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arthur's star
I remember getting Childhood's End out of the school library. I devoured it. It was the first time I realised there was more to life than Willard Price. So I made a little diversion to Strand Books this evening, to see what they had, and found this splendid anthology. I used to pore over these Chris Moore covers too.
This is from the foreword, it seems appropriate:
"Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this universe, there shines a star."
last chance to do
Iain introduced me to the brilliant photojojo a little while back. And their recent piece on polaroid reminded me to remind you that you should have a play with some sort of polaroid format before they all go away. It's the most fun I've ever had with a camera, and probably the best pictures, mostly because of the unpredictable joy of the format. And once it's gone it's gone. Sure Fuji or someone will keep making film but it won't quite be the same will it?
wind farms and server farms
I've just heard a fantastic talk by Andy Hopper at the Royal Society Ubiquitous Computing discussion meeting. Much of it was over my head, but one thing really struck me, partly because it sounded exactly like something you'd read about on BLDGBLOG. (You could try the abstract but the pdf doesn't seem to work on a mac. Which seems to be the opposite of ubiquitous computing; it doesn't even work on some computers.)
Anyway. He was talking about "Computing For The Future Of The Planet", suggesting, among other things that "computing will play a key part in optimising use of physical resources and ultimately their substitution by the digital world". Which makes sense.
But he was very aware that computing has its own energy needs, and that they're growing, so you can't throw computation at problems without thinking about energy appropriate ways to do it. Part of that involves reducing the energy requirements of the huge server farms. But he also pointed out a much more interesting possibility - moving the servers to areas where there's loads of free energy going to 'waste'. Because it's cheaper to transmit data and computing tasks than it is to transmit energy. So you could imagine server farms in the North Atlantic, powered by windmills, crunching the USA's data. (Really, just a natural extension of this.)
Or, as he suggested, maybe the Isle Of Lewis could become the UK's data centre. There's a lot of wind there, but it's hard to get the energy where it's needed. It might be more efficient to keep the energy there and move all the computation to it.
planning stuff
It's time for Heather's planning survey again. Details are here. And, if you're looking for the next Account Planning School Of The Web thing, I think Paul's going to stick his results up at Rob's blog. I'm not sure what'll happen after that.
building is learning
To Cambridge for the Science Festival today. The obviously populist bits were a bit mobbed but we were lucky enough to have lunch with Andrew and he steered us towards some splendid stuff, starting with a trip to the Whipple.
It's a fantastic little place, with great collections. I didn't really notice the numbering system until I was looking at the pictures just now. Is there a Dewey Decimal System for things?
The big bit of noticing for the day though was how easy and useful it was to learn through building stuff. These two anatomical doodahs at the Whipple gave me more sense of where the bits inside you are supposed to go than the endless hours of medical TV I've watched. Because you have to rebuild something, you have to see how it all fits together. (Warning - do not attempt home surgery using illustrations above, these are both 'before' stages)
Later, over at the Centre For Mathematical Sciences, we spent more excellent time doing and building math stuff. Arthur was delighted and excited to discover that maths (which he likes) is more than adding and times-ing. I'm reading Richard Sennett's The Craftsman at the moment and he talks in there about how making is thinking, it's also dawning on me that building is learning.
slow projects
I've recently been working on a lot of what I've come to think of as 'slow projects'. Things like the Instorematic and Best Urban Places. And other things which are too slow even to have a URL. Not long ago the idea of a slow project would have horrified me; where's the nimbleness, the agility? But now I'm thinking that for some projects slow is both unavoidable and good (like slow cooking).
It's unavoidable because these are the kind of projects you do with your friends, because you want to. Money is involved but only as a lubricant, not as the point of doing it, so these projects are cheap. And you're only doing them because you want them to be really good, that's the point. And that means the awesome logic of the fast/cheap/good trio swings into place - dictating that if something's going to be both cheap and good it can't also be fast. And of course it can't be fast, because these are projects done in evenings and weekends, in people's own time.
So you learn patience, and you realise that those long pauses are opportunities for reflection and that extra goodness might result from all that extra mulling, from stepping away for a while. The excitement and energy of a headlong sprint to execution is addictive and it can get a lot done, it's mostly what my working life has been about. But I'm enjoying the slow way, it's almost like craft.
(And to everyone who I'm doing one of these projects with: this is not me dropping a hint, honestly)
social docking
I bumped into someone new the other week. Someone who seemed nice, interesting, someone you'd think would be a good person to know. And we exchanged email addresses and the usual pleasantries about staying in touch. Time was that would have been it. But in the 48 hours after saying hello a thing happened that I'd not really noticed quite so bluntly; a form of social docking. Various connections were offered and accepted, on flickr, last, dopplr, twitter ; it struck me at the time as being like one of those space station docking sequences in a movie. Hoses extended and were coupled on, and the vapours of ambient intimacy started being pumped; the vapours that convert acquaintances into friends. It's good. I've always liked those docking/undocking sequences.
question
I was planning on using eventbrite for Interesting tickets again. It seemed to work brilliantly last time. For me anyway. I just wanted to make sure it worked for all you lot. Was it OK? Any other suggestions?