Preoccupations

Ted Nelson @ St Paul's II

The Bush years have not been kind to those Americans living abroad and dependent on the dollar exchange rate. Out of necessity, then, Ted and Marlene, who first came to St Paul's in July 2007 (see here), are soon to return to the States — but, before leaving, they revisited St Paul's. Today, Ted spoke about his work, his current book-in-progress (Geeks Bearing Gifts) and Xanadu.

Farhan's blogged Ted's talk so well that there's little left for me to add. Thanks!

There were some lovely glimpses into Ted's childhood — a boy who loved reading and words and knew, by ten, who had coined tintinnabulate … chortle … serendipity; growing up in Greenwich Village without realising it, then reading about it and longing to see this Bohemian paradise; experiencing Mrs Roosevelt as a near neighbour. He was (as expected) both amusing and savage about the blackhole which is the clipboard. His father had taught him that writing is mostly re-writing, and re-writing is mostly rearrangement — so why devise writing tools that are so bad they hide the very material you're cutting? (CTRL+C, CTRL+V: cram and vomit.) By the time he went to college, he'd written a lot by linking cut and pasted pieces of writing.

Graduate school in 1960 and a computing course saw him suddenly quite sure that personal computers would come and that his job was to design the documents of the future: make it possible to see the parts and compare the versions, to visualise the origins of quotations, to expose deep rearrangements. Hypertext was first used by Ted in 1963, but it was 1986 before it was used outside his immediate circle.

It was great to have Ted and Marlene here again. I was particularly pleased that a number of our 13/14 year-old students came along: Ted has been a name to them in their ICT course — and here he was.

Technorati tags: Ted Nelson, Xanadu, ZigZag

Re-echoing that Mac/DOS piece

When I read Stephen Fry's first Saturday Guardian column (previous post), I took in the cross-reference to Umberto Eco's piece about the Mac/DOS:Catholic/Protestant parallelism but didn't follow it as I recalled having read it before. Then I saw friends bookmarking it and something made me check it out. What I recall reading (in October, 2005, it turns out — see Labyrinths and Internet) was something fuller — short of a full-length newspaper column but more than a clip.

I found it on the web in The Modern World and I see from the same site's page of Eco's writings that it says of this, the Mac/DOS piece: 'This ubiquitous work has, by now, found its way all across the Internet'. So there we are. And here it is, again.

The Holy War: Mac vs. DOS by Umberto Eco

The following excerpts are from an English translation of Umberto Eco's back-page column, La bustina di Minerva, in the Italian news weekly Espresso, September 30, 1994.

A French translation may be seen here.

---

Friends, Italians, countrymen, I ask that a Committee for Public Health be set up, whose task would be to censor (by violent means, if necessary) discussion of the following topics in the Italian press. Each censored topic is followed by an alternative in brackets which is just as futile, but rich with the potential for polemic. Whether Joyce is boring (whether reading Thomas Mann gives one erections). Whether Heidegger is responsible for the crisis of the Left (whether Ariosto provoked the revocation of the Edict of Nantes). Whether semiotics has blurred the difference between Walt Disney and Dante (whether De Agostini does the right thing in putting Vimercate and the Sahara in the same atlas). Whether Italy boycotted quantum physics (whether France plots against the subjunctive). Whether new technologies kill books and cinemas (whether zeppelins made bicycles redundant). Whether computers kill inspiration (whether fountain pens are Protestant).

One can continue with: whether Moses was anti-semitic; whether Leon Bloy liked Calasso; whether Rousseau was responsible for the atomic bomb; whether Homer approved of investments in Treasury stocks; whether the Sacred Heart is monarchist or republican.

I asked above whether fountain pens were Protestant. Insufficient consideration has been given to the new underground religious war which is modifying the modern world. It's an old idea of mine, but I find that whenever I tell people about it they immediately agree with me.

The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach -- if not the kingdom of Heaven -- the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counter-reformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It's true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions: When it comes down to it, you can decide to ordain women and gays if you want to.

Naturally, the Catholicism and Protestantism of the two systems have nothing to do with the cultural and religious positions of their users. One may wonder whether, as time goes by, the use of one system rather than another leads to profound inner changes. Can you use DOS and be a Vande supporter? And more: Would Celine have written using Word, WordPerfect, or Wordstar? Would Descartes have programmed in Pascal?

And machine code, which lies beneath and decides the destiny of both systems (or environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that belongs to the Old Testament, and is talmudic and cabalistic. The Jewish lobby, as always. ...

Technorati tags: Umberto Eco, Mac, DOS, PC

Sherry Turkle: 'what will loving come to mean?'

