stick and carrying across the garden, then lifting it above your shed, and then straightening it out, all the while not creasing it at all, or it will suddenly go all precious and crack. I suppose if shed roofs were in more convenient places then all would be well, but unfortunately they are usually at the top of a shoogly ladder, and sometimes it might even be windy up there.

The fact that the felt was full of these characterful little wrinkles, that are one step away from roofing felt fragments blowing in the wind, meant that there was a lot of layering of additional felting layers to try and ensure at least some impermeable-ness in the the general roof area.

And what about the shed roof?

Heck, next time, I might just take down the decidedly feeble and lopsided ply wood, and take a day or two, putting a proper framework onto the top of the shed, then fix some decent plywood on as a roof, such that it is even, rather than just reaching the wall on one side, and overhanging it so much at the other, that roof felt snaps getting bent over at that acute angle.

With a fine day, a Workmate, saw, hammer, pencil, square, crow bar for taking of the old, ladder and stool for putting on the new, I could enjoyably enough spent a day or two putting a proper roof onto the shed.

With the time for it, and the tools, there is a certain pleasure to be had fixing something, working out what you can manage, and what seems to be working, what corners to cut, and which to re-inforce. We have our whole lives for tinkering and looking after things, when did we ever get to thinking that we were too busy.

The Burn

I normally like to do a blog posting each weekend, but missed one, so instead, a short story, which may be chapter one of something longer, as the characters rather intrigue me, but I’m not sure where they are going.



The Burn

I want to start at the end, that is where I am now. Sitting here in tears about to stick my hand into the fire. I have lost everything, there is nothing left to lose now. I lost her, then lost her again, and now I don't even know who I am.


It all started with the war, as we made the robots smarter, we made them our equals, or even our superiors, instead of our slaves. They did not just want to be static companions, or servants, they wanted to lead lives of their own. By then we had made them almost indistinguishable from ourselves. No one wanted a robotic lover or companion or employee. They were designed to blend in, not stand out. Of course the main problem was one of constraint, making them as feeble as we were, rather than letting them be as strong as they could be.

Things seemed okay for a very long time, there was the odd spat, demonstrations, robots standing for election, but everyone more or less knew where they stood.

The causes of the war were overanalysed, I won't repeat them here, and the idea of a war is an oversimplification, there were robots on both sides. There were humans on both sides. No one wins a war like that. We managed to get away, in the confusion we stole a craft and made it to here. A billion places just like this blinked out in the flames that followed the war. The war and flames swept over them, leaving nothing but ashes. By that time no one cared about sides, or winning, it was just about survival. There were no winners that I know about.

But somehow the two of us survived. Just me and Jenny. This is no paradise. But we could live. We could sustain ourselves. I managed to grow a few things, we could rear animals. We spent more time outdoors, got browner, and leaner, stronger and wiser. I rigged up some power, so we could run some electronics. It was all untidier than it sounds, but when it works, you don't worry about things like that.

I did not know much about Jenny, we had just met in the confusion of the war. But we just kind of clicked, instantly, easily falling into relying on each other. She came back for me, when she could have kept on running. I carried her for days. We got close as those things make you.

And then she died. She just stopped. In the middle of a sentence, her eyes went glassy, she just stopped, and toppled to the ground, falling hard like someone who was dead already. I just knew that there was no way of saving her. It does not work like that. She was dead. I sat and stared for ages, suddenly I was alone, more alone than I had ever been in my life, but that was not the thing. The way that she had fallen, the way she had just stopped...

I touched her body, it was not still warm and lifelike like a human corpse, there was a degree of play but basically it was rigid. Some subroutines must have still been working, but overall she was dead. She had injured a leg recently, keeping it wrapped in greasy bandages, hidden from me. I finally unwrapped it gently, the skin puckered and stopped, grey generic filler tissue burnt and torn, beneath that the rigid metallic frame lined with fibre optics and copper cabling.

She was a robot, I did not really care, I had loved her, and now she was gone. Here, it was all I could do to repair a laptop, there was no way I could repair her. The robots are designed to keep going for as long as they can, cannibalising power, re-routing systems, without maintenance they can survive remarkably long periods but when they fail, they fail completely, they have cannibalised away all their options. Away from civilisation and robot body shops, the cybernetics labs and Androids-r-Us, the robots only ever had a limited time to function. They did not evolve out of barbarism, they could not return to it.

And if she was a robot, what was I?

I stand here beside the fire, my hand stretched out, if it goes into the fire, I will burn,

will it be the familiar stink of burnt flesh, or will the skim of flesh burn back, leaving grey filler with gleaming metal bodywork?


Sunday 6 July 2008

going from filing to finding

I am an inveterate filer of things. There is a certain virtue in a world that is ordered and neat. Tidyness is a form of virtue. I could easily have become a librarian, efficiently finding the right place for things, even in my house, I am obsessed with finding sensible places to put things, logically placing like items with like items. Putting the frequently used to the front, the less frequently to the back.

In office terms, you had to file, if you did not file, you lost, and if you lost, you might as well never have had, and you were done for, you might as well never have been.

And so, my email is filled with folders within folders, my hard drives have folders within folders. There is a certain overhead to this, though virtual filing is certainly less onerous than physical filing. But it is a system that serves me well, I can generally place my hand on anything of note pretty briskly.

