Here’s a link to a Real Audio piece from the Harddisken programme on Danish Radio including an interview with yours truly. Most of it’s in danish but interview bits are in english.

Click here for Real Audio file.

Just found out I won an essay prize for a piece entitled ‘In Defence of Apathy’. I slightly twisted the title to say that apathy (in the traditional sense of voter apathy) doesn’t matter; what really matters is that we’re becoming a more active society.

“Like a metaphorical Jim Royle, the character played by Ricky Tomlinson in ‘the Royle Family’, society is waking from a blue screen stupor, rubbing its eyes and sitting up in its armchair. My defence of apathy is that the only apathy we’re seeing is towards traditional institutions, otherwise known as the end of deference. But this doesn’t matter since it’s being accompanied by a rise in activism which is reaching such a level that it is about to precipitate a major positive change in society.”

Read on by downloading the pdf here.

A massive thankyou to ippr, the judging panel and particularly to James Cornford for awarding me the prize.

Michael Moore’s new film Bowling for Columbine is a cracker. Starting out as an examination of gun culture in the US, it develops into the most persuasive argument that something is deeply wrong in american society I think I’ve ever seen. In the UK I don’t think we should think of it as just a film about the US though. There are worrying similarities with events and trends on this side of the Atlantic — the tendancy for “if it bleeds, it leads” on TV news, the increase in gated communities, the government warning us about ‘general’ threats from ‘general’ enemies. Anyway, go see it and see what you think.

You can read the transcript of the NFT/Guardian interview with Michael Moore here.

Just chanced across a brilliant interview with the theoretical biologist, Brian Goodwin on Edge.org. If you haven’t come across him before, he’s author of “How the leopard changed its spots — the evolution of complexity” which is one of the best explanations of what we could learn from natural systems I’ve ever read. I have a few friends who’ve studied with him down at Schumacher College in the beautiful surroundings of Dartington Hall in Devon, all are in awe of the man. Here’s a little taster from the interview:

“It’s not with theoretical physics that the 21st century lies. Theoretical physics is a beautiful structure, the essence of the intellectual adventure that characterizes current science. But now what we face is crises of the environment, crises of health, crises of community. These are the problems that we now face and we need a science that will actually address these issues and give us ways of being in the world that will allow us to live a life of quality. “

You can read the whole thing here.

It was in June 2000, when the Guardian published “What would you like to see?”, that I first got the Carver bug. Almost immediately, I bought everything by him that I could lay my hands on — books of short stories like “What we talk about when we talk about love”, “Cathedral” and “Elephant” — and I loved them all. Quite often a page of Carver’s original handwritten or typed manuscript is included at the beginning of the collections, and you can see how he would write and then go back and correct — making sure that every comma, every full stop was in the right place.

Although he’s celebrated now, Carver felt real hardship during his life which was cut tragically short at the age of 50. This biography appears on AmericanPoems.com:

“The American short story writer and poet Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, on May 25, 1938, and lived in Port Angeles, Washington during his last ten, sober years until his death from cancer on August 2, 1988. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1979 and was twice awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1983 Carver received the prestigious Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award which gave him $35,000 per year tax free and required that he give up any employment other than writing, and in 1985 Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize. In 1988 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Hartford. He received a Brandeis Citation for fiction in 1988. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

At least that’s the basic biography. Of course there’s no room in it for the nature of the hardship he and his family went through during most of those fifty years between birth and death. There’s no mention of his marriage at 19, the birth of his two children, Christine and Vance, by the time he was 21. No mention of his sometimes ferocious fights with his first wife, Maryann. No mention, either, of his near death, the hospitalizations — four times in 1976 and 1977 — for acute alcoholism.”

To find out more about the man in his own words, check out some of the many interviews that Carver gave later on in his life as recognition of his brilliance grew. William Stull has translated two interviews with Carver from European newspapers on his page Prose as Architecture.