At the entrance to the exhibit is a turtle from the Galapagos Islands, a seminal object in the development of evolutionary theory. The turtle rests in its cage, utterly still. "They could have used a robot," comments my daughter. It was a shame to bring the turtle all this way and put it in a cage for a performance that draws so little on the turtle's "aliveness." I am startled by her comments, both solicitous of the imprisoned turtle because it is alive and unconcerned by its authenticity. The museum has been advertising these turtles as wonders, curiosities, marvels — among the plastic models of life at the museum, here is the life that Darwin saw. I begin to talk with others at the exhibit, parents and children. It is Thanksgiving weekend. The line is long, the crowd frozen in place. My question, "Do you care that the turtle is alive?" is welcome diversion. A ten year old girl would prefer a robot turtle because aliveness comes with aesthetic inconvenience: "Its water looks dirty. Gross." More usually, the votes for the robots echo my daughter's sentiment that in this setting, aliveness doesn't seem worth the trouble. A twelve-year-old girl opines: "For what the turtles do, you didn't have to have the live ones." Her father looks at her, uncomprehending: "But the point is that they are real, that's the whole point." … "If you put in a robot instead of the live turtle, do you think people should be told that the turtle is not alive?" I ask. Not really, say several of the children. Data on "aliveness" can be shared on a "need to know" basis, for a purpose. But what are the purposes of living things? When do we need to know if something is alive? Sherry Turkle — Edge, 2006: What is Your Dangerous Idea?

Last Thursday evening I was at the Saïd Business School for an OII event, Sherry Turkle talking about Cyberintimacies/Cybersolitudes:

Recent years have seen the development of computational entities - I call them relational artifacts - some of them are software agents and some of them are robots - that present themselves as having states of mind that are affected by their interactions with human beings. These are objects designed to impress not so much through their 'smarts' as through their sociability, their capacity to draw people into cyberintimacy. This presentation comments on their emerging role in our psychological, spiritual and moral lives. They are poised to be the new 'uncanny' in the culture of computing - something known of old and long familiar - yet become strangely unfamiliar. As uncanny objects, they are evocative. They compel us to ask such questions as, 'What kinds of relationships are appropriate to have with machines?' And more generally, 'What is a relationship?'

This was a sceptical talk in the best sense, questioning the cyberpresent and the imminent cyberfuture ('this is very difficult for me — I'm not a Luddite'). The broad thrust of the talk was born of a desire to 'put robots in their place': the debate about machines and AI was once a debate about the machines; now, Professor Turkle believes, the debate is increasingly about our vulnerabilities. Something new is happening in human culture, for robots are not (simply) a kind of doll on to which we project feelings but are produced with "embedded psychology": they appear to be attentive, they look us in the eye, they gesture at us. Human beings are very cheap dates: we ascribe intentionality very quickly. Consequently, we are engaging with these robots, not (just) projecting feelings on to them.

She calls this change in culture the 'robotic moment'. Our encounter with robots crystallises how the larger world of digital technology is affecting our sense of self, our habits of mind. (In turn, software, virtual worlds and devices are preparing us, at times through nothing more than superficiality, for a life with robots.) The earlier, romantic ('essentialist') reaction to the coming of robots ("Why should I talk to a computer about my problems? How can I talk about sibling rivalry to a machine that doesn't have a mother? How could a machine possibly understand?" — 1999 interview) no longer holds sway. Now, she says, 'I hear that humans are faking it and robots are more honest.'

When we're thinking about robots we're thinking, then, about how we conceptualise the self. Narcissism and pragmatism combine and self-objects in perfect tune with our fragile self confirm our sense of who we are. If you have trouble with intimacies, cyberintimacies are useful because they are at the same time cybersolitudes.

Consider the elderly — this is Sherry Turkle writing in Forbes earlier this year:

Twenty-five years ago the Japanese realized that demography was working against them and there would never be enough young people to take care of their aging population. Instead of having foreigners take care of their elderly, they decided to build robots and put them in nursing homes. Doctors and nurses like them; so do family members of the elderly, because it is easier to leave your mom playing with a robot than to leave her staring at a wall or a TV. Very often the elderly like them, I think, mostly because they sense there are no other options. Said one woman about Aibo, Sony's household-entertainment robot, "It is better than a real dog. … It won't do dangerous things, and it won't betray you. … Also, it won't die suddenly and make you feel very sad."

Consider, alternatively, the paralysed man who said that robots can be kinder than nurses but went on to say that even an unpleasant nurse has a story — and 'I can find out about that story'.

For me, the best part of her OII/Saïd talk was her listing of the five points she considers key (also in the Forbes article, 'five troubles that try my tethered soul'). From my notes:

1. Is anybody listening? What people mostly want from their public space is to be alone with their personal networks, to stay tethered to the objects that confirm their sense of self.
2. We are losing the time to take our time. We're learning to see ourselves as cyborgs, at one with our devices.
3. Does speed-dialing bring new dependencies? Children are given mobiles by their parents but the deal is that they then must answer their parents' calls. Tethered children feel different about themselves.
4. The political consequences of online/virtual life — an acceptance of surveillance, loss of privacy, etc. People learn to become socialised, accepting surveillance as affirmation rather than intrusion.
5. Do we know the purpose of living things? Authenticity is to us what sex was to the Victorians, threat and obsession, taboo and fascination. "Data on aliveness can be shared on a need-to-know basis."

(On tethering, this from a piece in the New Scientist, 20 September, 2006, is helpful: 'Our new intimacies with our machines create a world where it makes sense to speak of a new state of the self. When someone says "I am on my cell", "online", "on instant messaging" or "on the web", these phrases suggest a new placement of the subject, a subject wired into social existence through technology, a tethered self. I think of tethering as the way we connect to always-on communication devices and to the people and things we reach through them.')

