There's a great documentary - Hoop Dreams -about two high school players trying to get into the NBA. For some reason, one of the only facts that's stayed with me in the twenty years since I saw it, is that one of the players goes on to Mineral Area College after high school. I assumed that meant there was a place actually called Mineral Area, which always struck me as a magnificently honest and straight-forward name.
I like pedometers and things that measure your activity. I'm know we're all supposed to be sousveiliancing ourselves into a stupefied something or other but I like the way they easily let me pay attention to how much I move and walk about.
My fitbit - combined with beeminder - helps me notice how little or much walking I'm doing. I found out, for instance, that I walk a lot less at the weekends than I do in the week, and if you'd have asked me to introspect about that, I'd have said the opposite.
In 2013 I set myself a target of an average of 10,000 steps a day. I managed to do that. In 2014 I raised it to 12,000 and I made that. So this year I'm aiming for 13,000. That's going to require actual effort and lifestyle change, it won't just be a case of walking to work and wandering around a little at lunchtime, I'm going to have to make more concious effort. But it's a good trend - if I keep up this sort of progress I'll be walking hundreds of miles a day when I'm 80.
This is the really joyous bit though, closing the social media door after the comments have bolted:
(Via, I imagine James)
Bought this from (where else?) the garden centre. Made me remember a conversation we had in the summer. We'd been walking around Derbyshire, looking at a renovated and much-loved pumping station. There are so many retired engineers around here, the tour-giver said, that there's starting to be a shortage of interesting old engineering projects to be repaired and refurbished.
Presumably though that problem will soon be solved as new generations of engineers retire and new technologies retire with them. Soon they'll be bringing ancient voicemail systems back to life, reenacting installs of old software, getting them up and purring again. And we'll all go along to special open days and point and remember - I had one of those! I used to log in to one of those - my code was 121224! We used one of those to download TV ratings, I had to reload the paper; it had those holes along the side!
I wonder when the Sealed Knot will do its first Y2K reenactment. I wonder if, this time, we'll lose.
This popped up on twitter today, via timehop:
It's a year old, but I imagine they'll be saying similar things again soon.
I always think of this as the 'Microsoft mistake' - thinking that a long list of features represents better value, and seems like better value, than a shorter list of features people understand and approve of.
I imagine people thought more of the BBC that did less.
Contrast this approach with the one that saved Apple. Fewer, better, more understandable products.
Don't get me wrong, I love the BBC, but if you wanted to illustrate feature-creep this would be the way to do it.
I'm fascinated by pedometers and measuring pebbles and their use and misuse.
Personally, I find a lot of what they tell me revealing, I learn new things about myself and I change bits of my behaviour through noticing these things. Equally, it's clear they're a sousveillance species and the street will find its uses for them. Especially if there are incentives for them to produce false data.
The first time I saw the evidence of these incentives – when you weren't just fooling yourself – was when Nintendo released the pokewalker and you would get more pokestuff in return for recording steps. An obviously well-intentioned idea from Nintendo but immediately, of course, pokeplayers found ingenious ways to artificially create steps.
And now, steps on your Fitbit or similar, can equal actual money, off your health insurance or in a personal injury case.
And, since everything these days is a battle between algos and quants then quantified cheating is going to have to get more sophisticated. Before long insurance company analysts will be able to spot the telltale traces of sensors strapped to turntables, pets or robots. The machine cheats will have to get more sophisticated.
Hence this prototype from Berners Street Fitness. Right now, it walks when an IFTTT trigger from twitter tells it there's a lot of people walking, but soon, we hope, it'll be able to succesfully and regularly pass for a real walking human. It'll pass a Touring Test.
