Prepare to have your world widened – for Meg is right – the song (and video) for Danger! High Voltage by the Electric 6 is about to colonise your consciousness and redefine music for you for the next twelve months. It’s going to be huge. The following images will be burned into your retinae. Await the coming..!
This will mean nothing to the people who come here to read rambling usability articles, or stuff on social software – or even the few people who come to hear me ramble on about what happens after-hours. This will only make the slightest sense to those few people in the world who are obsessed with Fame Academy, or more specifically Ainslie. Will the world please explain to me how David, the self-satisfied little pop tramp with a potential career as long as his butt-hair could possibly beat Ainslie? I mean, sure… Ainslie can’t really sing in tune that well… And yes, he has a tendency to get all worked up and run around like a lunatic, and coat himself in mud, and hide in cupboards… But at least he’s not a wanker?
If I had to choose the gay men that I consider to be worthy of the 100 Greatest Gay Britons poll that is happening over at Naked Blog, I would probably make sure that the following were among them: EM Forster, Alan Turing, Siegfried Sassoon, Cary Grant, Dirk Bogarde, Morrissey and Neil Bartlett.
Everyone in the UK pays a license fee for their television which means that we can have a high-quality public-sector television broadcaster: the BBC. The BBC also has the most-popular site in Europe. And yet while I’m delighted that it’s there, and don’t begrudge paying the organisation, there have only really been two things that I use them for – BBC News (TV & web) and Fame Academy. Well now there’s a third reason to pay the license fee: BBC Kitten Cam. Tiny kittens, real-time, 24 hours a day (although at night it tends to be completely dark)…
From Richard Stallman’s (creator of the free software movement and the man behind GNU which is itself at least partially behind Linux) website:
I’m a single atheist white man, 49, reputedly intelligent, with unusual interests in politics, science, music and dance. I’d like to meet a woman with varied interests, curious about the world, comfortable expressing her likes and dislikes (I hate struggling to guess), delighting in her ability to fascinate a man and in being loved tenderly, who values joy, truth, beauty and justice more than “success”–so we can share bouts of intense, passionately kind awareness of each other, alternating with tolerant warmth while we’re absorbed in other aspects of life. My 19-year-old child, the Free Software Movement, occupies most of my life, leaving no room for more children, but I still have room to love a sweetheart. I spend a lot of my time traveling to give speeches, often to Europe, Asia and Latin America; it would be nice if you were free to travel with me some of the time.
In the interests of fair exposure, I’m going to link back to Scott’s response to my response to his comments on my thoughts about manufactured scarcity, although I’m going to have to leave a more thorough response for another day as I have much to digest and process on other issues today. In the meantime, I’m just going to make two small points. When he says:
People in modern China (or even in a future America where the government has been granted broad control of its citizens) may have a valid desire to maintain anonymity online that is clearly more important than my annoyance with spam. (Capital letters my own)
This was in fact my initial point – that one can’t strip anonymity from the net without destroying much of its power for the disenfranchised. Hence when we’re assembling our micro-community structures online, we work to build a way of interacting that celebrates as much of the power of the web while simultaneously working to stop some uses of that power that could cause that community to collapse in upon itself completely. The nature of the web, web programmers and free software / open source projects (and indeed the market itself) means that there will probably not soon be a monopoly on community technology that stops people simply choosing another form of software to declare their home if the one they are in fails to meet their needs. That is probably the best place to resolve this debate – in net citizens’ interactions with, choices between (and accomplishments enabled by) various types of community software.
I don’t see how Tom’s example system could prevent a user from sitting at a single computer all day creating identities and then passing those identities around to other computers — assuming it can even prevent a computer from doing the same.
Again – it wouldn’t at all. But in my initial rough gestural example, the logging-in process would be time-consuming – which would mean that very specific speed bumps would be placed between new identity creation and new identity posting. This could radically slow down the amount of new users that someone could effectively maintain per computer. It’s a question again of difficulty – you do not have to make something impossible in order to stop it happening – you simply have to make something not worth the energy, time or money that you’d have to invest. That’s how public key cryptography works – not by making it impossible to break the code, but by making it take impossibly large amounts of time…
I’m a master of the pre-packaged culinary treat. You get it in a packet. You put the packet in the oven. You take the packet out of the oven. You have lovely food. It’s that simple! So as I’m sure you can imagine I was horrified to discover that the Lemon Chicken I purchased from Sainsbury’s required a baking sheet. You have to remove the chicken from the packaging, place it on a baking sheet and then add the sauce shortly afterwards. But if there’s a baking sheet, then it counts as cooking. And if it’s cooking food rather than magic oven food – where’s the pleasure?! It’s an invasion. I feel violated. I’m exhausted.
If I was a better geek, this article on XFML at diveintomark.org would be fascinating, illuminating and revelatory. Instead I stare at it in desperation, terror and confusion as the words change and resolve themselves in front of me to read, “Rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb”. This is not the kind of thing I’m supposed to admit in public.
Ok. I can just about buy the idea that you can use soundwaves to cool things down, and that you might be able to assemble a fridge that operated by those principles. I can almost buy the idea that two researchers are using “enormously loud sounds to keep their chiller cabinet cool”. And I’m grudgingly prepared to accept that one might be able to convince people that, “the sounds pumped through the Penn State fridge reach 173 dB, tens of thousands of times more intense than any rock concert”. But you have to start laughing when you read that a fully functioning acoustic fridge has been launched into space. And you’re going to look stunned and giggly when you’re told that “sounds of 165 dB would cause a person’s hair to catch fire from the frictional heating caused by air undergoing such intense compression and expansion”! [BBC News | Thermoacoustic Research at Penn State University]
I’ve added a couple of nice little things to the right-hand menu of the site today. You can now talk to people who live near me and work near me via UpMyStreet Conversations. The site’s progressing quite well – there are more conversations every day and new uses for the software keep emerging. Some people are just asking about areas they are moving to, debating London’s new congestion charges or complaining (at length) about layabout teenagers – but others are using it to answer very specific questions or even just to meet new people. I’d love it if UK webloggers decided to put a link to their local areas on their weblogs – I think that could really make it a useful and interesting place to relate to your local geography… But I guess I’ll just have to wait and see if that takes off…