There were good questions from (in particular) Steve Woolgar: just how new is this robotic "threat" (think of the eighteenth century panic about mechanical puppets) and what of our ability to adapt successfully to "new" challenges ('we learn new repertoires and relate differently to different kinds of "robots"')? I was also glad that someone mentioned E M Forster's 'The Machine Stops' (1909; Wikipedia — which links to online texts; the text can also be found here). Other than that, there was insufficient time for discussion. This was disappointing and so, too, was the caricature of hackers (a 'group of people for whom the computer is the best they can do') from one section of the audience (complete with careless remarks about autism).

Much food for thought, but I came away wishing we could have talked for much longer. I note amongst the students I teach the emergence of good questions about digital technology and a well-established desire to do more with the tools it gives them than sustain a narrow, narcissistic self. Many of them are, of course, using the web in inspiring ways, and the ingenuity of the young in escaping from being tethered (to parents, to authority) is not in doubt.

I want to give the floor to Sherry Turkle and link to other material of hers that I've found useful in thinking about this talk. In the course of a review of her Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Howard Rheingold fired three questions at Sherry Turkle (I think this is all from 1997). Here are excerpts from her replies:

As human beings become increasingly intertwined with the technology and with each other via the technology, old distinctions about what is specifically human and specifically technological become more complex. Are we living life on the screen or in the screen? Our new technologically enmeshed relationships oblige us to ask to what extent we ourselves have become cyborgs, transgressive mixtures of biology, technology, and code. The traditional distance between people and machines has become harder to maintain....The computer is an evocative object that causes old boundaries to be renegotiated. Mind to Mind

We have grown accustomed to thinking of our minds in unitary images. Even those psychodynamic theories that stress that within us there are unconscious as well as conscious aspects, have tended to develop ways of describing the final, functioning "self" in which it acts "as if" it were one. I believe that the experience of cyberspace, the experience of playing selves in various cyber-contexts, perhaps even at the same time, on multiple windows, is a concretization of another way of thinking about the self, not as unitary but as multiple. In this view, we move among various self states, various aspects of self. Our sense of one self is a kind of illusion . . . one that we are able to sustain because we have learned to move fluidly among the self states. What good parenting provides is a relational field in which we become increasingly expert at transitions between self states. Psychological health is not tantamount to achieving a state of oneness, but the ability to make transitions among the many and to reflect on our-selves by standing in a space between states. Life on the screen provides a new context for this psychological practice. One has a new context for negotiating the transitions. One has a new space to stand on for commenting on the complexities and contradictions among the selves. So, experiences in cyberspace encourage us to discover and find a new way to talk about the self as multiple and about psychological health not in terms of constructing a one but of negotiating a many. Mind to Mind 

At one level, the computer is a tool. It helps us write, keep track of our accounts, and communicate with others. Beyond this, the computer offers us both new models of mind and a new medium on which to project our ideas and fantasies. Most recently, the computer has become even more than tool and mirror: We are able to step through the looking glass. We are learning to live in virtual worlds. We may find ourselves alone as we navigate virtual oceans, unravel virtual mysteries, and engineer virtual skyscrapers. But increasingly, when we step through the looking glass, other people are there as well. In the story of constructing identity in the culture of simulation, experiences on the Internet figure prominently, but these experiences can only be understood as part of a larger cultural context. That context is the story of the eroding boundaries between the real and the virtual, the animate and the inanimate, the unitary and the multiple self which is occurring in both advanced scientific fields of research and the patterns of everyday life. From scientists trying to create artificial life to children "morphing" through a series of virtual personae, we shall see evidence of fundamental shifts in the way we create and experience human identity. But it is on the Internet that our confrontations with technology as it collides with our sense of human identity are fresh, even raw. In the real-time communities of cyberspace, we are dwellers on the threshold between the real and virtual, unsure of our footing, inventing ourselves as we go along. As players participate, they become authors not only of text but of themselves, constructing new selves through social interaction. Mind to Mind 

And this is from the Edge piece (2006) quoted at the start:

Do plans to provide relational robots to attend to children and the elderly make us less likely to look for other solutions for their care? People come to feel love for their robots, but if our experience with relational artifacts is based on a fundamentally deceitful interchange, can it be good for us? Or might it be good for us in the "feel good" sense, but bad for us in our lives as moral beings? Relationships with robots bring us back to Darwin and his dangerous idea: the challenge to human uniqueness. When we see children and the elderly exchanging tendernesses with robotic pets the most important question is not whether children will love their robotic pets more than their real life pets or even their parents, but rather, what will loving come to mean?

Also worth looking up: the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self and Evocative Objects, a new book edited by Sherry Turkle. The talk was filmed, so I assume there'll be a webcast and that it will appear here.

Technorati tags: Sherry Turkle, evocative objects, relational artifacts, robots

Dymaxion cubicle

A week ago today, I was in the Design Museum (enjoying the Zaha Hadid exhibition — a few photos here, though sadly I couldn't do her wonderful project paintings justice). A surprise to me was the Buckminster Fuller cubicle door drawing — in the Gents. I seemed to have the room to myself, so I took a couple of photos of the door (wondering what I'd say if someone came in or, worse by far, if the cubicle turned out not to be empty after all).

