David Pearson’s designs for the Penguin “Great Ideas” series of books are all er… great. But I particularly love this from the forthcoming 3rd wave…

I have a strange relationship with Wired magazine. The design and layout gives me a headache, the relentless consumerism that underlies almost everything in the magazine really gets on my nerves and, well, it just irritates me. Having said that I always pick up the office copy and I love some of their long story like articles, La Vida Robot for example, which is pretty much my favourite thing I’ve ever read in a magazine (go and read it now it’s bloody great). Anyway after last months tabloid style “expose” of climate change stuff (the most garish cover in recent memory, headlines screaming FLY MORE TO SAVE THE WORLD! etc. but the copy having very little new to say beyond a few counter intuitive factoids) it looks like the new issue is going to be even more annoying if this Chris Anderson piece is anything to go by. Basically theory is dead apparently

We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.

So the idea is that we don’t need models because statistical tools will tell us er… what exactly?

The first example Anderson gives is the mass gene sequencing of ecosystems. But…

Venter can tell you almost nothing about the species he found. He doesn’t know what they look like, how they live, or much of anything else about their morphology. He doesn’t even have their entire genome. All he has is a statistical blip — a unique sequence that, being unlike any other sequence in the database, must represent a new species.

Are we really no longer interested in how these new species live, how they play their role in the ecosystem, what they look like? People who do science are interested in theory, that’s why they do it, to improve our understanding how the world works not simply to describe it working. It seems to me that what’s being advocated amounts to a kind of grand shrug of the shoulders. What Anderson doesn’t mention is that Ventner is collecting all this data with the hope that one day it will have useful explanatory or predictive power when parsed through a model not because filling up hard drives is just cool fun.

In fact we’re only able to draw conclusions about this mass gene sequencing because a theory explaining relationships between genomes already exists. If Darwin or someone else hadn’t yet come along to explain the hierarchy of species, someone would probably use Ventner’s DNA sequences to develop just such a theory.

How will we know where to look without models and hypotheses to guide us? I mean we can gather a lot of data but in terms of describing the state of even a single square meter of reality, we’re not even close to being able to store that kind of information. We need a model to know how to choose our samples.

My main issue with the article is, as I’ve alluded, this: What exactly does Anderson think these statistical tools and number crunching computer programs are if they’re not models? Google’s algorithm is a model of the relevance of documents to a string of keywords, it may seem abstract but google’s algorithm embodies an imperfect theory of how people determine whether a page is useful to them. Every time someone fails to find what they’re looking for in Google the current theory is falsified but as Newton’s theory is falsified by what we know about relativity and we continue to use it we still use googles theory as a good enough model for a most situations.

Am I missing something?

So apparently I never posted anything about Belgian jump style. This is kind of odd seeing as I was utterly obsessed by it for a good two weeks last year as anyone who I saw - and forced to watch you tube videos - during that time will testify.

So anyway, without further ado:

How cool is that? It’s like proper folk dancing, feels like an update of older Northern European traditions, the music is kind of folky too albeit filtered through gabba and hardcore (also typically Northern genres). I love the fact that the videos all take place in grey skied anonymous back streets or garages, sparsely decorated bedrooms or un-tended gardens. places that will be familiar to anyone who grew up in small town in the UK and apparently Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany etc. A hipper Jonathan Meades might have traced this kind of music and dance around the Baltic along with the herrings and earthbound architecture he identified as key signifiers of Northern-ness in Magnetic North. I’m sure there was some archive footage in the first episode of Dance Britannia of this exact dance (more or less) taking place 100 years ago in a Cornish fishing town. Also there’s that slightly sinister edge to the whole thing the dance comes close to a goose step and the music is unmistakeably martial.

The new thing seems to be the slightly less odd Hard Shuffle. Compare and contrast:

It’s still ultra formal but the music is noticeably a bit funkier and the style owes an obvious debt to Michael Jackson. Also girls are involved.

Tektonic seems to be even further down the funky axis, arm movements are introduced and the rigid steps are relaxed. What better place to see a demo than the booze isle of a supermarket?

