Russell Davies

speaking of interesting

Rhodri Marsden of interesting saw fame*, has been doing a rather brilliant experiment in DIY music-making for The Independent.  In the process he's invented a band, made a quite lovely song, come up with a video that's getting tons of downloads on YouTube and written lots of funny stuff about it. I suggest you invest.

(* Just in this little world of course, in other worlds he's famous for all sorts of other things.)

grant at interesting

Here's a longer talk from Grant McCracken. After watching this again I've realised that it's probably a mark that you're living a good and interesting life if you can hold an audience spellbound for twenty minutes with a story from your own life. That's a good thing to aim for. Thanks to Roo for the thumbnail picture on the video. Again, the sound isn't brilliant but I think it's good enough. (It's about 16 minutes.) I think I'll get all the listenable stuff up as soon as I can, then we can add better sound for the final archive versions.

sophie at interesting

I was chatting with Jeffre today. He was telling me that the people who've written most about interestingness are people who do lots of database mining. And that they tend to ascribe two key characteristics to interestingness - it has to be novel, and it has to contain some information which makes us see new regularity where previously we hadn't seen a pattern. (I think that's what he said.) I guess this means an ability to help us see something in a new light, with a new fascination. And Sophie certainly did this for me. I've probably seen loads of Cezanne still lives in galleries or on tea towels. They've never struck me as interesting before. And then Sophie does three minutes of thoughtful, informed talking and they'll forever be fascinating. Thanks Sophie. Fantastic stuff.

Incidentally, the graphics at the start and the end are from The Design Conspiracy and the sounds are from Simon and Curtis.

doh

Howies and Thoughtful are doing something interesting (and probably mischievous) at the organic food festival in Bristol in September. They're looking for some real life dohboys. If you fit the bill (or know someone who does) contact details are here. I hope it's not humiliating for some kid though, that would be bad.

now we are four

I've just noticed; today is the fourth anniversary of the first post on this blog. 1,579 posts, 5,960 comments, 314 trackbacks, 1 consistent theme - stuff and things.

adrian at interesting

Hats off to Adrian for this one. Blimey. He'd never done anything like this before and I made him go first. What a git I am. And he does a brilliant job with three minutes that absolutely set the right tone. As did Johnny with his compering (I've included a bit of that so you can see the pressure the speakers were under. Friendly pressure. But pressure.) And, also, full marks to the crowd - I asked them to be enthusiastic and they were.

We might have a way to get better sound on here, but it'll slow the posting process down a bit. What do we all think? Is this OK?

looking for darkness

We climbed up Primrose Hill late last Sunday night, hoping to see the Perseids. We did everything wrong; early rather than late, the centre of London, and only hung around for a while (hard to keep a very tired 7-year old interested for long) but we still glimpsed a few. And it was rather magical.

And then, today, I read a brilliant article in the New Yorker about light pollution (abstract here, no full text online apparently). And it struck me that this might be one of those issues you could get people interested in. There'll have to be a huge bundle of ideas, actions and activities if we're going to get more responsible in our energy use - not one huge idea - and this might be one which catches people's imagination, because it seems to have everything going for it. Lighting the ground and not the sky saves money, increases safety and gives us back the stars.

Some points from the article:

Someone looking at the night sky over New York sees less than one percent of the stars that Galileo would have seen.

Installing 'full cutoff' lighting (ie lighting that shines where you want it, not up at the sky and not straight in your eyes) in public spaces can save huge amounts of money in energy bills because you can reduce the wattage per light.

And I really liked the fact that you can often increase visibility by decreasing the amount of lighting.

Because our eyes adapt to the brightest light present, if you've got a huge 'glare bomb' - an unshielded light - all it really does is create more darkness, because our eyes can't adapt to see anywhere other than the immediately illuminated area. (Doesn't there seem to a big juicy metaphor in there for something?) This often means that lights installed in the name of safety just end up creating huge pools of darkness for criminals to plot their dastardliness.

And there's a huge emotional pay-off - we'd be able to see the stars again. As opposed to the interior of Top Shop - which looks like this at night:

How is that amount of lighting necessary all night?

You can find out more at The International Dark-Sky Association, who have a splendid motto - Carpe Noctem.

 

interesting video - andrew

So, here's a bit of video from Interesting2007. Three splendid minutes from Andrew Hovells. Many thanks to the folks at Ogilvy Digital Influence for filming everything for us. I have to apologise, the sound isn't great, though it's listenable. I think Curtis got better sound straight out of the desk so someone who's better at editing than I may be able to piece them together sometime. Meantime if anyone's got any ideas how I can make the audio clearer (with a few clicks in iMovie, which is what I am capable of) that'd be great.

I'm going to get everything I can up over the next few weeks, given my vimeo bandwidth. In no particular order. (I'm not sure what I'll do with the longer presentations, I was thinking of Brightcove, but does anyone have any other thoughts?) Then when they're all done, we'll stick them up on their own site as a permanent archive.

And for those who'd like it we'll also have just sound files too.

interesting video

People have been asking me where all the video is from Interesting2007. Well, it's here:

Which obviously isn't really good enough. But, today, Steve was kind enough to get me a deal on the renting of one of these for the weekend:

Well, that's just the flight case. (I love flight cases)

That's the bit of gear, which enables me to get the video off the tapes and into here:

So that, hopefully soon, they'll be on this:

steinski and mass

Every now and then there are three little piles of vinyl I reach for and plunge into nostalgia. The first is a fairly complete selection of KLF 12s which we won't go into now, the second is a big old collection of early Go-Go stuff (also not for today) and the third is a small mound of hip-hop singles I fell in love with - headed by We'll Be Right Back by Steinski and Mass Media. Steinski was a particular hero because he managed to be both influential in the history of hip-hop and have a job in advertising. But in that way that sometimes we're all too dense it never occurred to me to try and drag that affection out of the past and see what Mr Steinski et al was up to now.  But yesterday while following links relating to dj/rupture I stumbled across Steve Steinski's blog and it's a marvelous thing. I've had a marathon listening to his shows on WFMU and you might want to too.