If Bruce Sterling hasn’t spun your head yet with the Viridian Design Movement, you’re coming up on half a decade behind the curve. But don’t worry, we won’t tell.

And he’s cranked up the conceptual overdrive for this address to SIGGRAPH, the annual convention of computer graphics and design people.

Having conquered the world made of bits, you need to reform the world made of atoms. Not the simulated image on the screen, but corporeal, physical reality. Not meshes and splines, but big hefty skull-crackingly solid things that you can pick up and throw. That’s the world that needs conquering. Because that world can’t manage on its own. It is not sustainable, it has no future, and it needs one.

It is going to get one from you.

Now let me briefly tell you how I think this process will play out.

Listen to this: ProE, FormZ, Catia, Rhino, Solidworks. Wifi, bluetooth, WiMax. Radio frequency ID chips. Global and local positioning systems. Digital inventory systems. Cradle-to-cradle production methods. Design for disassembly. Social software, customer relations management. Open source manufacturing.

These jigsaw pieces are snapping together. They create a picture, the picture of a new and different kind of physicality. It’s a new relationship between humans and objects.

If you can bear with me a while today, and kind of oil and loosen the joints of your incredulity, I’m gonna suspend some disbelief for you here.

You see, the future is already here, it’s just not well distributed yet.

Heady stuff, but worth wrapping your mind around because Sterling’s got a good track record for picking up big trends seven or eight years ahead of almost anyone else.

The full address is here.

Maybe it’s simply because I’ve been reading a book about complexity theory over the weekend, or maybe it’s because I just have a weird way of looking at things, but following the recent turn of events in Iraq (and especially of course Najaf), I can’t help noticing how something which in the grand scheme of things is apparently so small and relatively insignificant can be having such a huge global impact.

Indeed at one point it did really seem to be the case that the whole future of the world economy might have turned on the posession of a set of keys (obviously the Clavis Universalis, or could it be that all the delay is due to someone having a spare-set cut on the quiet: meantime the price of Brent crude spikes up and down).
Continue reading →

Even cowgirls get the blues, and even world leaders get sick and die. Sometimes it happens while they were in office, although the public seldom knows. It was a long time before we knew just how much Woodrow Wilson’s stroke affected his second term. John F. Kennedy’s medical problems were successfully concealed throughout his time in public office. When Reagan’s fall to Alzheimer’s first set in will probably be a secret for another couple of decades. Miterrand’s cancer was hidden from the French public. The Italian press wasn’t writing about how serious Bossi’s health problems are.

The Rt Hon Lord David Owen, CH, a former British foreign secretary, tackles this issue in QJM, an Oxford journal on medicine, and not your usual place for political reading

Diseased, demented, depressed: serious illness in Heads of State

As both a physician and a politician, I was first touched by the question of how illness can affect the decision-making of Heads of State or Government when I met the Shah of Iran in Tehran in May 1977. He appeared to be at the height of his power: self-confident, and enjoying his global role in helping to determine world oil prices. It would have been a great help to have known then, and particularly a year later, that he had been suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukaemia. …

The French Foreign Minister Louis de Guiringaud told me later, when we had both left office, that he had known of the diagnosis. But he never told me when I was Foreign Secretary, or Cyrus Vance, the US Secretary of State. Had I known I would have pressed far more vigorously early in 1978, and certainly been adamant in the late summer and autumn of that year, that the Shah should stand down immediately on health grounds. … However, we were still treating him as an imperial leader, capable of making bold decisions, when in retrospect what he needed was to be told what to do and virtually forced to take treatment in Switzerland. If he had done so, the Revolution in Iran would not have taken place in the way that it did, President Carter might have won a second term, and certainly the history of the Middle East would have been very different.

There aren’t any easy answers to these questions, as Owen suggests at the end of the article

Reluctantly, I must also conclude that if a Head of State or Government becomes ill in office, different considerations apply and there can be no set rules. … Formal procedures for fixed medical examinations for an elected incumbent is a process with a pseudo-objectivity which can be blind to the complexities and dynamics of government, as well as the uncertain relationship between disease and the capacity to make decisions.

Thanks to Electrolite for the tip.

As I walk through the valley where I harvest my grain
I take a look at my wife and realize she’s very plain
But that’s just perfect for an Amish like me
You know, I shun fancy things like electricity
At 4:30 in the morning I’m milkin’ cows
Jebediah feeds the chickens and Jacob plows… fool
And I’ve been milkin’ and plowin’ so long that
Even Ezekiel thinks that my mind is gone
I’m a man of the land, I’m into discipline
Got a Bible in my hand and a beard on my chin
But if I finish all of my chores and you finish thine
Then tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1699

We been spending most our lives
Living in an Amish paradise
We’re all crazy Mennonites
Living in an Amish paradise
There’s no cops or traffic lights
Living in an Amish paradise
But you’d probably think it bites
Living in an Amish paradise

– Amish Paradise, “Weird Al” Yankovic

Belgium is hell in July.

The Belgians, of course, know this instinctively. I don’t quite understand how a nation can continue to function when the entire population is on vacation at the same time for a whole month. The trams get cut back to the point where they’re useless out in the eastern suburbs of Brussels and the weather isn’t much to write home about either. I still have to wear a jacket in the morning in late July.

Of course, I have this extra problem: allergies. Something in Belgium sprays its pollen in July. Something that just about kills me every time. And every summer, I tell myself, next year. Next year, don’t forget to take your goddamn vacation in July like every one else, and get as far from Belgium as you can! And every year – this is my third year here – I have to be in Belgium in July for some reason.

This year, it’s the final report for my research in translation automation. The work is done. The results are excellent, spectacular even. In another year, under other circumstances, I would feel tempted to find some venture capital and see if I can revolutionise the language industry. Instead, I’ve spent the last week wheezing in bed, taking hits off my Duovent bong, popping Tylenol and Claratin, and snorting this foul-smellng shit my doctor gave me for hay fever.

I’m suffering from the most profound writer’s block I think I’ve ever had. I can’t remember ever having felt so unable to organise or express my thoughts. I have tons to blog, and vast quantities of material on how to profit from the statistical properties of the lexicon, but I can barely bring myself to read my e-mail. Writing this paper is like having acute constipation. I push and I push and it hurts like hell, and all that comes out is a little bit of crap.

But, I’m back at work today and that brings me to my e-mail, specifically a letter pointing me to an article in Saturday’s Guardian about Manitoba Mennonite novelist Miriam Toews:
Continue reading →

Although there are potentially looming problems of overcapacity and concerns about subsidies, it’s hard to deny that the emergence of budget airlines over the last decade has revolutionised travel among European countries, not only through cheap fares but also by allowing more flexible travelling arrangements, with a greater choice of flight departures and destinations. Furthermore the competition from them has had a positive knock-on effect on previously stuffy national airline companies, such as Lufthansa and British Airways.
Continue reading →

They did it.

Organizers of this summer’s Olympic Games in Athens have breathed a sigh of relief after the main stadium’s roof began its long-awaited slide into position. …

The IOC had given the Greek government until May 20 to slide into place the two huge arches — or abandon the project.

The project, which has already missed one “final deadline” on April 28, was the latest to cause concern as the Greek capital races to finish work on dozens of Olympic venues ahead of the opening ceremony on August 13.

Yes, yes, I know, every Olympics has this sort of moment. It’s just that Athens, which was a bit shaky to begin with, has had more than most and still has heaps to do.

Should be quite a summer.