So that was that, and then Stowe noticed that Dopplr had used Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map in their Dopplr 100 launch. From Wikipedia:

The Dymaxion map of the Earth is a projection of a global map onto the surface of a polyhedron, which can then be unfolded to a net in many different ways and flattened to form a two-dimensional map which retains most of the relative proportional integrity of the globe map. It was created by Buckminster Fuller, and patented by him in 1946, the patent application showing a projection onto a cuboctahedron. The 1954 version published by Fuller under the title The AirOcean World Map used a slightly modified but mostly regular icosahedron as the base for the projection, and this is the version most commonly referred to today. The name Dymaxion was applied by Fuller to several of his inventions.

Unlike most other projections, the Dymaxion is intended purely for representations of the entire globe. Each face of the polyhedron is a gnomonic projection, so zooming in on one such face renders the Dymaxion equivalent to such a projection.

Dymaxion map folded into an icosahedron

Fuller claimed his map had several advantages over other projections for world maps. It has less distortion of relative size of areas, most notably when compared to the Mercator projection; and less distortion of shapes of areas, notably when compared to the Gall-Peters projection. Other compromise projections attempt a similar trade-off.

More unusually, the Dymaxion map has no 'right way up'. Fuller frequently argued that in the universe there is no 'up' and 'down', or 'north' and 'south': only 'in' and 'out'. Gravitational forces of the stars and planets created 'in', meaning 'towards the gravitational center', and 'out', meaning 'away from the gravitational center'. He linked the north-up-superior/south-down-inferior presentation of most other world maps to cultural bias. Note that there are some other maps without north at the top.

There is no one 'correct' view of the Dymaxion map. Peeling the triangular faces of the icosahedron apart in one way results in an icosahedral net that shows an almost contiguous land mass comprising all of earth's continents - not groups of continents divided by oceans. Peeling the solid apart in a different way presents a view of the world dominated by connected oceans surrounded by land.

Which set me thinking: that Buckminster Fuller is someone we ought to be teaching in schools, of course (and I can see how we might start doing that easily enough — and soon), and about Dopplr and good design. For another very cool Dopplr ... er ... effect, if you've not seen their sparkline stack and read Matt's post about it, you really should.

Technorati tags: Buckminster Fuller, dymaxion, dymaxion map, maps, mapping, Dopplr

if the algorithm holds ...

Doug Rushkoff's Edge formula entry:

Edge's Formulae for the 21st Century ('What is your formula? Your equation? Your algorithm?'). More about Doug Rushkoff, on Edge, here.

Technorati tags: Edge, Doug Rushkoff

Life, the web — all a tangle

The interview Tim Berners-Lee gave last year (IBM developerWorks) was widely reported. I blogged it, Web 2.0: 'what the Web was supposed to be all along', in August 2006, shortly after it was posted. What most struck me about it was expressed, pithily and succinctly, by Sir Tim in a remark about the web made on an earlier occasion — the MIT Technology Review Emerging Technologies conference in 2005, as reported by Andy Carvin in Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web:

The original thing I wanted to do was to make it a collaborative medium, a place where we (could) all meet and read and write.

At the MIT conference, Sir Tim talked about Marc Andreessen and the emergence of a commercial web browser. In the IBM developerWorks interview he said of his web browser,

… the original World Wide Web browser of course was also an editor. … I really wanted it to be a collaborative authoring tool. And for some reason it didn't really take off that way.  And we could discuss for ages why it didn't. … I've always felt frustrated that most people don't...didn't have write access.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I came across a 1997 Time magazine piece about Tim Berners-Lee by Robert Wright, The Man Who Invented The Web:

Berners-Lee considers the Web an example of how early, random forces are amplified through time. "It was an accident of fate that all the first [commercially successful] programs were browsers and not editors," he says. To see how different things might have been, you have to watch him gleefully wield his original browser--a browser and editor--at his desk. He's working on one document and--flash--in a few user-friendly keystrokes, it is linked to another document. One document can be on his computer "desktop"--for his eyes only--another can be accessible to his colleagues or his family, and another can be public. A seamless neural connection between his brain and the social brain. … he is grateful that Andreessen co-authored a user-friendly browser and thus brought the Web to the public, even if in non-ideal form. Yet it can't have been easy watching Andreessen become the darling of the media after writing a third-generation browser that lacked basic editing capabilities.

Now the web is 'finally starting' to follow 'the technological lines he envisioned (… as software evolves)':

Berners-Lee, standing at a blackboard, draws a graph, as he's prone to do. It arrays social groups by size. Families, workplace groups, schools, towns, companies, the nation, the planet. The Web could in theory make things work smoothly at all of these levels, as well as between them. That, indeed, was the original idea--an organic expanse of collaboration. … "At the end of the day, it's up to us: how we actually react, and how we teach our children, and the values we instill." He points back to the graph. "I believe we and our children should be active at all points along this."

