Author: JP

 

Many years ago, I read a story about two neighbours. One of them bred pedigree dogs with almost-human ability to show emotion; the other grew the most beautiful flowers, with a tragic flaw: the petals were poisonous, they killed all who touched them. One day, the inevitable happened. One of the dogs managed to get through/over/under the hedge between the properties, played with the petals that had fallen off the beautiful-but-deadly plant, and proceeded to die a horrible death.

The dog neighbour took the flower neighbour to court. Wanted an injunction preventing flower neighbour from growing any more beautiful-but-deadlies. The judge thought about it, and then delivered a Solomon-like judgment.

The flowers could still kill. But only if the buyer had paid for that function. Accidental touches could no longer kill. The court ordered the flower neighbour to redesign the flowers that way.

It all happened in cyberspace. I believe it was in an early Larry Lessig book, probably Code.

Ever since I read John Perry Barlow’s A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace I’ve been curious about just how much the world I knew, (and still know, though to a steadily declining extent) will change as a result of digital transformation.

That curiosity, underpinned by childhood and youth in Calcutta in the 1960s and 1970s, built on the foundations of being part of a Brahmin journalist family and an education based on fifteen years with the Jesuits, continues apace. It’s why I found the stuff put out by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant and Howard Rheingold and Kevin Kelly intoxicating. It’s why I was fascinated by the world as described by people like Cory Doctorow. They were all pointing to a magnitude of change I could barely imagine.

As Roy Amara said, we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run. When it comes to the rollout of digital infrastructure and the consequent digitisation of everything, we’re now in the long run. And we’re busy making sure Amara’s Law continues to hold.

Earlier this afternoon, I read that millions of people in the UK were being threatened by some unusual spam. The email comes with an attachment, some clever malware. The “ransomware”, as it is now called apparently, encrypts files on the computer, in effect kidnapping them. You have to pay to have them released; you effect the release by paying the ransom and receiving instructions on how to decrypt the files.

And to cap it all, the ransom has to be paid in bitcoin.

This may look like a trivial scam, but to me it represents a serious inflection point. One that was signalled to me when I heard that many purchasers of Defense Distributed’s 3D printed gun paid for their purchase using bitcoin. One which started taking real shape when I learnt that Cody was working on a Dark Wallet for bitcoin.

For too long, too many people have been labouring under the misapprehension that the internet and the web were convenient distribution mechanisms for the entertainment industry, and much of the heavy action in legal terms was in that space. Hollywood, the music industry, the publishing industry in general, have all been happily breathing sighs of relief of late, as the tablet form factor and the app-store philosophy seemed to give them back the control they were angry about losing. Paywalls are now two-a-penny.

More recently, the focus shifted to espionage and snooping; some of the players changed, privacy took centre stage, and piracy exited, followed by a bear.

All this is just a prelude.

When the Maker Generation, 3D printing and open source P2P money (as bitcoin is often described) come together, the first act will begin to take shape.

Governments will be watching, as will disaffected people everywhere, of every age, political persuasion and socio-economic status.
And the tendency will be to underestimate what’s happening. To be complacent in the belief that the hard work is over now that the internet has been tamed for content and for espionage.

Sergeant Esterhazy time.

Let’s be careful out there.

 

 

 

 

Yes, Mohammed Shami. A bright young thing who’s burst on to the Indian cricket scene very recently, seven years after moving into the Big City that is Calcutta. I’d never heard of him, so when he played a starring role in the Eden Gardens Test against the West Indies a few days ago, I tried to find out more about him. And came across this article, Shami’s Rise from Small-Time Club to Country.

As I read the story, long-forgotten memories stirred. The Dalhousie Athletic Club. A bizarre relic of a bizarre time. Founded in 1880, eight years before the Football League was established; three years after the first Test match, bang in the middle of the birth of Test cricket; less than a decade after the first rugby international. 1880, the year that the first national bowling association was formed. A time when people still referred to the burgeoning world of team sports as “athletics”.

The Dalhousie Athletic Club. Formed in a city that already boasted the world’s first golf club outside the United Kingdom: The Royal Calcutta Golf Club. Founded in 1829, it is actually the world’s second-oldest outside Scotland, after Royal Blackheath.

