Author: JP

Over dinner at Rasoi a few nights ago, the conversation meandered all over the place, and at one point touched upon the kind of music people listened to. Someone was trying to describe Rick Wakeman’s Six Wives to someone else, and one thing led to another and I found myself extolling the virtues of Steve Howe playing Mood for A Day. Probably my favourite guitar instrumental.

And it got me thinking. How many people would be able to give a one-song answer when asked “What is your favourite song of all time”?

If I had to choose, Mood For a Day would be up there. As would Season of the Witch on Super Session. As would Take Five. And Peter, Paul and Mary doing Rocky Road.

Can’t Find My Way Home when done by Blind Faith would be there or thereabouts. But in the end, I would have only one answer, and it wouldn’t be any of the above.

If I was forced to live the rest of my life with just one song to keep me company, it would be Suite: Judy Blue Eyes. Magnificent.

So far I have met only one other person who may choose the same song as his all-time Number One, and that’s Hugh.

What’s yours?

It’s been a very long time since I wrote any code at all. [And a good thing too, I hear you say :-) ]. As I get older, I find myself seeking (and occasionally finding) vicarious proxies for many things; one of the commonest proxies I use is reading.

So. While wandering around, I found this article, How To Write Unmaintainable Code. And enjoyed it. Maybe it shows my age.

London calling to the underworld
Come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls

The Clash, London Calling

I’d heard about an unusual little burst of activity on Wikipedia over the last few days: people were frenetically editing and improving an article listing songs that were about London or parts of London.

You can find the article in Wikipedia here.

I found the rules for inclusion and exclusion fascinating.  I quote:

This is a list of songs about London. Instrumental pieces are tagged with an uppercase “[I]”, or a lowercase “[i]” for quasi-instrumental including non-lyrics voice samples.

Included are:

• Songs titled after London, or a location or feature of the city.
• Songs whose lyrics are set in London.

Excluded are:

Songs where London is simply name-checked along with various other cities (such as “New York, London, Paris, Munich”, lyrics of “Pop Muzik” by M

It struck me that this was an excellent example of crowdsourcing, of applying opensource processes to a research task. More importantly, based on the qualifying criteria, it seemed to me that here was a case where the crowd will always beat the computer, where it was actually quite difficult to write a program to compile the list.

Comments? Any other examples?

When I was a mere stripling I used to enjoy playing text-based adventure games; as I grew older, I watched them morph into graphic representations,  as games like Larry The Lounge Lizard came out.

But I never really made the cut into the later rounds of MMOG and virtual worlds. I did venture into Second Life, but realised quite soon that I just didn’t have enough passion for it, so I gave up. Nevertheless, there was something about virtual worlds that kept dragging me back; I kept on seeing possibilities open up, possibilities of using virtual worlds as means to a very specific end, that of empowering disenfranchised people.

I had to find a way of keeping my hand in, vicariously if possible. Which is why I dip into Terra Nova on a regular basis. If you are curious about virtual worlds, it’s a good place to go.

This evening, while idly flicking through Terra Nova,  I came across The Image of the Undercity by Greg L. A fascinating article, leading me to decide to re-read Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City. [Thank you Greg]. More importantly, it took me on to this article, and consequently on to these comments by Richard Bartle. I quote:

Overall, I suppose to an architect yes, it would seem odd that a virtual house would have a sloped roof if there’s no virtual weather, or a door at street level if people can fly. I can also see how they’d be grumpy about looking for innovation and seeing a lot of what are basically 3D paintings of imagined real-world structures.

However, virtual space is not like real space, and the users of both have different criteria by which they judge it a success. People want to feel they’re in the world, and that means the architecture has to be faithful to genre. Exciting new architecture is possible, but if it intrudes then it must do so for a reason. I expect it will be a long while before the architecture award goes to a building in a contextualised (ie. game-like) world, rather than a less themeful one such as SL.

Also, because each virtual world is physically different, architecture that is successful in one may not be successful in another. Does the virtual world need staircases? Does it require structures to self-support under gravity? Are there materials that you can see through from one side but not the other? How about materials that change what they look like depending on who’se looking at them? What’s possible in one virtual world may not be possible in another – unlike the real world, they don’t all use the same physics.

Important stuff, helps me keep my vicarious perspective right. They don’t all use the same physics. I have to keep on understanding things like this in order to be free in my thinking.

In a week when the New York Times announced that it was making its digital archives available to all free of charge, I found myself spending time thinking about open access publishing in general, spurred on by this article in the New Scientist.

Initially I could not get over the irony of finding that an article headlined “Information wants to be free” had been placed behind a paywall in the first place. But that’s not the point of this article, so I will let that slide. 

The first thing I did was to look up Wikipedia, something I am wont to do just for the heck of it. Why would I do that? Well, by looking up a word or phrase first in Wikipedia, I seem to be able to establish “baseline” information about the topic quickly and cheaply. In this particular case I had some snatches of memory to do with Stewart Brand originating the phrase ( and Don Marti “inflating” it, according to Doc Searls, as I referred to a few days ago).

So, in case you’re interested, take a look at Information Wants to be Free in Wikipedia. If you haven’t seen it before, then the Stewart Brand quotation is of immense value all by itself, so I reproduce it here:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Reading the New Scientist article also made me try and find out more about the author, Jim Giles, which then led me to his blog.

In the article, Jim highlights some of the dirty tricks being used by some publishers,  of the need for publishers to embrace change, and then writes in detail on a particular change, that of the underlying business model. I quote:

Almost 3000 journals already use the new system: instead of charging people for access to journals, they charge researchers to publish in them. The fees, typically $1000 to $2000 per paper, are usually met by the organisation that funded the research, and several big funders, including the Wellcome Trust, have committed to providing the money their researchers need. The articles are then made available for free online; in other words, they are “open access”.

Judy Breck, while covering the New York Times archive free-up in Smart Mobs, has this to say:

With my interest in education, I have particularly agonized over the fact that because its terrific articles and multimedia creations for science, arts and other subjects have only been free for a few days, they have been walled off from students and from connecting for other educational purposes.

Jim and Judy make some very important points. I am reminded of what the legendary Bill Shankly is meant to have said about soccer:

Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I’m very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.

Information in the right place at the right time saves lives. The web provides us with a path that can connect the people who most need that information with that information. More importantly, the web provides us with an affordable path. It is our duty to ensure that we do not allow that path to be polluted, or made less affordable.