Is being “connected” becoming a “sense”?

Over the years I’ve started to think harder about being “connected” by thinking harder about what it means not to be “connected”. By this I do not mean the traditional debate about the digital haves versus the digital have-nots, a discussion that soon goes down rabbitholes of economics-meets-education. By this I do not mean the traditional debate about net neutrality and cheap bits and expensive bits and who will pay, that’s another discussion that soon goes down the same rabbitholes, but with a twist of politics as well.

I mean something else altogether.

Today, I was sitting quietly in an exhibit that looked like a theatre in the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (known locally as MAMbo), waiting to see what happened next. I was the only person in this theatre-within-a-museum at the time. And what happened next was this. Two people, a man and a woman, started talking about their experiences of being blind. They talked about the difference between being blind from birth and becoming blind after having normal sight for a while. They talked about the role that memory played in that second instance, the memory of sight. How it became a frame of reference for many things later. How that memory decayed. How it played tricks.

And something about the way they spoke made me think of how kids today perceive being connected, particularly in the West, but increasingly in India and China as well.

You may gather from this that I think of being connected as an important thing. You’d be right. That’s why I wrote The Kernel For This Blog and About This Blog the way I did.

You see, I think connectivity, particularly ubiquitous always-on mobile connectivity, can make a real difference in terms of health, education and welfare, and that it can make a difference today. The days of “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers” and “there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home” are long gone. Today the BRICS have bricks in their hands, the bricks are getting smaller and they’re always on.

Too often, when people try and make this point, the objections are common and predictable. “You don’t get it, these people need food first. They’re starving.”. And so the debate about connectivity gets waylaid. Ironically, this is often done by people who then pump up the volume about the importance of biofuels in solving the energy crisis…. the same biofuels that then drive grain prices up and make staple food harder to afford for many people…..but that’s another debate.

All I was thinking was this. Is connectivity becoming like sight and hearing and speech and mobility? And if so what does that mean for the endless debates we appear to be having about what the internet and the web are?

[An aside. If I take this analogy in reverse, I land up in strange places. Told you I was confused. Like a year ago I spotted David Beckham at the Diana concert. With my bare eyes. Was I somehow trammelling over his image rights as a result? Should my eyes be cut out in order to feed the God of DRM? That’s the way a lot of DRM logic appears to me.]

You say tomayto, and I say tomahto

One of the joys of spending time in Bologna is that I don’t need an excuse to order dishes with bolognese sauce every day. And one of the joys of growing old is that I can claim to do this in the name of “research”. Stuff and nonsense, as you well know. The main reason I have had some bolognese sauce every day is that I love it. Especially when it is well made.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Just what is a well-made bolognese? If you look up wikipedia, this is what you get. The article starts off with the following:

Bolognese sauce (ragù alla bolognese in Italian, also known by its French name sauce bolognaise) is a meat based sauce for pasta originating in Bologna, Italy. Bolognese sauce is sometimes taken to be a tomato sauce but authentic recipes have only a small amount of tomato.

…authentic recipes have only a small amount of tomato. Okay, let’s park that thought for a moment.

The article then goes on to say:

The recipe, issued in 1982 by the Bolognese delegation of Accademia Italiana della Cucina, confines the ingredients to beef, pancetta, onions, carrots, celery, tomato paste, meat broth, white wine, and (optionally) milk or cream. However, different recipes, far from the Bolognese tradition, make use of chopped pork, chicken or goose liver along with the beef or veal for variety, or use butter with olive oil. Prosciutto, mortadella, or porcini fresh mushrooms may be added to the soffritto to enrich the sauce.

Okay, so it would appear that tomato paste is definitely part of the “official” recipe. So let’s then take a look at what the Accademia Italiana della Cucina actually has to say about this. More precisely, let’s take a look at what the Accademia says about Emilia-Romagna ragu sauces:

Pomodoro maturi (oppure pelati o concentrato).  So we still have the tomato, with different options.

So then I took a look at Heston Blumenthal’s Spaghetti Bolognese recipe. And a few more. And it confused me.

Everything I looked at had quite a bit of tomato in it. Yet the locals (and even Wikipedia for that matter) keep stating “only a small amount of tomato”.

I guess it’s all down to taste. You say tomahto and I say tomayto.

After five days, I know what I like. For me, the stuff that looks like this:

tastes infinitely better than the stuff that looks like this:

[Pictures courtesy of Wikipedia]. All I know is that the bolognese sauce I really like doesn’t have any red about it, the tomato is either in small amounts or slow-cooked to extinction.

