Bukes
What I have read since coming to Dublin:
Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Probably the most easily digestable book about economics ever, because it’s not really about economics, but rather about making stories from statistics. Individually interesting chapters, but doesn’t really have an argument beyond “it’s good to look at things in different ways”. Structurally suited to become popular via blogs (which it did), in that it’s chapters are totally modular and explainable in a single line. (2/5)
A HeartBreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers One from the pile. The passion AHWOSG was written with is contagious; I devoured this book. So often I could imagine Eggers hunched, sweating over his computer at night, belting out page after page in a frenzy. Of course it’s pretentious and self-obsessive, but unashamedly and consciously so, and not afraid to hide it’s hangups behind fiction — that’s what’s at it’s core, and Eggers has got the writing talent to pull it off in spades. Monumental. I wonder why almost all of the novels that have really blown me away are written by people in their 20’s? (5/5)
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. A wonderful book by any account, but mainly in that it instills just that: a sense of wonder. I read this in stops and starts a while back, but didn’t feel I gave it a fair run, so I reread in a couple of sittings. Through glorious prose and imagination, Marco Polo recounts descriptions of imaginary cities to Kublai Kahn, and describes what can in some form be found in any city. (5/5)
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware Completely different to any comic book I’ve read before. Half the action consists of people staring out the window sadly, yet on another page the story of two generations of family history is told without words. It’s surprising how gripping it remains throughout given how slowly it burns. Follows on nicely from the last book I read; Ware is to Eggers as painful family history exorcism through writing is to both of them. (4/5)
The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton Actually more a book about the aesthetics of everyday objects than architecture in particular, but a good and entertaining read nonetheless, and inspired me to spend some time gaping at every ugly and beautiful building I came across. I probably read this at a good time, given that I’m not long in the city and the architecture is still new to me. I enjoy nothing more than my evening ride home on the train every day. It’s got all the good stuff: buildings, sunset, shifting perspective (rotating around an object is better, but dollying past is still pretty good), a train… this isn’t a book review any more, is it? De Botton talks around a topic nicely, but never really punctures through it with a point. (3/5)
Recommendations welcome.
latests
Three days in Plymouth, and the end of the second year of my Masters. I presented my first draft project proposal which seemed to go over alright. Also took part in an Arduino workshop, making strange things happen with electrical circuits, breadboards and Processing. I made a game of Pong controlled by a potentiometer and a light sensor.
London for the weekend. Staying with friends in Golders Green, I woke up this morning to the sound of birds — yes, birds in London, a first for me too! Nice area, but where are all the rabbis everyone told me about? Oy vey, I’m disappointed. Inclemency notwithstanding, the city delivered again: Borough Market, the Tate, Old Street, Camden Town, and the ICA this time.
Karin’s kitten, who is so attracted to the property of movement that it must make life an unbearable endurance for the poor thing, is completely disoriented by which of my typing fingers should be his next prey. For the sake of his sanity, I’ll finish.
The environmental impact of thin client systems
Some establishing observations:
The world is running out of energy, and like all good crises, the global power crisis knows how to loom hard.
There are over 822 million desktop computers in the world plugged in today (src).
All your desktop apps are moving online, with your digital data storage to follow very soon.
Sun Microsystems just released a thin desktop client with an average power consumption of 4 watts, or about 5% of the typical desktop PC.
Now to tie these statements together:
In the future, your desktop computer may well be an extremely thin client with internet connectivity and little else. That means that when you boot up your Linux box, Firefox and maybe a command line terminal will open, and that’s it. Your computer can’t do anything else, but it doesn’t need to; everything you need exists and happens on a server somewhere, and can be accessed through your web browser. You won’t have a hard drive, or any external media ports. Running applications directly on your computer will become practically obsolete. Most of the computational heavy lifting will be done on a central server, and the processing power of the average user’s desktop machine and operating system will become less and less relevant. (By the way, have you heard that there are going to be no less than seven different version of Vista to choose from?) A thinner client means less local computation, means less power consumption. Now multiply by 822 million.
Will this happen? Here’s a graph of Moore’s law in action over the past 35 years, stating that the complexity of integrated circuits doubles every 18 to 24 months:
In the next couple of years in the typical desktop, this trajectory will start to level off — expect a similar-looking chart on bandwidth to take up the slack. You can also look for the average efficiency of a desktop computer to be similarly up and to the right. The limit of what’s technically possible will continue to grow exponentially, but the average user will have no use for that type of processing power, in the same way that 90% of Microsoft Word users only use 10% of the features, or that not everybody drives a racecar. The Mac mini is probably an early leader here.
