Cool stuff

Write about FourthBlog here.

Some more random jottings

* I shall love you until death makes strangers of us.

* The gravity engines - it is assumed that man will colonise planets with similar gravity. However if you can use gravity engines to convert gravity into energy, which seems conceptually possible, though physically improbable, then you could colonise planets with very high gravity, by living in discrete low gravity bubbles, surrounded by gravity engines.

* Hellish creatures - what if creatures evolved that used chemicals to phase in and out of our time stream, using time to rot away material that they could then consume in the future. What if such creatures left a backwash that could catch a man and pull him down through time. What if such travel was strictly one way. How much would you dare travel, down through time, till you ran out of futures?

Cool Stuff

To explain a little. I recently got a new iMac computer, and from there got Broadband, expensive but worth it. I dabbled with iTunes, but until a friend recommended podcasts for long commutes, I did not see much need for iTunes or an iPod. However I now have an iPod and listen to quite a lot of podcasts. I do commute a lot!

Much of what you see when computing is simply a metaphor. The desktop is a metaphor, the material is not there in any physical sense, it is just presented like that, to make your life easier, just as the files on a hard drive are not single neatly filed items.

The metaphors of computing and what they signify are starting to change quite a lot, it seems to me. It is difficult to understand what things actually do.

Clearly an iPod is not really a flash drive walkman, it is something cleverer than that. However google is simply a very high tech version of the old biblical concordances. It is interesting to try and step back and think about what we are really using, and what it really does. Or to just dive in and swim around in all these new possibilities that were inconceivable a short while ago.

The podcasts led to the Indiefeed Alternative/Rock feed, and that led to listening to the Thermals, which led to me researching them on google, and wikipedia, and listening to segments of their tracks from wherever, and my wife ordering a couple of CDs from Amazon. This is probably a tediously ordinary story, but inconceivable a few years ago. I remember reading about endless bands in the NME but you never knew what any of them sounded like. As Billy Joel sang, you can’t get the sound from a story in a magazine.

Alternatively listening to a podcast of a lecture by Professor Howard Frumkin on public health and town planning
http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/podcasts/

I could then check out his presentation as a pdf, (I have an iMac so not having it in powerpoint is a big deal to me), check out his books on Amazon, and add one to my Amazon wishlist, so that when my wife asks for ideas for Christmas presents, I can direct her to my Amazon wishlist.

Other cool stuff
http://yugop.com/ver4/index.asp?section=stuff&id=6
Though I have no idea what or why, but I do like creating grey waves.

I’ve already mentioned wikipedia, and I use this blog, so they are obviously both cool, as are operating systems that update on the fly through your broadband connection. One more site strikes me as particularly cool at the moment, and like the others, I drip drip drip heard about it through podcasts, until I eventually checked it out, having no idea what to expect.

Flickr - basically a fantastic shoe box of shared photos. I’ve not delved deep, but I do like the random interesting images. I do like the overall high quality of the photos that you initially come across. I do like the page of popular tags, with the different font sizes, presumably demonstrating their popularity. I do like the slideshow option for the tags. I do like the way you can wander through images as you interests take you.

A couple of thoughts occur.

Just as walking across my field last week, I knew that many feet make a path, and a path presumably leads somewhere, and my feet keep the path there. Where no feet walk there is no path. The internet now uses our feet to make paths, everywhere. People buying this book on Amazon also bought this, people downloading this podcast also downloaded that one, popular searches today are...

Even quietly wandering through the internet we are leaving a path, that is of value to others, although we might not know where we are going, we are leaving a path, because in aggregate all these paths do amount to something.

Having once wandered, it is impossibly difficult to retrace your steps, without the back or history on the browser, it would be like a Borgesian library, an image once glimpsed, but never to be seen again.

There was a wonderful image on Flickr of a stone like chain against an old barn wall. The textures were gorgeous. I clicked to see more images by the artist. Within a few minutes I has seen a few dozen images of her life. I had a rough idea what she looked like, where she lived, what car she drove, her pet dog. On the one hand I was growing to know and like her. On the other I have no connection with her, I will never know her name, or conceivably meet her. I felt uncomfortable. I felt that I was intruding too much. All this technology seems to offer intimacy, as people we offer intimacy quite casually. Here are the photos on my desk of what matters most to me, I leave my filofax lying about. But we want privacy. On the morning commute no one wants to speak. We are all tired, lost in our private worlds. Intimacy and privacy are oxymorons, but the internet seems to offer both, but offers neither. You think that you are an unseen observer, but you leave paths, and trails, you think you are an anonymous poster, but the astute observer can pick up clues, that lead back to you.

Maybe we need a new sense of etiquette to cope. In the early days of the internet you just did not post personal details, so the various texts you left across the internet would not identify you too easily. Now google can search the internet for a duplicated misspelling in an instant, you leave images and fragments of your life, you link to others you know, who might be less discrete than you. Common user names across different domains, lazily duplicated passwords, we are living our lives in a shop window of our own devising. Like the early evening commute when you see in peoples houses, before they think to pull the curtains. We are at once intimate, but private. Alone but potentially endlessly observed and studied.

When I was young cars were less usual, housewives were more common, it made for a safer environment for children to grow up in. Those days are gone, and I don’t suppose you would want them back. You have to accept responsibility for the downsides of the changes you experience. If we are to live in this virtual shopwindow, then we must accept its implications. Random people can contact us, and start conversations, we have to accept that people are who they say they are, they might be hyperintelligent canines, or bots in Turing test mode.


Why do I need a webpage?
I initially used bulletin boards, way back, before I could access the internet. Then set up my own webpage. I still have a webpage, but have not updated it in ages. However I could post all my jottings to this blog, and all my family photos to Flickr, why go to the trouble of a webpage. May webpages are simply created in the same way that these blog entries, are pasted together to make a page. No html required. Simply cut and paste into some software online that does the job for me. I suppose you need a website to display a portfolio of work of some description to market yourself in some way, but unless you have a high degree of need, then blogs and flickr seem so much easier.