“With the click of a mouse, the message was sent. Nike, sports clothing giant and symbol of personal freedom, had created a feature on their website allowing shoppers to customise shoes with words or slogans of their choice. On 5 January 2001, Jonah Peretti ordered a pair of shoes customised with the word ‘sweatshop’ and Nike refused to deliver. But the email conversation between Peretti and the Nike customer services department about why the company wouldn’t allow his request was stored on Peretti’s computer.

Peretti forwarded the email conversation to just twelve friends, but within hours thousands of people had seen the message. Within days the message had been posted on popular discussion sites like Slashdot.org and Plastic.com and was seen by tens of thousands of other internet users. Soon, Peretti was getting calls from journalists and TV producers asking him for interviews. NBC’s Today programme flew him to New York to appear live in front of millions of viewers. There was nothing Nike could do to put the genie back in the bottle. Once the message was out, there was no going back…”

To read on and find out why it happened, download Open Policy here.

To comment on the idea, take part in the discussion forum here.

Most media reported the attack on the internet backbone of a couple of weeks back and I’ve been digging around to see what else is going on. There are some startling stats — albeit from internet security companies. London-based computer security firm mi2g says that October has already qualified as the worst month for overt digital attacks since records began in 1995, with an estimated 16,559 attacks carried out. Compare this to the whole of the first quarter of this year when there were 6,937 and you get the feeling something strange might be going on (source: The Washington Post).

In terms of what’s been done to sure up the internet since the DNS attack, EWeek reports:

“In the wake of last week’s unprecedented DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack against all 13 of the Internet’s root-name servers, the U.S. Government and ICANN, one of the Internet’s main governing bodies, are considering changes to help protect the DNS system against future attacks. The most immediate and significant changes will likely come from the ICANN, which is holding a meeting this week in Shanghai, China. The body, which is ultimately responsible for maintaining the root servers that contain the master list of Internet domains, will hear recommendations from its Security and Stability Advisory Committee on securing the edge of the Domain Name System network.”

Wired reports on developments at Splashpower, a company based in Cambridge, which is developing wireless chargers for multiple gizmos. Basically you just place you mobile phone, PDA etc on a pad and they’re all magically (!) charged without the need for carrying around all those annoying cables and transformers.

I’ve always wondered why we charge devices that require such a low voltage using the normal household supply. Why not use lower voltage renewably powered chargers that don’t require bulky (and inefficient) transformers? And why do all companies insist on using a different adapter for chargers? Surely a standard for portable, personal gadgets would be possible and prevent us from needing a new charger every time we buy a new toy. Rant over. Let me know what you think.

Stephen Wolfram’s epic 1000+ page book, A New Kind of Science, is keeping me occupied at the moment. Certainly an interesting read and quite extraordinary in what it sets out to achieve. The opening gives you some idea: “Three centuries ago science was transformed by the dramatic new idea that rules based on mathematical equations could be used to describe the natural world. My purpose in this book is to initiate another such transformation, and to introduce a new kind of science that is based on the much more general types of rules that can be embodied in simple computer programs.”

What I find fascinating is Wolfram’s discussion of the way he wrote the book, which bubbles to the surface every now and then. There’s a good article in Wired magazine by Steven Levy called “the Man who cracked the code to everything…” which follows the story of the ten years that it’s taken Wolfram to write the book. He worked almost nocturnally, seldom straying into the “real” world, experimenting on “cellula automata” — essentially simple programs. Levy reports that one friend, described Wolfram thus, “He reminds me of the noblemen who worked in science during the 1800s — they did it for the love of it.”

Anyway, I won’t spoil the book for you, but take a look. I think it may be the most significant scientific book to have been published in my lifetime.

For Steven Levy’s Wired article click here
For Wolfram’s New Kind of Science site click here

Just come across ‘the official Jon Ronson site’ which is well worth a look. Jon Ronson is a journalist based in the UK who I first became a fan of through his ‘human zoo’ columns which used to feature in the Guardian’s Weekend Magazine. He’s now quite well known for his TV documentaries following some of the strangest individuals you’re ever likely to see — from Iain Paisley through to David Icke via Jonathon King. His book Them is deservedley a best seller and thoroughly recommended.

jonronson.com