The story goes that the computer hardware industry was once compared to the auto industry by Bill Gates thusly: “If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five dollar cars that got 1000 miles per gallon.” (“Yes”, came the reply, “but the car would crash twice a day”.) Now desktop hardware is about to follow the design changes that occurred in the automobile industry around the same time that the first personal computers were becoming available. Cars could have gone hundreds of kilometers per hours, but they simply didn’t need to; instead of continuing to increase in power, cars that were smaller, cheaper, and more economical emerged to cater to city driving.
Will computers start to slow down soon, with more of a focus on size, efficiency and price, even at the expense of performance? If so, will we see an end to SUV-like, 100w-guzzling desktop monsters? It’s interesting to note that within the ecosystem of computing, it is sustainable software development has engendered an environment that could cater to more sustainable hardware systems, and the emergence of more efficient behavior.
Peter Schwartz on the geography of the future
As an addendum to my note on the influence of cosmology on cartography, a quote from Peter Schwartz:
Cosmology actually matters in the long run. In the geocentric universe, you did one set of things. Suddenly when the sun is at the centre and you’re going around the sun, you start answering those questions differently, you imagine different possibilities, the future looks very different. And of course, once you discover that the sun is only one of many suns, and that it’s part of a galaxy, and [the galaxy is one of] many galaxies… and now you’re into a real universe, it’s a really big thing. Your sense of who you are is now very different. Now we’re even at maybe multiverses, right? We’ve thought about stellar travel, intergalactic travel, interuniversal travel, woah.
He’s talking about generating ideas, but imagine if you can this scale of thinking applied to mapping and our conception of location. Woah, indeed. From his really great The Art of the Really Long View lecture (available to download here).
Temporary workstations and OS polygamy
I have become terminally nomadic of late. No, I have not become an incurable drifter (boom boom), but on a pretty much daily basis now, I swap between computer terminals.
Not only that! My promiscuity extends to operating systems too; until recently my eye wandered only occasionally to other blue gradiated desktops, but in the last few weeks I have skipped between Windows, OS X and Linux with abandon. A while back, I gave Microsoft the shove, who I had been seeing since the days of DOS (it’s been something of a shotgun marraige ever since, given that we had offspring to support) and started an enjoyable liason with a very sexy new Macbook Pro.
I think it’s curious how not-jarring all this swapping back and forth is. I imagine if I had to drive a few different cars, or use a number of different phones every day I would be uncomfortable. And I use my computer much more than I use either of those.
Then again, I’m always reading a couple of books at any given time, usually a cross-section of genres to appeal to different moods, so perhaps OSes work the same way. OS X is Douglas Coupland or Stewart Brand, Linux is Michel Foucault or maybe Dave Eggers, and Windows is Christopher Marlowe or Dan Brown; what am I in the mood for?
Also, driving or phoning are boring activities, whereas I enjoy tinkering with computers and find interface design interesting.
In a somewhat circular move, I’ve been delving into the UNIX command line also. It’s odd; here I am 15 years later, learning the command line all over again. ls -l is the new dir /p.
Summer in Dublin
Life rumbles on, even if this blog lies fallow. I live in Dublin now, and do all the Dubliney things that it entails; reading on the Dart to work in the morning, meeting up with old friends in the evenings, going to some exhibitions with Paula, driving home to Galway the odd weekend.
And the evenings are getting bright. Shadows stretch long along the ground and crawl up onto buildings, the sky is getting blue, and the low hanging sun glares on the road; time to get the camera out again, the photographic light has arrived.
Upping sticks
My bags are almost packed, years worth of stuff has been donated and dumped, and the time has come to make the short trip east. Like so many brave young souls who went before us, we’re moving to Our Nation’s Capital, Dublin.
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks dealing with all of the aforementioned stuff - sorting my shit out, I think it’s called - before I have to pointlessly haul it to across the country to gather dust until the next move.
I gave away my desktop computer, probably the last desktop I’ll ever own - I’ve had one of those things in my various bedrooms since I was about eight. I’m selling my long-silent bass amp, surely a sign that my latent dreams of a career as a famous musician are now somewhat in danger of not being realised. Books and CDs, I’m hanging on to for now.
Anyway.
New city, new people, new job - it should be fun. Time to switch off, pack the car with my now-streamlined collection of stuff, and go.
The intonation of hyperlinking
A new style of writing that the collective mind of the internet has unknowingly developed: creating emphasis on a word or phrase by making it a link to another page.
Some people’s blog posts, for example, are densely linked collections of references, hinting at a wealth of further material beyond the surface of the text. The paragraphs of text on their own make sense, but they are ridddled with links to external references (squint at things magazine or Rodcorp to see what I mean).
By adding a link to an otherwise unassuming word within a sentence, you create an optional branch to the flow of communication, an aside. In a literary sense, the link says: there’s something more to be seen here, there’s something else I’m thinking but not saying directly, but you can pick up on it if you’re willing to follow through. The link implies an embedded additional meaning.
