A really nice remark by Matt Jones during the Urban and Social Media presentations at Futuresonic :
"we get a kind of muscle memory of cities, like where is the best place to cross the road. Can we surface this for each other" using the streams of data we now generate.
and corporeal.
I usually try and make myself stay away from Latin words, because when writing in English they are much less poetic than ones that come from old english and the vikings, but maybe that's a good one.
Because it's got corpse in it. As in dead body.
I've just used incorporeal when writing about wireless networks and data -- so what I've written would mean "things that don't have a body which will die."
It sticks out a bit, to be honest, as a choice of word, when "intangible" would probably do the job, and words that stick out are usually the ones you should get rid of, but it sounds richly strange, in the context, and it makes me think of alchemists, plagues and Descarte fighting with the "evil genius" .
Urbisunderground is the communal web site set up by/for the alternative* teenagers who hang around outside Urbis in Manchester.
Building and maintaining it seems to be a semi official youth work project, rather than self organised, but the web presence certainly followed from the real world meeting place rather than the other way round.
They talk about being "on Urbis" - by which they mean being at the real world place, not the web site: "there was a weird atmosphere on Urbis last night" - in the same way they would talk about being on messenger or on My Space.
*"emo" may no longer be the correct terminology.
My pal Simon at the BBC’s super geese.
Here are some photos of the dead Pope:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/13632876@N00/tags/morto/
And here's the BBC's photo of a forest of camera phone snapping hands:
What to make of this, if anything at all.
I guess the first question would be, when the last Pope died did everyone troop past with their Polaroids?
If not, what's the difference?
Weight of numbers? And having the equipment to hand? When one person plucks up the nerve, everyone can instantly follow suit.
Anything more?
That thicket of camera phones is, to me, funny, irreverent and liberating.
After all, the Pope is only a dead man to his family and close friends.
To the rest of us, he's a media event.
It's just that now, we've all got media capture devices, haven't we?
"The more I traveled in the country, the more I came to understand that virtually every location -- creek, molehill, cinder cone, hot spring, forested area, and (ancient or present) farm had a specific name."
A really nice little piece about "the naming process [as] local, embodied, idiosyncratic, or personal." in comparison to standardisation and GPSery.
The Aymara people of the Andes think of themselves as standing with the future behind them and the past in front.
Only those things that have been witnessed can be claimed with any certainty, and the Aymaran language has markers to distinguish things that have been seen by the speaker and things that haven’t: "Yesterday my mother cooked potatoes (but I did not see her do it)."
If you leave these eyewitness markers out, you’re either boasting or a liar.
My first thought when I read about this on the Test weblog written by Matt Locke was, “What nice, modest people”, and the second was, “I wonder how much longer that language is going to last?”
There are differences between languages because of physical limits on communication. When the next valley was a long way away, cultures headed in different directions, and we ended up with dozens of folk names for a single common flower, let alone the thousands of spoken languages.
Now that we’ve removed those limits altogether (with tanks as well as telephones), the names of flowers have gone with them. This must be for the best, overall, and is certainly unstoppable, but if we face the past for a while (and though I shouldn’t presume, I think this is part of what Matt Locke is writing about) we’ll notice that we’ve lost some richness.
We can’t put physical limits back, but maybe we should put them back for good manners. For the Aymara truth is a far as the eye can see, and history a chain of witnesses: “I saw my grandfather say that he saw his grandfather say that he saw that as a child.”
Being there is what counts, and maybe we need to be modest enough to put that limit back on some of our channels of communication. Only the people who are here can talk.
"These names had never appeared on maps but had been passed down from generation to generation in oral tradition, creating mind-maps which vary from individual to individual.
How different each informants mind-map was became apparent when comparing the information provided by a father and son who both grew up in the same township but who did not provide one single overlapping name.
During the research it became clear that the amount of names an individual remembered depended strongly on how close his or her relationship with the surveyed terrain was."
Place-Names of Barra, Anke-Beate Stahl
Ambient interface
Meditation 1
...I will suppose that some malignant demon, who is at the same time exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his powers to deceive me; I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things, are no more than the illusions of dreams, which this being has used to set traps for my credulity; I will consider myself as without hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or any of the senses, and that to believe I have these is false...
...But this is a hard undertaking, and a certain indolence leads me back, without knowing it, to my ordinary course of life; just as the prisoner, who, perhaps, was enjoying in his dreams an imaginary liberty, when he begins to suspect that it is just a vision, dreads awakening.
Meditation 2
The Meditation of yesterday has filled my mind with so many doubts, that it is no longer in my power to forget them. Nor do I see, meanwhile, any way in which they can be resolved; and, just as if I had fallen all of a sudden into very deep water, I am so shocked that I cannot either plant my feet firmly on the bottom or sustain myself by swimming on the surface.
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy 1, 2