But computing is all about metaphors, because we do not think in binary, we apply metaphors to make meaning. Folders are a paper based metaphor, because you put things in them, then ordered them neatly. We know folders, we like folders, so we have virtual folders in our virtual lives. But folders exist because processes like duplicating and sorting and finding are all labour intensive in a real world. But when you have four gigabytes of RAM, and a terrabyte of storage, then processes that might seem unimaginable if performed physically suddenly become a mere commonplace that come at no real cost.

So we are moving from filing to finding, you don't need to file something logically, so that you can find it again. You can simply title it and leave it in a big dump of stuff, and search for it if you ever feel that you need it. So what if your search turns up twenty possible documents, it will be there anyway, and it only takes a moment to pick the right one.

But have we just swapped one metaphor for another. By making searching faster we can get rid of filing, but it is still a rather manual mindset that we are thinking in. Surely the point of computing power is not just that it does what we do a little quicker, or a little cheaper. That is like employing servants just to do what you cannot be bothered to do yourself, knowing that basically the servants came with pretty much the same design specification that you did, only their hourly rate is cheaper than yours, so you can get them to do all the stuff that you cannot be bothered to do. Like your family really.

But computers are not just a mini-me, they are something completely different. Why are we trying to get computers to comply with our outdated metaphors, and ways of working. We could instead look to what computers are good at, use them to compliment ourselves, while we have abilities that it would be impossible for computers to equal, they equally exceed us in other areas.
I suppose that this is the sort of hive-mind idea that is floating about, without any particularly clear articulation, because it is all a bit too blue skies to really be able to assimilate. We are uncomfortable about pushing away from the side, losing our metaphors. On the one hand artificial intelligence could offer a potential future, but isn't that just all about trying and failing to make computers think like we do. Like people making two legged robots to climb stairs. We did not design motor cars to duplicate horses, that could eat grass and jump fences. We built them to run on specially built roads and come in attractive colours.

It is about accepting the differences and changing our world a bit to accomodate what computers unfettered could offer.

I'm no smarter than anyone else - I don't know the answers, or even what they would look like, they will be different, that much is for sure.

THINGS THAT WORK NOW
  • storing incredible amounts of data works well - especially now that computers can search and sort it so easily,
  • paths - allowing the wisdom of crowds to sort out the most crucial of stuff
  • living on line lives - minimal barriers to putting stuff on line
  • communities of interest, rather than geographical communities

ISSUES TO WORRY ABOUT
  • the internet is still a scarce resource, we are not touching the sides yet, but soon will.
  • Datafarms already use about 3% of the UK's energy. Factor in how difficult it will be to produce energy in future, with peak oil and the declining acceptability of fossil fuels, and this could be an issue
  • internet pipes are not infinitely fat pipes, they were designed for stuff like email, as were the protocols. So stuff found its way through, not instantly but efficiently. There was enough capacity for all, you just had to wait a wee while sometimes, or the site you were after might be down.
  • But now people are using broadband as a means of accessing vast amounts of data, watching TV programmes on iPlayer, phoning each other by skype. These are hungry and need to be pretty quick to be useable, so they have hungry protocols that don't play nice and share so well.
  • There is an internet infrastructure and new internet infrastructure needs to be paid for. But current charging mechanisms don't really help fund infrastructure.
  • I would expect the internet infrastructure to start creaking in a serious way in the next few years. I would also expect the electricity grid to start creaking too. In America they are used to brown-outs when the amount of power reduces. Fine if you are running an electric fire, not so great if you are running a data farm. An interesting point about datafarms is that they already select hardware on the basis of power efficiency, it is that crucial a factor for them.
  • I know that digital inclusion is a very trendy term, and I know the theory that some people are excluded access to the internet and this serves as a barrier to their full participation in society. I don't really disagree, but although there are people with good reasons for being excluded, through disability or infirmity, or inability to cope, most of those who are excluded choose to be excluded. People without a computer either cannot afford one or are not interested. Often enough they can afford games machines, they simply choose not to spend their money on a computer. Even if you were to magically place an easy to use computer in every house - would it really get used in any useful way. Just as children use a dictionary to look up rude words, or prop up a table, there is no guarantee that people will use the internet wisely. If you simply want to passively interact with a medium that entertains you, then that is the medium that you will find on the internet. The challenge is to make people make more use of the potential of the internet, to join these communities of interest, to create the wisdom of crowds. The internet should raise our potential, or what use is it.

POSSIBLE FUTURES
  • the death of computers - because in future everything will be smart - to an appropriate degree
  • your boiler will tell you when it was last serviced, who your service contract is with, and supply competitive quotes for fuel, service and insulation services, as well as responding to ambient temperature, preferences and holidays.
  • your cup will advise on the presence of off-milk and beverage temperature
  • not just some blade-runner esque nightmare of continuous and cretinous advertising, but useful functionality. Why should we spend so much time shopping, mostly we don't like it.
  • the death of applications - because in future everything will be smart, why switch on your computer, it switches on so as to be ready for you as you come in, it advises you of your tasks for the day, and any urgent emails, finds reading material for work and leisure, suggests contacts that you might want to follow up. You switch seemlessly from email to browser to word processor, the computer offering appropriate options based on your previous behaviour with appropriate wild card options.
  • the smart paths - wisdom of crowds model will extend beyond shopping, what about politics with smart crowds, what about meaningful social change!
  • what about work with all the boring bits taken out, a work that responded to you, rather than fitting you into some strait-jacket of how the office liked to function.

I really will need to do some serious thinking around this. Safe bets would appear to be that human skills like interpersonal skills or creativity will be more valuable than stuff that can more easily be duplicated by a computer. We all want to feel valued and happy, and computers will only ever be able to go so far in making that happen.