The Dalhousie Athletic Club. Founded in 1880, in a city that already had the Calcutta Cricket Club (1792) and the Calcutta Football Club (1872-77, then reformed 1884) by then; those clubs were soon to merge to become the Calcutta Cricket and Football Club. As the Calcutta Football Club, they instituted the Calcutta Cup in 1878, the trophy that England and Scotland still play for.

The Dalhousie Athletic Club. Barely a mile from the Royal Calcutta Turf Club, India’s oldest racecourse, founded before Queen Victoria had ascended to the throne.

Hearing all that, you would think that the Dalhousie Athletic Club would be an imposing Victorian edifice with elegant driveways and red carpets and uniformed commissionaires.

Nope.

I first went there in 1966. And it looked a lot like the photograph above. A hut. With some carefully tended bushes and lawn nearby, surrounded by larger swathes of grassland. [I confess that I am not sure whether the photograph above is of the DAC. But it reflects my memories of the place faithfully, so at worst it is a proxy for the fading truth in my head].

It was a very strange place. There was an extremely well tended lawn in front of the hut, if you imagine the front to be where you see the collapsible doors above. And on that lawn people appeared to be straining quite hard while apparently doing very little. They wore strange clothes, white without being flannels, pressed to perfection, yet not a tie in sight. And they wore straw hats. They said very little as they sent big black balls to try and hit a small ball. And they kept missing, or so it seemed.

I was nine years old, and watching my first game of bowls.

It was hot, and soon I wanted to go inside, but it was a bar so I wasn’t allowed in. On the other hand it wasn’t really a building, just a hut with wooden and canvas sides and a corrugated metal roof, all painted in the green camouflage that all buildings on the “maidan” sported in those days. And the collapsible gates weren’t really doors (I may be wrong, but what I remember didn’t even have those gates, just canvas sheeting, as you would see in a tent). In the space that passed for the door, there’d be a number of tables and chairs set out, and children were allowed to sit there. Provided they were still and said nothing. [There were some tennis courts that belonged to the club, a little further away; the intervening space was where you were allowed to run and shout and chase each other and even play rudimentary ball games].

If you were quiet and good, then, occasionally, you could sit at the bar on a high stool, even as a child. In those days serious drinking didn’t begin there until the sun was down.

The first evening I was there was remarkable, I felt I was in a different country. A full fifteen years or so before India had television, we were able to watch English first division football matches. I suspect they were Pathe newsreels.

So I watched people like George Best and Denis Law and Bobby Charlton (Yes, Manchester United seemed to have the same dominance of media then as it has now); teams like Wolves and Leicester appeared often. I have no idea what the time lag between the game and its DAC showing was, but everyone in the club seemed to be excited, no sign of knowing what the actual results were.

What was really bizarre was that people would actually take part in the pools. Pools coupons, religiously filled in, religiously collected, religiously checked. I have no idea how this worked. A parallel system? A time-delayed process, with the forms filled in at the proper time, and then “checked” when the newsreels arrived? Perhaps even a full Sting-like scam week after week? Who knows? I was too young to ask or even truly understand what was going on: but the forms existed, they were filled in, they were paid for and they were checked with shouts and groans.

Strange times.

As I write this, I’m sipping an unusual drink. A Coca-Cola. With lots of ice. Topped off with a dash of Lime Cordial. One of my favourite drinks. Been a favourite for years. Ever since I had it for the first time.

At the Dalhousie Athletic Club, in 1966. [Derek O’Brien, if you read this, ask your father and his contemporaries what they remember of the place. And if they called it the DAC, because that’s how I remember it. Distinct and different from the Maidan Club, an altogether different beast]

 

I’ve been learning to temper passion with patience for decades now, and will continue to do so. Not because I think passion is wrong (I don’t) but because I think that it is even more powerful when leavened with patience. I can never have enough of patience: I’m prepared to wait a long time for my share of patience.

Earlier this week someone in my network shepherded me towards The Power of Patience, knowing I would probably love the article.

