December 10, 2008 at 3:29 am · Filed under Litterature, Technology
About a month ago I stumbled across Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws of prediction somewhere on the internet while checking up on some facts about the 1968 movie on “2001: A space Odyssey”. His laws of prediction seems to make sense as ground rules of any creative activity. So think about your colleagues at work and read these omnipotent truths that beautifully puts a limit to the tyranny of experience:
- 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.
- The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
For any extra geeky readers, the BBC science and technology staff has investigated eight of Clarke’s predictions including cryogenics, the millennium bug, communication satellites and the space elevator.
August 11, 2008 at 3:14 am · Filed under Litterature, Systems Theory
I recently stayed in New York City for a ten day vacation. I really enjoyed it. But why? I repeatedly caught myself observing that it was “just like in the movies and on TV”. When something did not corrospond with the image I had from the media it “Wasn’t really New York’ though obviously is was. This made me think of Jean Beaudrillard’s book ‘America‘ compiling travel notes from trips to USA. The book reflects on America from a European point of view, and is in essence subjective, but it offers some really interesting insights for any first-time visitor to America. Among other thought provoking statements Beaudrillard concludes that for an outsider whose main impression of American reality is constructed through the media, Disney World is the most ‘real’ place in America. Read it and wonder.
Everywhere I went I was met with unparralleled service and professional hospitality from the ‘ticket queue’ security check at JFK to the Lyic Diner at east 23rd street end 3rd avenue where I had several of my breakfasts. I caught myself choosing music venues, resturants, parks and sights after how ‘typically New York’ they were - how ‘real’. This was, of cause, staged. Everything was service, and I don’t think i saw a single business that wasn’t in some way providing service or trading shares in companies in the service industry. I even leaned that the old New York Navy Yard in Brooklyn where they used to biuld battle ships and air craft carriers was converted into movie studios and a plant that produces Sweet n’ Low (artificial sweetener you put in coffee and tea in restaurants and cafés).
Seing New York (Which is, I was told by a native waiting in queue for the men’s room at the Lincoln Center, not a part of USA but rather an international zone) as a tourist made me want to come back and find the REAL America. Is everything service and setting or is there more? Is it real and to whom, or is Jean Beaudrillard right when he classifies USA as a theme park? I intend to find out.
October 19, 2007 at 11:43 am · Filed under Litterature
Michel Bauwens of the P2P foundation has been so kind as to bring a summary of the master’s thesis by yours truly in the research fest blog at p2pfoundation.net . Go check it out and get lost in the p2p wiki where all sorts of exiting people share their take on the connected world to come.
The future is together. Like it or not.
