Observations from a Hill

OK - as is well-documented in these pages over the last six years, I've been trying to find some semblance of external organisation for my somewhat scattershot thoughts, which I hoped would remain principally in the analogue domain. But as I've mentioned before on a number of occasions, I've still got the itch to get back into the hybrid information domain of HyperCard, that woefully abandoned piece of Apple citizen-tech that was a work of true genius - and still remains impressively so - that was originally a freebie with every Mac computer back in the day [blog posts passim]. I've been scouring around the net for a long time to find an alternative solution to the fact that the only way I can run the original entails using a very old Mac and original disks, or running the original in emulation; neither of which are really practical. I might have found something that will fill that curious void between analogue and digital: Decker; a free software package that runs fin...

Nothing in this world, or indeed the Universe, is permanent: this much is known, indeed simple common sense, and even if one subscribes to the nature of permanence simply because one's family has a storied and written & illustrated history going back centuries and houses to match this mythology, it's all essentially an illusory, and in the scheme of things, highly short-term view. The landed gentry aside - and they really should be just that: aside, given their track record in society - we have similar, albeit smaller scale 'traditions' in the real world that are also pretty transitory in nature. I'm thinking of course about the humble public house and its rise and fall. We like to think of the village pub as the ideal archetype; the hub of community life, and an essential and central part of an imagined, atomic community of locals. Which confected stability of course presupposes a constancy of both regular imbibers and landlords alike; which of course, on a mom...

  Back in the mid/late sixties, we had several [actual film] film showings at school in the assembly hall and the one that still sticks in my memory is the 'Ipcress File', starring Micheal Caine, based on the book by Len Deighton. At one point in the storyline, we get the obligatory seduction scene in which Caine's character, Harry Palmer cooks an omelette for Sue Lloyd's character, Jean. Until this point in cinematic history, seduction scenes generally revolved around alcohol, if anything: the question of a 'real bloke', especially a working class one, cooking food for the purpose - cooking decent food at all - was simply alien to most. However, Len Deighton was an accomplished cook himself, and taught Caine at some length to cook a decent French omelette for the purpose of the scene. The hands seen in close-up cracking two eggs simultaneously were Deighton's own, as Caine's level of dexterity wasn't up to it. Deighton for his part, produced several...

When I went to work for BT [British Telecom] in 2004, I was exposed for the first time in my life firstly to being employed by a corporate structure, as opposed to more human scale business or academia, and secondly to what would become the bane of my life for sixteen years: performance management. Although not a new branding of the concept, even then, its origins stretch back nearly a century-and-a-half to the concepts of work management dreamt up by one Frederick Winslow Taylor in the U.S. His approach was to essentially break down working practice - mostly in heavy industry - into discrete, time-managed units which could in theory be quantified in scientific terms, circumventing entrenched guild and unionised working practices where roles, conditions and time management devolved to the workers themselves under the traditions of their trades and crafts and the relations between the various skill groupings. In essence, his approach was to solidify the aspirations of profit motive of e...

I'm going to stick roughly to the theme of the last couple of posts here tonight, in that I was reading Carlo Rovelli's seminal 'Seven Brief Lessons on Physics' this lunchtime, over a couple of pints of local beer and a poke of chips, at the Bull in Biwmaris [Beaumaris]; specifically his second lesson, 'Quanta', which aims to enlighten the casual reader to the niceties of Quantum Theory/Mechanics in layman's language. As always, like all good teachers, he lays out the complex in terms that most of us can at least grasp, leaving the technical and mathematical underpinning to one side in order to give a clearer overview of frankly, apparently, mind-boggling concepts. On the question of the un-resolvability of the exact existence of electrons [Heisenberg's theory], or their position in space when their interactions reveal them to us, he has this to say: '... an electron is a set of jumps from one interaction to another. When nothing disturbs it, it is ...

I mentioned last night that digitised data is twice abstracted via both hardware and software, but I didn't expand on what I meant by that, so I thought I'd drop a brief note to go some way in explaining what I meant by it. Getting back to the written/printed page as the most successful archival method of human produced stuff yet invented: a page of text in whatever natural language is the perfect wysiwyg - 'what you see you get' - interface. It is a direct, orthographic, symbolic rendering of human language, unmediated by the medium that transmits it. It's longevity, and hence its long term viability and reliability as a data retrieval system, is only governed by the quality of the means of production [paper, ink, binding, etc.] and the stability of the long term storage conditions of the artefacts. No other significant factor comes into play, and as the layer of abstraction of the data is the direct analogue of its source, ie. natural language, and as written lang...