So, a fundamental deviation from Tim Berners-Lee's vision for the web occurred in the form taken by popular, commercially viable web browsers. In Dave Winer's view, this early deviation was heavily reinforced by Microsoft:

Since the re-rollout of Office in 1996, it's been really clear why Microsoft was so hell-bent at first owning and then suffocating the web browser, along with the web. … Because for them, writing was not something that would be done in a web browser, if they improved their browser as a writing tool, that would be the end of Word, and with it, a big reason for using Office. … If instead, Microsoft had embraced the web, and with it the shift in their product line and economics, in 1995, we'd have a much richer writing environment today. Blogging would have happened sooner, in a bigger way. It's hard to imagine how much the sins of Microsoft cost all of us.

What a tangled thing technology is (Berners-Lee — 'The Web is a tangle, your life is a tangle – get used to it'). I hope very much that Ted Nelson has brought Geeks Bearing Gifts nearer to publication. Meanwhile, with the Time 1997 piece a little bit more of the road map of the web's evolution became clearer to me. The read-only nature of the successful web browsers that came after Sir Tim's explains a great deal about how many an adult of a certain age perceives the web. I think of John Naughton's sketch of how today's 22 year-old conceives of the web, and of Andrew McAfee's comment,

Evidence is mounting that younger people don’t think of the Internet as a collection of content that other people produce for them to consume. Instead, they think about it as a dynamic, emergent, and peer-produced repository to which they’re eager to contribute.

And I think back to Bradley Horowitz's talk at the London March 2007 FOWA meeting, which I wrote about here — and Twittered at the time: 'from a hierarchy of creator(s)/synthesisers/consumers (1:10:100) towards a web world of participation (100)'.

If the history of the web browser had itself been different, would we have suffered the misalignment of perceptions about the essentially social, creative nature of the web ('I believe we and our children should be active at all points along this') that often exists now between today's different generations of users?

Well, and in any case, 'The Web is no longer the future of computing, computing is now about the Web' (Dare Obasanjo).

***

Footnote. Two other things from the Time piece (I pass them on as given there): ' … contrary to the mythology surrounding Netscape, it was he [Berners-Lee], not Andreessen, who wrote the first "graphical user interface" Web browser. (Nor was Andreessen's browser the first to feature pictures; but it was the first to put pictures and text in the same window, a key innovation.)'

Wikipedia's timeline of web browsers is available here.

Technorati tags: Tim Berners-Lee, browsers, web browsers, history of the web

The certainty of chance

From the Economist's obituary of George Melly:

As a lifelong Surrealist, he was sure that the bizarre and marvellous lay in wait for him everywhere, and carried in his head a Surrealist motto, “the certainty of chance”.

'The 'certainty of chance' was', James Boyle says, 'the phrase André Breton used to describe both modernism and his own philosophy of life'.

Earlier this month, the TLS reprinted George Melly's 1991 review of A Book of Surrealist Games, in which he concluded:

It may puzzle the more pompous as to why this body of men and women, these ardent revolutionaries of the spirit, spent so much time engaged in occupations usually considered more suitable for bored children on wet afternoons. The answer is, to quote the preface, that “Surrealist play is more like a kind of provocative magic”, that it “breaks, the thread of discursive thought” and, above all, helps to confirm the primary Surrealist belief in what they called “objective chance” or “the certainty of hazard”. These games will prove to you that not only was Lautréamont justified as to poetry; one could add a rider: “Surrealism too can be made by all.” 

Of the cover, George Melly wrote:

… a bourgeois interior, painted with the minimal realism of early Magritte. Seated opposite each other in identical armchairs, a young father is engrossed in his newspaper while his wife is teaching their son to read. Something is mildly askew. Is it because, while it is dark outside, the curtains are undrawn, or that the room is lit by anachronistic Victorian oil lamps, or that the newspaper, despite the completely Western ambience of the decor, is printed in oriental typography?

The origin of this illustration is unrevealed. I suspect it may have been an advertisement for a pre-war European product aimed at the Japanese market, or vice versa, but it is a brilliant trailer for the displacement on offer within. In a balloon-shaped inset, replacing perhaps a commercial slogan, is a quotation from Lautréamont, the nineteenth-century writer so revered by the Surrealists: “Poetry should be made by all.”

Amazon carries an "editorial review" (cited as Amazon.com): 'Surrealism is far more than some dead art movement: it is also a collection of tools for perceiving and representing the world in ways that transcend normative perspectives. … If you have any spark of creativity, you are strongly encouraged to get this book to help loosen the holds of quotidian existence on your craft.'

I see Anne's been here before — and quotes more of the preface to A Book of Surrealist Games than George Melly did:

Surrealist games and procedures are intended to free words and images from the constraints of rational and discursive order, substituting chance and indeterminancy for premeditation and deliberation... In one particular and important respect Surrealist play is more like a kind of provocative magic. This is in its irrepressible propensity to the transformation of objects, behaviours and ideas. In this aspect of its proceedings Surrealism makes manifest its underlying political programme, its revolutionary intent.

Before going on to put some surrealist games online, Anne also quotes Philippe Audouin:

It is not to belittle Surrealist activity to consider it as a game, in fact as The Great Game, whose prizes in the eyes of those who played and lived it, can be calculated in promises of freedom, love, revolution, and in anything else that intransigent desire can aspire to.