And I did. Jennifer Roberts knows her art history, and the stories she tells, using Copley’s Boy and Squirrel as the centrepiece, are well worth listening to. I was aware of the painting; I think I’ve actually seen it years ago at the MFA, but I can’t be sure. I may only have read about it. Reading the article made me appreciate the painting a lot more; I learnt things about the artist as well as the piece itself; and I was catalysed into wanting to learn more. The learning wasn’t just about The Boy with a Flying Squirrel and about John Singleton Copley; it wasn’t just about the prevailing circumstances in New England during Copley’s time. It was about education, it was about life.

I was particularly taken with this paragraph:

“I want to give them the permission and the structures to slow down.” 

Serendipitously, someone else in my network pointed me towards Nicholas Carr’s article in the latest Atlantic Review: All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge In The Hands Of Machines. I know Nick, we’ve spoken at the same conference a number of times, we’ve even shared the stage a couple of times. We agree on many things, disagree on a few, particularly when he gets into sensationalist-journalist mode. What he says here interested me:

My sense is that the two “cognitive ailments” Carr refers to often act in tandem and reinforce each other. And that has the effect of shutting down our sixth senses, our sanity checks, our smell checks, the strange ways we humans have of tacitly verifying that all is well. I remember being fascinated some years ago by the nature of this “systematic” fraud, reported in a PriceWaterhouseCoopers survey a few years ago:

Automated invoice processing and payment systems that check the price of the item but not the shipping. A Trojan Horse of a fraud, simple yet effective. But they did get caught in the end, when common sense woke up.

As you have probably gathered by now, some of what Jennifer Roberts said resonated with me, and some of what Nicholas Carr said did as well. And remember, not even my worst enemy would call me a Luddite. So what gives? How come I identified with those articles.

I think it all comes down to the concept of mastery. Knowing something deeply, properly, understanding its core principles, embedding those principles when demonstrating associated skills. The tacit knowledge that makes mastery possible.

People have been researching and studying muscle memory for millennia now, and advances in our understanding of our own neurological make-up continue (even if some of the research is flawed, something we need to be closely aware of). Personally, I’m more intrigued by what I’m tempted to call “memory muscle”, the things we remember about the way to do things, make things.

I’ve never driven, never had a driving licence. In the India of my youth, if you were rich enough to own a car, you were rich enough to hire a driver.

Yes, I’ve never driven. One day I will learn to drive. As a hobby, for sheer pleasure. And when I do, I will probably buy a Duesenberg. Preferably one over a hundred years old. It’s something on my bucket list, ever since I read the novels of James Leasor as a teenager. While he is remembered for the Jason Love series, I became entranced by his Aristo Autos novels. They Don’t Make Them Like That Any More and Never Had A Spanner on Her were the two that come to mind, and once I’d finished them, I was in love with Duesenbergs. And Cords as well. But particularly Duesenbergs.

An aside. Remember Velvet Underground’s Sweet Jane? Written by and regularly performed live by the recently sadly departed Lou Reed? The Stutz Bear Cat mentioned in the second verse, and shown above, is actually based on a Duesenberg.

Built entirely by hand. Manufactured, in the original sense of the word, as I refer to in this month’s Scientific American. Now that’s something that really resonates with me. My parents encouraged us (I have four siblings) to spend enormous amounts of time doing strange things like the Times Crossword,  jigsaw puzzles, playing Scrabble and chess and duplicate bridge, memorising great swathes out of our favourite poems and plays, even reading comics. And Mad Magazine of course.

And Meccano. I remember he even made us a massive purpose-built box out of reinforced plywood, with special compartments built in for every type of Meccano component. It was a big box, probably 3ft by 3ft by 9 inches. I wonder where it is now.

It’s difficult to describe the sheer joy that came from building small vehicles that worked, especially when you could buy small motors to put into them. Even fitting the rubber “tires” on to the wheel rims was such a satisfying exercise in those days.

Now I’m probably giving away too much of my childhood. We were really really encouraged to play with stuff, in groups as well as alone. Sometimes in intense quiet and concentration, sometimes accompanied by raucous laughter and whoops of joy. Sometimes both these things happened at the same time, as one group played Two-To-The-Left while another played chess.

