Is this scenario familiar? You order your dinner online, wait for the home delivery, then eat it while multi-screening in front of the television and checking Facebook, while other members of the household work late, snack or play computer games in different rooms. For philosopher of technology Albert Borgmann that script signals the moral as…More
Genius headgear
Fans rated Spock’s Brain the second worst of the original Star Trek episodes. The story involves the unlikely removal and theft of Mr Spock’s highly logical brain for use as central controller for the complex systems and services of a planet run by women. While waiting for the brain’s return Dr McCoy manages to install an apparatus on Spock’s head…More
Showing off
As well as valuing their privacy, it seems that some people want to make spectacles of themselves. Include in this category conspicuous whistle blowers exposing secrets — about covert operations that uncover other people’s secrets. Amidst concerns about the interception of text messages, voice, and phone data by GCHQ (Guardian) and ubiquitous video surveillance, spare…More
What’s wrong with parametricism
NURBS (Non-uniform rational B-spline curves) and blobs (blobs) are big in architecture. We used to talk simply about parametric design, and some still do. Parameters are the constants in an equation, set of equations, or a computer program (script). They define and limit what the equation will produce, e.g. the shape of a curve. But you can…More
Architectural pragmatics
It’s important to get to the truth. Michael Gove, the current UK education secretary, thinks that we are selling short the truth about WWI: “Our understanding of the war has been overlaid by misunderstandings, and misrepresentations which reflect an, at best, ambiguous attitude to this country and, at worst, an unhappy compulsion on the part…More
Frequent feelings
In my research into emotions I’ve found it useful to look at Google search counts to gauge the relative popularity of terms like happiness, melancholy, and mood. Now Google provide n-grams, which show the occurrences of words (or any string of characters) during any year in the entire corpus of books that Google have scanned…More
Morphic fields
The kids at Hogwarts learn to move objects about at will without having to touch or grab them. According to philosopher David Ray Griffin, the mechanistic philosophy of Rene Descartes helped counteract the belief that minds can control objects over distances. This insight eventually reduced the persecution of people labelled as witches. For good or evil the…More
Enchanted places
Who can deny that there are places whose “numinous nature” is best sensed “in the peace and tranquility of the atmosphere that surrounds them, simply by sitting still and quietly letting the energy and power of the place slowly seep over you.” I’m quoting from a book on ley lines by Christopher Street (p.3). Can people…More
How to slow down time
Apple introduced a slo-mo video recording feature on the iPhone 5S (with its 64 bit chip) recording at 120 frames per second. So far there are lots of online slow videos of skateboarders, dogs shaking off after a bath, lips blowing rasberries and objects dropping into water. Here’s another one. The availability and ease of the…More
In meditative mood
Being in a prison cell for a long period frees the mind of external factors and aids serious introspection. In a letter to his wife, Nelson Mandela recommended 15 minutes of meditation each day before going to sleep. Winnie was also in prison at the time. Twenty seven years in gaol, 40 days and nights…More