Unsurprisingly, various things here made me think again about the aleatoric. 

Technorati tags: George Melly, André Breton, surrealism, chance, aleatoric, play, magic

Narrating the work

E O Wilson in Consilience, quoted by Jon Udell:

The creative process is an opaque mix. Perhaps only openly confessional memoirs, still rare to nonexistent, might disclose how scientists actually find their way to a publishable conclusion. In one sense scientific articles are deliberately misleading. Just as a novel is better than the novelist, a scientific report is better than the scientist, having been stripped of all the confusions and ignoble thought that led to its composition. Yet such voluminous and incomprehensible chaff, soon to be forgotten, contains most of the secrets of scientific success.

As Jon put it elsewhere,

By narrating the work, as Dave Winer once put it, we clarify the work. There can be more than narrator, but it makes sense to have one team member own the primary role just as other members own other roles.

The first Jon Udell piece referred to above focuses on Timo Hannay:

As director of web publishing for Nature Publishing Group, Timo Hannay’s projects include: Connotea, a social bookmarking service for scientists; Nature Network, a social network for scientists; and Nature Precedings, a site where researchers can share and discuss work prior to publication. The social and collaborative aspects of these systems are, of course, inspired by their more general counterparts on the web: del.icio.us, Facebook and LinkedIn, the blogosphere.

Jon's interview with Timo Hannay is here. I'm keeping a close eye on what Nature is up to.

Dave Winer's original usage runs: 'I think that narrating your work is the way to go'. I can see why Jon Udell likes that as much as he does.

Technorati tags: E O Wilson, Jon Udell, Dave Winer, Nature, Timo Hannay, conversation

Ted Nelson

Ted came to speak at St Paul's last Tuesday. He was on great form. Just turned 70, he spoke with few notes and to the theme of his book-in-progress, Geeks Bearing Gifts — a look at how technology advances not by deep intent and precise planning but through accident and politics ('the clash and resolution of agendas'): nineteenth century rail track development (Brunel's broad gauge vs standard gauge), space travel (the science was developed by the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, but Goddard gets the credit), the invention of radio — Tesla ('the man who invented the twentieth century') vs Marconi, the American space programme (V-2 rockets, von Braun — Operation Paperclip — and the course of NASA's development) …

Including von Braun allowed Ted to mention the 1960 film about his work, I Aim at the Stars — subtitled by wits, 'But Sometimes I Hit London'. This was a talk peppered with good jokes. (Photos left and right by Frode Hegland.)

Then on to computing technology, software and hardware, and the erratic, kludgy nature of its development. The highly partisan Apple/Microsoft war-of-loyalty is wholly beside the point when the angle of approach is the one Ted takes, but he still had a great line on Windows: you can tell that it was designed from the ground up 'because there's a lot of … ground still up there'. In a Nelson world, the clipboard of either OS would have been fundamentally overhauled and made useful, not reduced to a feeble echo of the real-life clipboard on which it was modelled.

I hope Geeks Bearing Gifts sees the light to day: listening to Ted talk about the history of computing you appreciate how deeply he has lived and known its history over the last 45+ years. He understands Doug Engelbart's vision from the inside (the mouse was a detail — 'the work of a weekend', so to speak) and he had so much to communicate in the hour he had with us he only had 15 minutes in which to demo Xanadu (beginning with the Cosmic Book) and ZigZag.

Lunch came and discussion went on. Several of our students followed up next day, emailing Ted to maintain the link he'd established so well with them. Ted and Marlene (Mallicoat) made great guests.

Ted left us with working versions of both Xanadu and ZigZag. The latter can be downloaded from here and Xanadu is now available here. There's an excellent video available of Adam Moore (Nottingham University), working with ZigZag and biological and chemical data:

Further ZigZag resources are available online here.

All in all, we had a really good few hours together. What's more, a chance discovery by Ted of some mint first editions of Computer Lib meant we could buy a copy for departmental use (student and staff), as well as one for our main reference library. It was published in 1974 and you only have to dip into it to see it was way ahead of its time.

   

Technorati tags: Ted Nelson, talks, Xanadu, ZigZag

Privacy

Wanting to look into 'privacy' some more I asked a few friends about the long roots of the modern idea. Where does it come from and what conceptions of privacy did previous ages entertain? Of course, this is a vast subject and the very term even as used today is complicated. The OED's definitions run (I've put the first cited date of usage in square brackets after each definition):

The state or quality of being private.
1. a. The state or condition of being withdrawn from the society of others, or from public interest; seclusion. [c 1450]
b. The state or condition of being alone, undisturbed, or free from public attention, as a matter of choice or right; freedom from interference or intrusion. Also attrib., designating that which affords a privacy of this kind. [1814]

2. a. pl. Private or retired places; private apartments; places of retreat. Now rare. [1678]
b. A secret place, a place of concealment. Obs. [1686]

3. a. Absence or avoidance of publicity or display; a condition approaching to secrecy or concealment. [1598]
b. Keeping of a secret, reticence. Obs. [1736]

4. a. A private matter, a secret; pl. private or personal matters or relations. Now rare. [1591]
b. pl. The private parts. Obs. [1656]

5. Intimacy, confidential relations. Obs. [1638]

6. The state of being privy to some act; = PRIVITY. rare. [1719]

For the etymology, we go to private (a.) — and this immediately tells us so much:

ad. L. prvt-us withdrawn from public life, deprived of office, peculiar to oneself, private; as n. a man in private life; prop. pa. pple. of prv-re to bereave, deprive

A friend who's a medievalist recommended A History of Private Life and a classicist friend recommended the same ('though it only starts from Rome'). I've been meaning to make a start on those volumes (five?) for some time.

