confused of calcutta

I guess quite a few of you will already have read Abraham Flexner’s essay “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge“. Flexner was the founding Director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and originally wrote the essay as a memo for thr General Education Board; he later used it as the basis for an address [...]

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Recently I wrote about meeting Doug Engelbart for the first time, courtesy of a dinner invite from Tom Malone. Before dinner, I had the opportunity to hear Doug speak at a Center for Collective Intelligence seminar at MIT. As you would expect, he covered a lot of ground very quickly, and I won’t attempt to [...]

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Funny place the internet. Or maybe we’re the ones that are funny. Maybe it’s just me, funny peculiar. You know, I never thought of looking for The Mother Of All Demos on the web.
Then, last week, I had the opportunity of attending a Doug Engelbart seminar at MIT, and the incredible privilege of having a [...]

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Have you ever noticed that whenever you try and describe something “new”, there is a tendency to use words that relate to the “old” thing it replaces? I guess it’s human nature. The trouble is, quite often this leads to a misunderstanding of what the new thing is about. As Einstein is reputed to have [...]

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Early comments and conversations suggest that I didn’t get my point across when discussing the moods and changes of various armed services organisations with respect to emerging technologies.
The point I was trying to make was this:
An integral, essential part of the web as it is today is its writeability, its “liveness”. When you comment on [...]

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I was reminded of the existence of this during a completely different conversation over at Gordon Cook’s discussion group. Fascinating talk, provides an unusual and lively view of aspects of computing history. I think it’s important for all of us to revisit such conversations and discussions, it will help us do the right thing when [...]

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Three headlines I saw today, suggesting the shape of arguments to come:
1. Bandwidth leap for British forces
2.  US Military takes Iraq war to YouTube
3.  US blocks soldiers from websites
I find the trend interesting and just slightly worrying. Let me explain why. Of course the military have the right to make judgment calls on the economics [...]

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People have been very quick to add the suffix 2.0 to pretty much everything that’s going on nowadays, and as quick to argue about what 2.0 means in each context. I don’t particularly care one way or the other; my interests are in the tools and techniques that emerge, who uses them and why, how [...]

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It’s been an unusual weekend. Spent most of it closeted away with a bunch of very talented people, at an event organised by the Trinity Forum, headlined When No One Sees: The Importance of Character in an Age of Image. It worked a bit like an unconference: a small group of attendees, a core agenda [...]

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Bing tiddle tiddle bang

Bing tiddle fiddle bing

Bing fiddle fiddle tiddle tiddle

Bing fiddle tiddle tiddle BONG!

So went Zatapathique and singers in the Europolice Song Contest many years ago, parodying Lulu’s win with Boom Bang-a-Bang in 1969. She sang:
…My heart goes Boom Bang-a-Bang Boom Bang-a-Bang when you are near…. Peter Warne/Alan Moorhouse, 1969
Dom alerted me to this [...]

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