I totally love this! I know I’m supposed to be posting the new version of the money chapter but I’m afraid that this is too good to ignore. I’m not usually a fan of things like this, as some of you will know, but this is great, especially for kids, partly because you can blow things up on the safety of your own sofa. You tube clip here (2 minutes 44 secs).
Free version and premium version both on itunes.
“ In solitude you don’t need to make an impression on the world, so the world has some opportunity to make an impression on you.”
I do like this quote, from a collection of stories exulting in solitude. The book is Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett and the quote is taken from a review in last weekend’s FT. I’ve started to find most newspapers either depressing or full of news (I already know about) not reviews or analysis. The major exceptions are the FT and the New York Times, especially the weekend editions.
Now here’s an interesting thing. I was at Imperial College today trying to figure out how to graphically represent the future of supercomputing. I had dozens of ideas but all were clichéd and none were any good. So I decided that I needed a cup of tea to unblock my brain. So off I went down the corridor to the kitchen to boil a kettle.
The kettle was more or less empty so being a reasonably considerate person I filled the kettle up with water and waited for it to boil. This took absolutely ages, so it seemed, but while waiting for the steam to appear an idea condensed in my brain. I suddenly had a bit of inspiration about how to solve the problem.
But here’s the thing. Next to the kettle there was a machine that provides boiling water in a matter of seconds (image above). This is obviously designed for people who can’t wait the sixty odd seconds it takes for a full kettle to boil. Instant gratification for people wanting a cup of instant coffee and such like. But had I used this fast, convenient modern marvel of a machine I suspect that inspiration would not have struck me. It was the doing nothing for a moment that lead to something. Instant ideas? No such thing.
Nice article in the Atlantic concerning why there aren’t more women futurists.
Personally I think the problem is that in the early years ‘futurology’ – or whatever f-word you care to use (and I can think of a few) dropped out of science and technology and to some extent science fiction writing. Both of these were fairly male preserves until quite recently. But that can’t quite be it. Maybe women are far to sensible and intuitive to have anything to do with such nonsense?
Pretty much done with the re-write of my chapter on money. Just left to to print it off on paper and read it through with a glass of red wine in hand (yes, I know about the quote about write drunk and edit sober, but it’s only a glass). I’ll post the revised chapter later this week.
Meanwhile, I’ve been listening to Jonathan Franzen on the radio talking about the internet. Very relevant to Digital Vs. Human. Good article in the Guardian on this here.
In this vein (the Internet being like a totalitarian state) I also recently read that in East Germany, at the hight of the Cold War, 1 in 63 people was a state informant. Thank goodness they didn’t have access to Instagram and Twitter.
I don’t want to jump the gun, but I may have cracked this.
Firstly I’ve changed the chapter title from Money & Economy to Economy & Money. This won’t sound like much to people, but it now makes sense of the fact that the chapter starts with some broad macro-economic themes (inequality, employment and so on). I then dumped almost all of the sections that didn’t directly relate to economics or money (D’oh!) and I’m now signposting much more directly throughout using subheads. There’s quite a bit of new material going in too. I’m roughly half way through it now and things could yet go pear-shaped, but so far so good.