Another classicist friend, a Latin specialist, came straight back with: Andrew M. Riggsby, " 'Public' and 'private' in Roman culture: the case of the cubiculum," Journal of Roman Archaeology 10 (1997), 36–56. I'm going to have to go the Bodleian for that, but I did find Riggsby's university homepage and also this:

Riggsby describes the Roman conception of privacy as “not so much a right as a mandate: ‘If you are going to behave that way, you must do it in a certain restricted area. Keep it out of our view.’” … Keeping Riggsby’s interpretation of the Roman “right to privacy” in mind, the obligation to sequester morally questionable behavior outweighs any right to unmonitored freedom of action within the confines of “private space.” … Citing the anti-democratic tendencies of Roman society, Riggsby points out that, “The state does not permit a protected private sphere to go unwatched and allow it to become a potential source of disruption.” … According to Riggsby, “[Roman] Aristocratic moral tradition dictated that any act…is subject to the moral evaluation of the community. In one sense, then, there was no generally accepted norm of privacy, no legitimate moral claim to freedom from judgment of certain kinds of activity or activity within certain social or physical regions.”

Nearer our own times, there's masses of material, but I liked this for its broad sweep — suggestive as a springboard to more reading and research, and for its focus on how space described possibilities for privacy:

English 792X: Seminar: The Invention of Privacy in the Renaissance    Prof. Elsky    T 6:20-8:00
The premise of this course is that the modern imagination of everyday life began in the Renaissance. This interdisciplinary course examines how a social and intellectual revolution led to the invention of privacy as a cherished and sometimes feared value. We will look at new methods of analyzing literature based on an understanding of material culture, particularly the everyday life of the times. Our starting point will be a look at the way people lived in their homes and houses, and the way people's living spaces were completely redesigned in this period to include a variety of private withdrawing rooms. We will consider examples of new spaces designed for men, women, and families, and how these spaces affected family relations and relations between men and women. We will then turn to an exploration of how these new spatial structures actually altered the structure of the imagination as reflected in the major writers of the period. Literary works will include lyric, drama, and prose, as well as personal diaries written by both men and women. We will emphasize how the great writers of the period used the settings of privacy to reveal deep personal and spiritual fulfillment, on the one hand, but also the threat of social subversion, betrayal, illicitness, revenge, and murder.

Technorati tags: privacy, cubiculum, private life

Historic Quotes

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarised with the ideas from the beginning. — Max Planck

Found here — a great source of quotations, some just plain "historic", others forecasting the future, greeting new discoveries/ideas, etc, and getting things badly wrong:

"What use could this company make of an electrical toy?" — The President of Western Union responding to Alexander Graham Bell's offer to Western Union of the exclusive rights to the telephone for $100,000 in 1876.

Technorati tags: quotations, future, forecasting

Alan Kay's & Doug Engelbart's vision

Alan Kay, interviewed in CIO Insight (another link via Martin's del.icio.us links): 

A great thinker in our field is Doug Engelbart, who is mostly remembered for inventing the computer mouse. If you search Google you will find Doug's Web page, where there are 75 essays about what personal computing should be about. And on one of the early hits you can watch the demo he gave in 1968 to 3,000 people in San Francisco, showing them what the world of the future would be like. 

Engelbart, right from his very first proposal to ARPA [Advanced Research Projects Agency], said that when adults accomplish something that's important, they almost always do it through some sort of group activity. If computing was going to amount to anything, it should be an amplifier of the collective intelligence of groups. But Engelbart pointed out that most organizations don't really know what they know, and are poor at transmitting new ideas and new plans in a way that's understandable. Organizations are mostly organized around their current goals. Some organizations have a part that tries to improve the process for attaining current goals. But very few organizations improve the process of figuring out what the goals should be. 

Most of the ideas in that sphere, good ideas that would apply to business, were written down 40 years ago by Engelbart. But in the last few years I've been asking computer scientists and programmers whether they've ever typed E-N-G-E-L-B-A-R-T into Google-and none of them have. I don't think you could find a physicist who has not gone back and tried to find out what Newton actually did. It's unimaginable. Yet the computing profession acts as if there isn't anything to learn from the past, so most people haven't gone back and referenced what Engelbart thought. 

The things that are wrong with the Web today are due to this lack of curiosity in the computing profession. And it's very characteristic of a pop culture. Pop culture lives in the present; it doesn't really live in the future or want to know about great ideas from the past. I'm saying there's a lot of useful knowledge and wisdom out there for anybody who is curious, and who takes the time to do something other than just executing on some current plan. Cicero said, "Who knows only his own generation remains always a child." People who live in the present often wind up exploiting the present to an extent that it starts removing the possibility of having a future.

