Category: Four pillars

I love mangoes. So much so that I eat them in every possible form: the normal fruit, the dried fruit, the pickle, the juice, ice cream, sorbet, whatever. Even in joke form. Mangoes in to a bar.

Talking about mangoes and bars, take a look at this:

What a wonderful idea. A fork with an extra-long central tine, so that you can “spear” the mango all the way to the seed, so that you can peel off the skin and eat the mango lollipop style. Mango forks have been around for quite some time, as you can see below:

If you want to know more about mango forks, you need to read Maura Graber’s forthcoming book, Let Them Eat Cake.

While I was wandering around her site, I was reminded of another piece of wonderful Victorian utensil invention, the moustache spoon. So here’s one:

Don’t you just love it when people design useful things?

I use Akismet, and as a result most of the spam directed towards my blog gets trapped. Some stuff does get through, and there’s something about the stuff that gets through that intrigues me. So I thought I’d share it and find out if anyone can shed light on the phenomenon.

A large percentage of the spam that does get through seems to be directed at a particular post, as shown below:

It’s an old post, nearly three years old. And it doesn’t read too well, the quotation marks have been replaced by hieroglyphics ever since I recovered the post from backup. But I can’t see anything unusual or different about the post, something strange that would attract spam. Yet maybe 70 per cent of the spam that makes it past Akismet is directed towards this post. Anyone know why? Anyone experience anything similar?

I was going through a bunch of old papers and magazines, doing the therapeutic, cathartic clear-out thing. And I came across the September 27, 1999 issue of BusinessWeek where the first-ever E-BIZ 25 was announced. Heady days.

Anyway, here they are, unranked, grouped in 6 classes shown in brackets:

[empire builders]

• Jeff Bezos, Amazon
• Steve Case, AOL
• Tim Koogle, Yahoo

[the innovators]

• Louis Borders, Webvan
• Jay Walker, Priceline
• Meg Whitman, eBay
• Glen Meakem, Freemarkets
• James Clark, Mycfo
• Christos Costakis, E*Trade

[bankrollers]

• Masayoshi Son, Softbank
• Robert Kagle, Benchmark
• Lawton Fitt, Goldman Sachs
• John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins
• Bernard Arnault, LVMH Moet Hennessy

[the visionaries]

• Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley
• John Hagel, Mckinsey
• Bill Joy, Sun

[the architects]

• Lou Gerstner, IBM
• Pehong Chen, Broadvision
• David Peterschmidt, Inktomi
• Kevin O’Connor, DoubleClick
• Ellen Hancock, Exodus

[the pacesetters]

• David Pottruck, Charles Schwab
• John Chambers, Cisco
• Michael Dell, Dell

Seems like such a long time ago. Yet less than ten years have passed. No Google on the list. No Apple. So who would make your list today?

Some years ago I confessed that my interest in opensource was driven more by Jerry Garcia than by a Stallman or a Raymond.

There’s something about music, and about food, that teaches me a lot. Which helps me understand that opensource is about culture and values; the economic benefits accrue as a consequence rather than as an objective.

Which is why I found this article about what Trent Reznor’s doing encouraging. Now I’m not a big fan of Nine Inch Nails; I have this sense that they’re loud and dark and negative and foreboding ….. see, I’m probably showing my age and biases. Actually I haven’t heard enough of Nine Inch Nails to have an opinion about them; when it comes to rock, I spend my time mainly listening to music made in the period 1964-1974, usually on the softer more melodious side. [And I have liked some of their stuff, thanks to Russ Goring.]

But I don’t have to like Nine Inch Nails in order to like what Trent Reznor is doing. Take a look. See what you think.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

Margaret Schlegel, in Howard’s End (EM Forster, 1910)

This year’s Edge Annual Question is:

What Will Change Everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?

As usual, there are a large number of excellent essay responses, over 150 in all. I’d strongly recommend you read all of them: at 109,000 words, reading them might seem a bit like reading a couple of small novels, but it’s worth it.

Let me try and entice you further by pointing you at a few of the essays. I’m going to pick six in particular:

Alison Gopnik’s Never Ending Childhood

Stewart Brand’s Climate

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s The End of Analytic Science

Keith Devlin’s The Mobile Phone

Marti Hearst’s The Decline of Text

That’s five. But I want to place all five in the context of a sixth, the essay which for me is the Number One answer of the 151 provided. Chris Anderson’s A Web-Empowered Revolution in Teaching.

I make no secret of my passion for education. Regular readers will be well aware of my intent to build a school as and when I “retire” from normal salaried work. My interest in School Of Everything stems from the same root. In fact, my interest in working for BT stemmed, at least in part, from my belief that ubiquitous, affordable connectivity will transform education, and through that transformation, affect health, welfare and society in general.

We stand at a crossroads today, and we don’t have the Yogi Berra option (when you see a fork in the road, take it). We have critical choices to make. What choices?

Are we prepared to change our worldview to one of good stewardship? Where we make ourselves accountable and responsible for the use and enrichment of the talents we are born with, the talents we are given, the talents we acquire? Are we prepared to encourage, develop and enrich the talents of our society, our peers, our children and the generations to come? Do we care about the legacies that each of us will leave?

As curator of TED, Chris Anderson has been instrumental in giving us the opportunity to listen to some wonderful lectures by many other people about many things. Right now, it’s time we listened to him. Read his essay. Then read it again.

We have to change the way we think about many things, stop looking at stuff in isolation: The Csikszentmihalyi essay is a good place to start. We have to approach this need to change with the openness and freshness that a child brings to learning: The Gopnik essay should help us do that. We have to appreciate the technological changes that are taking place, changes that will help us become better stewards of all that we are given to look after: the Brand, Devlin and Hearst essays provide a worthwhile context for that.

But what brings it all together is Chris’s essay about the need for us to “contribute more than we consume”, the importance of education in doing that, the role of technology (particularly the web) in supporting that.

So please read the essays. And then read them again.