This is what intonation does in speech; by stressing or accenting a particular word or phrase when I talk, I’m communicating something extra. In fact, when reading online I find myself mentally applying verbal emphasis to linked words within a sentence (literally stressing the word in my mind). In the same way as italics or a question mark are a guide to tone, so is a link.
Are the limitations old media being exposed by it’s linear restrictions? I don’t know of an equivalent style in literature (David Foster Wallace’s hyperactive use of footnotes (See? I did it just there!) is the nearest parallel I can think of). What about speech for that matter, with it’s inadequecy to express what we are really thinking or feeling (the very thing poets and many writers spend their careers striving to overcome)?
What if we could embed hyperlinked commentary, mental symbols or narrative branching within our speech?
Burn on Demand?
Does anyone know of a “burn on demand” service - that is, something that allows you to order small runs of CDs to be professionally burned (not as CDRs) and packaged as needed?
Neassa told me about the difficulty of getting a relatively small print run of her EP done. Services like Lulu allow authors to self-publish single copies of their book as they are needed. Why not CDs? I asked a friend who works for a label, who asked his boss, and both came back negative - they’d never heard of it.
I’ve wondered if there would be any point to something like this. Not the mechanics of it - asking a musician to manually create the CDs themself would be the equivalent of asking an author to photocopy their book for distribution - but the obsolescence of the format itself. What with the new model for music distribution - iTunes, MySpace, the Arctic Monkeys and all that - where does the humble CD stand?
As an aside, one of my favourite projects from Transmediale was Burnstation, a mobile copying station loaded with Copyleft licenced music. You browse for music you dig, then burn it all to a CD to take with you.
Anyway, burn on demand, does it exist? Should it?
Beneath the pavement, a blog!
… or, the Dublin Riots and the citizen journalist’s revolution.
So there was mad rioting in Dublin at the weekend - street paving torn up and flung at police, cars burned out, shops looted. RTÉ didn’t even break from their regular Saturday sports programming to cover what was going on (although Charlie Bird took a few lumps for the side), simply because they weren’t prepared to deliver the ground-level reportage required. There were plenty of bloggers about though (highlights that I’ve seen here, here), who covered what was happening on the ground as the day went on better than TV and radio managed to, and better than the Sunday papers.
I’m not convinced that “citizen journalism” is the only way forward by any means, but in instances like this it’s strengths are apparent. In the same way that bloggers simply don’t have the resources or time to devote to investigative journalism, the traditional news media can’t achieve the blanket coverage that distributed guerrilla reporters can. So, we got political analysis and high-level interviews from TV and radio, and we got on-the-spot coverage from blogs. They compliment each other.
The online coverage called to mind an excellent book of vivid stories from the Easter Rising that took place in the same street ninety years ago, and the fictionalized account of the same events in A Star Called Henry. These books simply following people’s actions throughout the day, while something bigger happens around them.
In school, history bored me so much that I dropped it for the Leaving Cert. When I went to college I took it up again, because by then I had caught on that interesting stuff had happened after all - I’d just heard about it from poor storytellers. History is almost always more interesting when told from a personal perspective, from the participants points of view. That’s why I found the independent online coverage of Saturday’s events particularly captivating. However, news shouldn’t just be entertainment, and the mainstream media still plays a role in providing a wider perspective on current events.
Berlin, London, Dublin
I’m home from a fun and full week away. There was Berlin and the Transmediale festival (including a talk by Janet Cardiff), Dorkbot, snowball fights, and cheap beer. Then there was London and the Web 2.0 Summit, being blown away by Tino Sehgal at the ICA, Prefabulous London, and expensive beer. And last night there was Dublin for a two and a half hour set from Broken Social Scene.
Links are the new holiday snaps.
The Prophet
About five years ago, I was given a copy of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran as a present before going traveling, so it’s very closely tied in my mind to a specific place and time, almost to the extent that I’m not sure if I can even tell if it’s any good or not. Regardless, it worked for me at the time (even though I didn’t always agree with it), and I’ve dipped back into it a couple of times since.
In the book, and over the course of twenty-eight short chapters, a spiritual leader who is about to leave his city speaks to the people on a range of themes: Love, Marriage, Children, Giving, Eating And Drinking, Work, Joy And Sorrow, Children, Clothes, Buying And Selling, Crime And Punishment, Laws, Freedom, Reason And Passion, Pain, Self Knowledge, Teaching, Friendship, Talking, Time, Good And Evil, Prayer, Pleasure, Beauty, Religion, Death. That’s all it’s about, and it’s about all of that.
I was reminded of the book again recently when I read the similarly-structured Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, and decided to re-read it. So, I’m going to read a chapter during each of the twenty-eight days of February, and while I’m at it, publish each chapter to a blog each day (the book is in the public domain). Follow along by subscribing to the RSS feed and taking a few minutes out each day to slow down and reflect.