Lots more besides to enjoy: on the way operating systems have been written as 'layered architecture … even though layered systems don't scale very well' — 'This is an example of the invisibility of normality. We're not even aware that we're accepting most things we accept. Any creative person has to try and force their brain to reconsider things that are accepted so widely they seem like laws of the universe. Very often they aren't laws of the universe; they're just conventions'. On the Viewpoints Research Institute, of which he is President: 

The Viewpoints Research Institute is actually involved in three new projects. One is the $100 laptop project that Nicholas Negroponte is doing. That is coming along very well. The first 1,000 factory-built machines were built in the last few weeks. The plan is to build 5 million to 8 million laptops this summer, and perhaps as many as 50 million in 2008. We're very involved in that. The other thing is a recently funded NSF project that will take a couple of giant steps, we hope, toward reinventing programming. The plan is to take the entire personal-computing experience from the end user down to the silicon and make a system from scratch that recapitulates everything people are used to—desktop publishing, Internet experiences, etc.—in less than 20,000 lines of code. It would be kind of like a Moore's Law step in software. It's going to be quite difficult to do this work in five years, but it will be exciting. 

The third project we're just getting started on and don't have completely funded yet, is to make a new kind of user interface that can actually help people learn things, from very mundane things about how their computer system works to more interesting things like math, science, reading and writing. This project came about because of the $100 laptop. In order for the $100 laptop to be successful in the educational realm, it has to take on some mentoring processes itself. This is an old idea that goes all the way back to the sixties. Many people have worked on it. It just has never gotten above threshold.

On the possibilities for computers and computing experience in the future: 

How much learning is a person willing to do to really learn how to use a computer? The answer, over the last 25 years of the commercialization of personal computing, is almost none. Nobody really wants to put in any amount of effort. The things that people have been willing to learn have tended to be like the media they grew up with, which have really simple user interfaces. (The big exception is video games.) You don't see Doug Engelbart's approach to user interface, which was an incredibly efficient, two-handed interface that required training to learn how to use. 

One way of looking at personal computing is to focus on the kinds of things that computers can help people learn. There are a whole bunch of things that can be done if learning, rather than function, matters. If you were to change the approach to the user interface, as we thought we were doing at Xerox PARC, to a more learning-curve-oriented system, then you would be able to accelerate the acceptance of the newer ideas about what computers can do.

But perhaps most of all: 

… the reason I work with children and not adults is because adults are famously difficult to change in any significant way. They've made a commitment to the norms of the world they live in. Children are born not knowing what culture they've been born into, how the culture thinks, and what that culture thinks is important. Yet they are born with some built-in patterns of thinking that are universal. Since the late sixties, I've been interested in the extent to which you could cultivate the kind of thinking skills that only a few people use in the world today, by getting children to learn much more widely and much more fluently than most adults have. If you want to make a change, get the children to think differently.

Technorati tags: Alan Kay, Doug Engelbart, Viewpoints Research Institute, OLPC, computers, computing, collective intelligence, organsations

Cerebrotonic

No sooner do I post about Auden and include 'The Fall of Rome' ('Cerebrotonic Cato may / Extol the Ancient Disciplines'), than up pops 'cerebrotonic' in another blog post.

'Cerebrotonic' sounds like an Auden coinage, but isn't. Here's the OED:

A. adj. Designating or characteristic of a type of personality which is introverted, intellectual, and emotionally restrained, classified by Sheldon as being associated with an ECTOMORPHIC physique. B. n. One having this type of personality. So cerebrotonia (-tn), cerebrotonic personality or characteristics.

1937 A. HUXLEY Ends & Means xi. 165 Dr. William Sheldon, whose classification [of types of human beings] in terms of somatotonic, viscerotonic and cerebrotonic I shall use. Ibid. xii. 193 The cerebrotonic is not such a ‘good mixer’ as the viscerotonic. 1940 W. H. SHELDON Var. Human Physique 8 In the economy of the cerebrotonic individual the sensory and central nervous systems appear to play dominant roles. 1945 A. HUXLEY Let. 2 Apr. (1969) 517 There was just enough of the somatotonic in his..cerebrotonic make-up to make him regret his cerebrotonia. 1950 Themes & Var. i. 121 Too secretively the introvert, too inhibitedly cerebrotonic, to be willing to take the risk of ‘giving himself away’. 1951 AUDEN Nones (1952) 28 Cerebrotonic Cato may Extol the Ancient Disciplines. 1954 R. FULLER Fantasy & Fugue iv. 75 You..unfortunately incline to the cerebrotonic ectomorphyou worry too much, you're too good looking, and you can't abandon yourself happily to booze.

The other blog post? Momus' Celebrating diversity means measuring difference. Momus writes about William Sheldon:

I discovered his writings when I was 20, and trying to understand my own problems and potentialities better. Sheldon proposed what seems at first like a very simple way to measure body types. He isolates three basic components: fatness, muscularity and thinness, which he calls endomorphy, mesomorphy and ectomorphy. … "Ectomorphy means linearity, fragility, flatness of the chest, and delicacy throughout the body," he wrote. "We find a relatively scant dev