Clearly this is the cross over point with NuRave/ Electro clash or whatever…

…the point at which the whole thing becomes acceptable to French people and the YouTube videos mostly feature girls. Irony and coolness have made an appearance, I can’t help but feel that something has been lost.

The pilot, who is usually based at RAF Lossiemouth, turned to the Queen’s Regulations and found the moustache’s width did not breach RAF guidelines.

if a moustache is worn, the upper lip is to be unshaven and the moustache is not to extend below the edge of the mouth.

OnePlusYou Quizzes and Widgets
via LMG

Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Radiohead held an online contest to remix “Nude” from their album - “In Rainbows” This was quite a difficult task for everybody that entered, as Nude is in 6/8 timing, and 63bpm. Most music that’s played in clubs is around 120bpm and usually 4/4 timing. It’s pretty difficult to seamlessly mix a waltz beat into a DJ set.

This resulted in lots of generic entries consisting of a typical 4/4 beat, but with arbitrary clips from “Nude” thrown in so that they qualified for the contest.

Thom Yorke joked at the ridiculousness of it in an interview for NPR radio, hinting that they set the competition to find out how people would approach such a challenging task.

I decided to take the piss a bit, as the contest seemed to be in that spirit.

Based on the lyric (and alternate title) “Big Ideas: Don’t get any” I grouped together a collection of old redundant hardware, and placed them in a situation where they’re trying their best to do something that they’re not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there.

from here via here

I assumed everyone would be pro free swimming. Clearly not

I prefer to keep my tax money and if / when I fancy a swim I will pay. Unbelievable actions by this government!!!!

Blimey, are the government drunk? What the hell are they talking about? I just spent 50 quid to fill up a Fiat Punto and they’re offering free swimming?

and my favourite

Of course, all this initiative will do is create a two-tier swimming system.

An unintentionally powerful piece of design from the CIA

From Social Design Notes

The ACLU has posted a handful of documents they’ve pried from the CIA about the use of waterboarding on prisoners in CIA custody.

After the Director of the CIA publicly admitted that the CIA has, in fact, used waterboarding, the agency could hardly argue that this was a state secret.

Apologies in advance for the incomprehensible nature of this post.

OK, I’ve linked my Wii account to my Nintendo club account so in a sane world I’d be able to simply buy Wii credits with those points which I could then use to buy virtual console/Wii-ware titles. In this sane world there would be no problem for Nintendo in providing me with these credits and I could just buy them whenever I had enough points (you earn points by buying certain Nintendo games, usually the first party ones and a few key franchises, advance wars etc.). Instead I have to order credits in groups of 500, 1000 or 1500 (conveniently the precise value of nothing in the Wii shop so you always have unusable change) and they get delivered to your door in the form of a card with a handy string of numbers and letters that you have to laboriously type in using the Wii’s on screen keyboard. Oh yeah and they’re never in stock. Yes that’s right a purely imaginary currency which never need exist in the physical world but for stupid Nintendo reasons does, is always out of stock. So I’m unable to spend my points.

And now to add to my woes Nintendo inform me that my points are going to start expiring at the end of the month. Do you have any idea how long it’s taken me to save up over 10,000 of those fuckers? Bloody ages that’s how long! Each game you buy gives you about 250 so those of you who can do mental arithmetic can probably work out how much of my cash I’ve thrown at Nintendo over the years (not including console purchases, 2 GBA SPs, a Gamecube, Wii, 2 DS’s some plastic bongo drums etc.). I prefer not to do that calculation. Is it too much to ask for a little something back? I really don’t want to be spending my hard earned points on princess peach mobile phone wallpaper.

:(

We’ve just watched episode 10 of the fourth series of The Wire. The accepted wisdom seems to be that The Wire, at least up the end of 4, is on an entirely upward trajectory but I’ve got to say that so far, after the magnificence of 3 it’s a bit well not a let down but sort of business as usual. Obviously the previous series have all built strongly in the later episodes so I may be jumping the gun here.

What do you think?