Russell Davies

A London ear

Ben is back. With Dad Rap, a lovely bit of Donny Hathaway and an introduction to Sabu Martinez and his Swedish percussionists.

Didi Han - Late Night Vibin'

Blimey. This also is fantastic.

Clothes and connection

There's much about fashion that's wasteful, indulgent, materialistic, unethical etc. We all know this. But I can't stop thinking about something a young person said in a workshop I ran - sthg simple but revelatory about our sartorial choices being a bid to foster connection.

— Vanessa Kisuule (@Vanessa_Kisuule) September 24, 2022

Peggy Gou streaming at the Han River

This is fantastic. And it'd be fun too. Set up somewhere interesting and play music to the world. I wonder if you could do this with castrooms. I guess it's not what it's for, exactly. But...

Sunshowers l Yasmin Williams

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Gorgeous. Just gorgeous.

Persuasion rooms

For the PowerPoint article I wrote for Wired I interviewed John Underkoffler of Oblong. He tends to be known as the Minority Report guy. I was interested in the parallels between his product Mezzanine and what the Eames's built for the World Fair:

They were both about multiple screens, multimedia, a room dedicated to presentation.

No one else was interested though and I couldn't get it into the article or into my book. I've kept collecting that stuff though.

My absolute favourite is the Dupont Company chart room.

 

"Oh no," you might complain after reading this list, "making good PowerPoint is complex."

May I introduce you to the world before PowerPoint, the DuPont Chart Room, where you would be be given a presentation among grinding gears as slides whizzed towards you on a monorail system pic.twitter.com/a27eIEQbdt

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) August 28, 2020

But let's also give it up for the knowledge box

 

Um. 'Inside the knowledge box, alone and quiet, the student would see a rapid procession of thoughts and ideas projected on walls, ceilings and floor in a panoply of pictures, words and light patterns, leaving the mid to conclude for itself.' https://t.co/E8z9j9b2lq pic.twitter.com/PynZvuNRqp

— Justin Pickard (@jcalpickard) August 29, 2022

Death notes

Speaking of notes. For various reasons, some of which are obvious, I've been thinking about death and mourning recently. Don't worry. Not my death. This is not that kind of thinking.

So I've been compiling notes. Some will follow. Again, apologies to the RSSers.

JLG death registers in that space where death does not lead to grief because his ways of thinking and prioritizing have so affected my own that he is no more dead today than he was yesterday I did not know him as a person all I ever had was his work and I have that still

— Sasha Frere-Jones (@sashafrerejones) September 13, 2022

(JGL = Godard)

This is from Laurie Penny's GQ piece about the queue:

"Maybe it’s a coincidence, but almost everyone I speak to turns out to have recently lost someone, or something important. Pam nursed her mother for five years of Alzheimers, but could not be with her when she died at the start of the Pandemic. She never got to say goodbye. Nor Jason and Carson, who buried their father two years ago. Jason has a ponytail, John Lennon glasses and a musical Scouse accent. In a previous life, before the Queue, he managed software that coordinates timetables and ticketing between different train lines. They came here today “Because why not? It’s amazing. You just have to be part of it.” He downs his beer. Then he remembers to add. “And, um, obviously. The Queen.

There’s Joe, who is tall and thin and quiet and lives in Devon and was born in Hong Kong and fled with his family and will never go back. He associates the Queen, and the idea of British rule, with a place he remembers, a place that has changed forever. He explains this shyly to Hillary, the fish wholesaler, who seems consumed by an urge to protect everyone she knows from anyone she doesn’t, which includes most foreigners. Hillary decides we’ve got to look after Joe. She knows what it’s like to arrive at a funeral too late. We are all here to mourn, and to have that mourning matter."

Which, if we’re honest, can be liberating as well as upsetting. https://t.co/anV1ulSX6S

— David Aaronovitch (@DAaronovitch) September 19, 2022

A history of the invention of PowerPoint

I say 'a history' because I undoubtedly got some facts wrong. But if you'd like to hear me opining about PowerPoint then I'm on this podcast.

And if you'd like to buy the book you can do it direct.

And also there's posters

eg We sell insurance

Thank you to Giles for keeping this. And remembering where he kept it.

How arches work

There's a phenomenon I think of as revenge acrostics. This isn't that. But it's in the same ballpark.

"Hooke, for example, when he figured out how arches work, published it as an anagram. He condensed the idea into this pithy statement: “The ideal form of an arch is the form of a chain hanging, flipped upside down.” Then he scrambled the letters to make an anagram and published it. That way, he wasn’t giving away the secret, but if somebody came along a few years later and claimed that they’d invented it, he could just unscramble what he’d published."

(Neal Stephenson, Some Remarks)

Royal Society version