This isn’t the end, but it is the end of the beginning. After 9 years writing this blog I’ve decided that it’s too much. Too much of it is facile, superficial, shallow nonsense. At the very least far too much of what I write isn’t me writing at all. It’s me echoing banal platitudes that someone else has already recycled.

The occasional statistic is OK, but that’s what my brainmail newsletter is for. And there’s What’s Next too.

Anyway, enough. Enough of the pressure to post something (anything) daily. Enough thinking that if I don’t post something every day people will stop reading what I write. Enough writing without really saying anything. Most of all, enough time looking at a screen instead of looking out of a window and really thinking.

Instead of a daily post I will try to post something more substantial weekly or even monthly. It will hopefully be considered, edited, original and, most of all, me.

What if the screens that we look at all day could read our faces? I’m not talking about facial recognition, but rather software and devices that can read the mood of individual users or perhaps the mood of a large crowd.

Such technology already exists. In 2009 scientists from MIT created a project in which the facial reactions of volunteers watching adverts during the Super Bowl could be recorded using webcams. Data was then grouped by age to gauge reactions, by age, to certain types of advertisement.

In the future this could perhaps be done in real time and broken down by age, gender and a host of other factors for anyone and everyone watching an event on a screen. So a clever new tool for advertisers then? Yes, but think a little more broadly. The concept of giving people a non-verbal voice and, in particular, of assessing the emotion of a large crowd could be useful in politics, especially during elections.

It could also be valuable to authoritarian regimes interested in judging the mood of a country or perhaps in identifying small groups intent on disagreement. The technology that exists right now can can tell the difference between not only happiness and sadness, but between interest, disgust and contempt.

In fact it can even filter out joyful smiles from sad or frustrated smiles. There’s still a long way to go, because humans can read facial expressions and body language to a degree that machine still cannot, but expect such emotion-reading technology to develop, for better and for worse, in the decades ahead.

I got fed up with the weather in England so I’m in Kuala Lumpur. That’s not quite true – I was going there anyway – but the weather was getting me down and it’s a nice opener for a sentence. Anyway, true to form I’m awake at 3.00am. Weird stuff. One thought was weather a country’s electrical system is a soft form of power. In Malaysia, for example, the electrical sockets are the same as in the UK, a legacy from its colonial heritage I suspect. Does this give the UK any form of political power? I don’t think so, but that’s the kind of thing I start to thinking about when I have breakfast at dinnertime and can’t sleep.

I’ve also been thinking about whether it’s just me or have newspapers, especially in the UK, got really bad recently? There never seems to be any news I can use. No analysis of anything meaningful beyond wild speculation about the EU and North Korea and no pure thought in the sense of thinking for the sheer hell of it. The New York Times is still good, but even here I’m struggling to find original material.

Malaysia, I should report, is buzzing. New buildings galore and lots of weird stuff (or maybe not) such as people photographing (and taking videos!) of their breakfast. Also women in heir fifties wearing t-shirts with the word Lexus on with the logo in fake diamonds.

BTW, if you’re recently sent me an email (e.g. Bradley) thanks but I’m having problems….

A study by Tinna Laufey at the University of Iceland has looked at behavioral changes in Iceland since the economic crash of late 2008. It reveals that all unhealthily forms of behavior (the ones they measured anyway, like consumption of alcohol, tobacco and sugary drinks) have fallen since late 2008. People are also working less, more people are getting married and more are getting a good night’s sleep. So recession = good?

I’ve become very self-conscious following my last post about being anti-social. For example, is this new post trivial or worth posting? Is it about anything other than me? Anyway, as a link to last week’s discussion about machines demeaning human beings, I’ve just been asked to think about the future of love, which could almost be as much fun as thinking about the future of fun. Now I’m not sure why exactly I’ve wandered onto relationships and sex, but have you seen any of the material on sex robots and is it just are or I these things really creepy? As for the image above, I’m not sure about the “Rental” business, although I guess that’s no different to what some people do with themselves and to other people already. As for the second image, is that a wedding ring on the finger of the guy not quite in the picture?).

A jukebox that plays poems…

This idea doesn’t actually exist yet*, so in the meantime here’s a poetry app created by Maurice Saatchi as a tribute to his late wife, Josephine Hart, which allows you to listen to great actors reading great poetry (free).

The poetry app.

And if you really like poetry try this too – the poetry cafe

* The idea belongs to (or appears in) The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach.

I don’t know if it’s the cold office, the dark office, the office that moves up and down (the boat in London) or something else, but I can’t seem to write anything interesting at the moment. For some reason this brings me on to George Orwell’s Six Rules for Writing. Personally, I’d add that if you are blocked go out and see something (someone?) different. Generally do something else until the urge returns. Or visit your muse. The six rules:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I seem to remember making up something called ‘Night Solar’ in one of my recent books.Turns out he idea isn’t quite as mad as it was intended to be. The cover of New Scientist (26 January) is all about Dark Solar, which appears to be much the same thing.

A report by the National Organisation of University Art Schools in Australia says that schools should be teaching ‘visuacy’. The National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) is similarly focusing on the “outcome” of visuacy being a stand-alone subject for years K-10 and the National Review of Visual Education says visuacy should be given the same prominence as literacy and numeracy.

So what is this strange new skill that will be so fundamental to students in the 21st Century? Judging by the fact that the report cites the example of deconstructing an advertisement for Elle Macpherson’s kickers to establish “conditions of value and meaning” alongside an examination of Picasso’s Guernica, visuacy appears to mean visual literacy plus post-modernism minus a sense of humour.

Doubtless members of the Visual Education Roundtable (“a coalition of key stakeholders to be an advisory body to CMC and MCEETYA”) will paint me as a pedantic philistine, but I can live with that. Newspeak like this is a mutant life form from outer space (i.e. certain parts of Canberra, Westminster and Washington) and needs to be killed off before it infects the whole planet.

To put the record straight I’m all in favour of visual literacy. So is my mum, who used to be an art teacher. Our brave new world is saturated with images and it’s going to get much worse in the future. Everything from walls and tabletops to cereal packets and clothing will soon have the potential to become screens displaying the almost infinite amount of information and entertainment created by you, me and everyone else.

Thus we will be drowning in digital dross and there will be a real need to filter this material, either by visualising information or by understanding the difference between stylish eye candy and items of real substance.

But according to post-modernist academics with a love of Jerry built jargon all of this imagery is of equal value. A video by Kylie is as meaningful as a painting Van Gogh. We should be so lucky. My point here is not a discussion about postmodernism. What’s getting my goat is simply the use of bad language, especially in schools. Yes we live in a visually cluttered culture, but that doesn’t mean that words don’t matter.