The seeds of my curiosity into things mechanical were sown before I was in my teens, and, if anything, that curiosity has grown. So, no surprise, I have a mechanical gramophone at home, all mechanical, no power needed, it just needs winding up. It’s about 108 years old, and shown below:

I have a number of items of that class: typewriters, adding machines, manual presses, pinhole-style box cameras, telescopes and binoculars. They fascinate me for a number of reasons: they’re built to last and they’ve lasted a long time, despite being mechanical, despite having moving parts; they use no batteries or electricity to work; they’re precise and entirely beautiful in their engineering, with “damped” components sliding softly and elegantly into place.

And they tell me something about how and why the whole thing works. I’ve written about the Maker Movement a number of times mainly because I cherish this aspect of mechanical things: when you can take something apart and then put it back together, and particularly when you can put it back together in different ways for different purposes. It is sad that there are so many things built today where there is no such ability to take apart and re-assemble at will. There is such learning, such joy, in being able to do that.

Which is why I found Infento an absolute delight. I was asked to give the keynote at an Accenture Innovation Awards event in Amsterdam yesterday. It was in a fantastic venue, a large sprawling old factory that had been refurbished to become a number of venues with different forms of seating, all around a huge exhibition space.

Wandering around the exhibition space, I saw these things:

I was hooked. Hypnotised. And I went around the exhibit, looking at all the vehicles. Because I could smell that they were completely mechanical and completely built by hand.

I looked more closely, and I saw this:

Yes, you could put any of those things together using nothing more than a small number of Allen keys. Incredible.

I continued to walk around the exhibit space, and came across this:

Suddenly memories of my old Meccano box came roaring back. I was now beyond hooked and hypnotised, I was addicted. So I went looking for the brains behind this. And met Spencer Rotting, one of the principals.

The vision that people like Spencer and Sander Letema  have is amazing. Using simple robust standardised components to build things. Selling them as kits that are accessible to six-year-olds as well as sixty-six-year-olds. Concentrating on simplicity and elegance while avoiding compromise on safety and quality.

I spoke to Spencer for a while. Saw how excited he was about the use of Infento products in education. Saw how relaxed he was about the risk of copycats. Saw how the Infento vision extended into working with 3D printers at home. They were intending to make the 3D specs for their components available to all.

I’d had a very busy week. And I came home very happy. Tired, but happy.

Because I’d seen Infento, because I’d spoken to Spencer. Because I could see that there were still people who cared about building things.

Bedenk bouw beleef. Remember the experience of construction. Savour the joy of building things yourself.

Bedenk bouw beleef. That’s the tagline Infento uses, one I shall remember with pleasure.

I suspect I’ll be buying Infentos long before I get around to that Duesenberg.

It’s rare that you get such deliciously different synoptic views of the same event.

It’s even rarer to see the same organisation express itself with such distinctive variety across multiple channels.

And when the event is one of those truth-is-always-always-stranger-than-fiction candidates, it’s worth writing a post about it.

Something happened in the toilet-roll aisles at a Tesco in Musselburgh last Friday.

Here’s what was stated by the officials at Police Scotland:

“A 21-year-old man was arrested and charged in connection with an assault in Eskview Road, Musselburgh, on Friday 1 November.

“He was remanded in custody until Monday 4th November, where he appeared in court and pled guilty to the offence.”

All the usual officialese formality guff was in place….”charged in connection with an assault”, “remanded in custody”, “appeared in court”, “pled guilty to the offence”. Where else do people talk like that but in official police statements.

But wait a minute. Let’s see what the same organisation said about the same event, but this time via a tweet, on Twitter:

 

And here’s how I found out about it, in a story on the BBC news site:

 

You know something? I quite like the 140 character version. Perhaps we should be considering the use of such extreme character limits for all kinds of officialese, including those pesky Terms of Service.

Over the past few days, in occasional conversation with friend Brian Shaler, I’ve become aware of dogescript.

You take doge, a “language” that now serves as the monologue vehicle for Shibe, the dog pictured below:

Add doge to the continuing javascript explosion; soon you get doje.js and, not long after that, dogescript. Such browser so html5.