Lovely stuff.

The Long Now essay by Daniel Hillis on “Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine” contains some fantastic, inspiring nuggets, which I couldn’t resist quoting from … they really remind me of conversations at Jodrell Bank.

“… we planned to connect the processors in a 20-dimensional hypercube …”

“In retrospect, if we had had any understanding of how complicated the project was going to be, we never would have started.”

“… he distrusted abstractions that could not be directly related to the facts.”

“Since the only computer language Richard was really familiar with was Basic, he made up a parallel version of Basic… “

“Like many physicists who had spent their lives going to successively lower and lower levels of atomic detail, Feynman often wondered what was at the bottom. One possible answer was a cellular automaton. The notion is that the “continuum” might, at its lowest levels, be discrete in both space and time, and that the laws of physics might simply be a macro-consequence of the average behavior of tiny cells. … If the universe in fact worked this way, then it presumably would have testable consequences, such as an upper limit on the density of information per cubic meter of space.”

“… a typical Richard Feynman explanation … on the one hand, it infuriated the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it delighted the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real understanding of the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality. “

Balancing vast complexity with the ability to genuinely communicate ideas is a remarkable skill, and very hard to find. As someone who takes quite a long time to understand the complexity, I’m eternally grateful to the handful of people I’ve met who can do this. The chasms between science and its representations in business, politics and the media are intensely frustrating, and very hard to navigate.

Has anyone documented best-of-breed examples (like Feynman) to try any cement those bridges? Why don’t we have better communication? We have great examples of interconnected silos, but no real cohesion…

(image from http://www.longnow.org/about/)

Blogs are very useful to gratuitously vent one’s disappointments out into the Ether…

Dear Bicycle Thieves,

As a thief you’ll never consider that you are taking peoples belongings, not just “objects” to convert into cash.

I don’t even consider myself particularly materialistic, but I did love my bike.

You’ve not made me angry - you’ve made me sad. The amount of inconvenience you’ve just caused me is huge.

The bicycle is my main mode of transport - I don’t own a car (never have).

If I could give you the cash that you’ll no doubt make from selling it, I would - it’s worth that much to me. In fact if anyone does help return it in good order, I’ll offer a £100 (no-questions asked) reward.

I love cycling. My bike was fabulous to ride. Very comfortable, light, strong. Front-suspension.

It had a beautiful form and I loved the colour. It weighed under 9kg.

I bought it last year for a substantial sum - £900. I bought my last bike in 1993 so this was a big update (I was lucky enough to have saved enough to afford it at the time).

Of course, I don’t have insurance. Why? Well - at £110/year plus the most ridiculous restrictions on what constitutes a claim makes it wholly unrealistic for anyone who actually rides a bike. At least I know I had a good lock - you had to remove the steel fixings from the brick wall that I was tied to and take the lot. Looking at the Terms of some of the insurers I don’t think this would even have been fully covered.

I have the bike shop searching for another, but they don’t make this one any more - Koga are based in Holland.

A Koga Miyata Terraliner with carbon wheels. Whoever ends up with it will be quite noticeable.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

For (mostly my own) reference, here’s a scan of the printed version

Thanks to Wendy.

Some people are too clever by half.

(to the dopplr, batbit)

Flying with radar, gaming trashes the internet, passively.

The core of dgen, 30th April, 22:54:19 up 370 days.

#reboot complete

A bit like my brain feels.

Sad news today.

Clarke’s three laws;

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

http://www.clarkefoundation.org/

This is very promising - the Library of Congress is starting to add its archives to Flickr

“The real magic comes when the power of the … community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images … which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. “

I was hoping that I was being ridiculous when creating the “ultimate reality TV show format” - Human Tamagochi - in 2001…

but apparently Fox TV thinks it’s a good idea.

According to Boing Boing and Mother Jones

As part of the “Torture Hits Home” package in the new issue of Mother Jones, Michael Mechanic has written a terrific story about the Fox reality TV show Solitary. The show features contestants who undergo brutal psychological and physical “treatments” with a $50,000 prize as the carrot on the stick.

From TED Talks: Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action — and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. As he points out, humans have been banding together to work collectively since our days of hunting mastodons.

I also can’t ignore the other TED themes this month: Music and Rockets, with George Dyson (who provided me wih some useful advice for AMEE) talking about Rockets to Saturn and Pamelia Kurstin discussing the Theremin.