As I said before, it’s a matter of taste. So I am looking for recipes that are low in tomato. Of course there are a million other things that matter, people use different meats, different spices, different ways of cooking. I’m just trying to simplify things for myself  by concentrating on the behaviour of one ingredient: the tomato. Fresh or not? Hand-peeled and hand-pressed or not? And how much. Pomodoro is assumed, I guess.

Comments please. As usual I will learn from them, and share what I learn.

“Isn’t it nice when things just work”

I first came across this some four or five years ago, when researching the web for Rube Goldberg machines. But all I saw were references to the original Honda “Cog” advertisement. More recently, since maybe 2005, there have been a number of versions on the web. This one seems the most “official”, I only came across it recently while continuing with investigations into the Rube Goldberg space.

Worth seeing if you haven’t already done so.

Why am I looking into Rube Goldberg machines? Simple. Because one day I want to build a large “marble run meets Rube Goldberg meets Heath Robinson meets perpetuum mobile“. Told you it was simple.

Why then do I bother to talk about this in a blog “about information”? Because I think there are many lessons we can learn by digging into the making of the video. Lessons like what? Like maybe there is a “the physics are different” lesson to be learnt about software development meeting virtual world. Like maybe now that a critical part of Hollywood, post-production, is encamped firmly in Bollywood, the economics change as well.

Just musing. Comments welcome.

More musings about IPR

If you haven’t seen it already, do take a look at this letter to the Times last week, from Joseph Stiglitz and John Sulston.

Here are a few excerpts:

The question of “Who owns science?” is therefore a crucial one, the answer to which will have broad-reaching implications for scientific progress and for the way in which the benefits of science are distributed, fairly or otherwise. Two of the most pressing issues concern equity of access to scientific knowledge and the useful products that arise from that knowledge.

The current system of managing research and innovation incorporates a complex body of law governing the ownership of “intellectual property” — copyright and patents being the most familiar. Intellectual property rights are intended to provide incentives that encourage the advancement of science, enhance the pace of innovation, increase the derived economic benefits and provide a fair way of regulating access to these benefits. But does it really achieve these purposes? There is increasing concern that, to the contrary, it may, under some circumstances, impede innovation, lead to monopolisation, and unduly restrict access to the benefits of knowledge.

We believe it is time to reassess the effect of the present regime of intellectual property rights, especially with respect to the area of patent law, on science, innovation and access to technologies and determine whether it is liberating — or crushing; whether it operates to promote scientific progress and human welfare – or to frustrate it.

Every time the discussion is about patents, trademarks or copyright, people go all polarised. As if the debate is about pinko lefty tree-huggers on the one side and honest sweat-of-brow geniuses on the other.

This is not what the debate is about.

The debate is about old laws no longer being fit for purpose and needing changing. Changing radically. Changing in ways that do not treat everyone (yes, everyone!) as a criminal; in ways that pollute paths of communication unnecessarily; in ways that throw away the value represented by the web when coupled with ubiquitous communications.

The debate is about health, education and welfare.

Not cinema, as some people would have it.

The debate is about innovation.

Not stifling it, as some companies would have it.

So let us continue to have the debate.

Pictures and words: musing about open multisided platforms

Over the last two years, I’ve been continuing with my research into open multisided platforms, particularly with a view to building community with them.

I’ve been privileged over the years to be associated with openadaptor, tiddlywiki and web21c; from the earliest moment I’ve tried to learn how to get out of the way and stay out of the way, while somehow remaining accountable. Sometimes I think we need a new term to describe the sort of soft-hands leadership required; the last time I tried, the best I could do was “tangential management”. But that’s another story.

I continue to think about open multisided platforms, and I’m sure there’s a lot I will learn in the process, particularly as friends and colleagues point me at people to talk to, books to read, articles to ponder over, sites to visit. And this has been happening.

For many years, it was hard to talk about open multisided platforms. Open source people don’t go looking for monetisation models, they solve problems. They make shoes, not money. So it was with open platforms. Whenever you mentioned them in conversation, the first question was not about the community but about the business model. And when you mentioned meta-models built around the community, in fact often built by the community, there was wailing and gnashing and glazings over. Which sort of killed the conversation.

Things have become a lot easier. Firstly, people are more willing and able to understand the importance of community, and of second-order business models built around the emergent community. But secondly and more importantly, articles like Better Than Free have helped remove the scales from their eyes (thank you Kevin Kelly).

Nowadays, when people talk about platforms, it is hard to avoid mentioning what’s been happening with Microsoft and Yahoo and Google. And it always reminds me of these three pictures I saw in an article by Henry Blodget. Read the whole article, it’s worth it. Even if you don’t agree with some of it.

They tell quite a story, don’t they? It’s going to be interesting, moving from the lock-in world to the open multisided world, a journey we have only just begun to take. A high-stakes table, as the charts above show.