Ciarán Ryan notebook

Ages ago, I’m sure I heard Bill Cullen say, on Radio 4, that “good luck is when hard work and opportunity collide”

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/and-now-for-the-good-news-1379098.html

Tim Berners Lee talked about the semantic web to Tamsin Toddin - The Independent 17 May 1999.

Berners-Lee: “If the Web turns all the documents in the world into one big book, then the semantic web will turn all the databases in the world into one big database”

This allows inter-operability

Seven years on,  the BBC collaborated with Microsoft Live Labs. Photosynth  creates three- dimensional representations of some of the most dramatic buildings in Britain by combining hundreds of different photographs.

Using metadata.

http://labs.live.com/photosynth/bbc/

A neuron can connect with 80,000 others. Human brain contains 20 billion neurons, capable of 100 trillion connections (does this include the brain gas-stuff used to make connections?).

So in 1999, Charles Jonscher in ‘Wired Life’ book said computers are nowhere near to brains.

And that knowledge is a state of being.

Information is transitive.

“We must not mistake gigabytes for wisdom”

How I learnt to hate the landowner and love the rambler
Independent, The (London), Mar 9, 1999 by David Aaronovitch

“And yet, until 300 years ago our forebears walked more or less wherever they wanted. Paths marked the most convenient ways to travel, not - as today - the only permitted ways. Land ownership conveyed the right to profit from land, not the right to exclude all others from it. And then we allowed all this to disappear, and - for the best part of two centuries - the rights of landowners increased at the expense of all the other subjects of the Crown. Forests were enclosed or destroyed, common land was seized, rights of way were barred and the right to hunt wild animals was aggrandised by the few.”

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19990309/ai_n14210560

Ariely uses another example. A study conducted in an Israeli nursery decided to punish parents for collecting their children late. They would be fined £10. But once the fine was introduced, guess what happened to lateness? It went up. Once the social obligation (turn up on time) had been replaced by a market transaction (Late? That will be £10 please) attitudes changed.
Predictably Irrational by MIT’s Professor Dan Ariely.

http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/2008/04/the-behavioural.html

Smith was suspicious of “the mean rapacity, the monopolising spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind.”

Remember, it’s:

“not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or baker that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”.

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943

Also:

What happened to the hot badge?

“And if you are the partying type, all you have to do is don your `Hot Badge’ which has electronic information about your taste in food, music, hobbies programmed in it. When you enter a social gathering, it automatically takes you to other like-minded pe ople who are wearing similar badges!”

http://www.hinduonnet.com/businessline/2001/05/13/stories/141339g3.htm

Admass. This is my name for the whole system of an increasing productivity, plus inflation, plus a rising standard of material living, plus high-pressure advertising and salesmanship, plus mass communications, plus cultural democracy and the creation of the mass mind, the mass man.

J. B Priestley, Journey Down a Rainbow, Heinemann-Cresset, London, 1955, p. 51.

On War and Society…
“My own personal view, for what it’s worth, is that we must stop thinking in terms of property and power and begin thinking in terms of community and creation. …We want a world that offers people not the dubious pleasures of power, but the maximum opportunities for creation. And, even already, in the middle of this war [World War Two], I can see that world shaping itself.
” …Property is that old-fashioned way of thinking of a country as a thing, and a collection of things on that thing, all owned by certain people and constituting property, instead of thinking of that country as the home of a living society, and considering the welfare of that society, the community itself as the first test.”
(Taken from his weekly wartime broadcast, Postscripts, 1940)

An inspector calls

Secret of Who Wants to be a millionaire.

1) Shoutability (When at Capital Radio TV producer Briggs realised the drama of hearing contestants making their mind up on air) at home the listeners engage and shout the answer

2 ) Ramp up the drama with anguish. Torture the contestant with tension music and cold blue light etc. Show their anguished faces.

3) One million prize money (needed premium rate numbers to support it)

Tim Berners Lee - altruist?

Internet is cables and computer

Web is abstract space or body of knowledge that works on top

He guarded against web’s fracturing and dismantling by not claiming it - it is non-proprietary. He wants it to remain independent.

Its growth has depended on its independence. It not being owned?

He worked for something other than the bottom line - but Darwinian types explain this as being for his own good? Evolutionary advantage is not just wealth? Hmmm

See also: Nonzero: The logic of human destiny - by Rober Wright - evolutionary psychologist.

Information technology - better communication - is even fostered by wars and binds the globe together. The zero-sum game of you win (I lose) has been replaced by You win (I win) -nonzero sum game.

Because better communication means more invention and faster evolution.

Estimated 1999: 800 tonnes of cannabis are consumed each year by British users.

What affect on country?

mobutu and kabila

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8310

The savage satire of `1984′ still speaks to us today
Independent, The (London), Jun 8, 1999 by Bernard Crick

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19990608/ai_n14231422

“One could put them differently, but I see seven main satiric thrusts: the division of the world by the super states; the mass media as an agent of “prolerisation”; power-hunger in general and totalitarianism in particular; the betrayal by the intellectuals; the abuse and degradation of languages for purposes of control; the rewriting of history for political purposes; and the theses of James Burnam (who believed that the social systems of the seemingly totally antagonistic USA and USSR would come to converge in an authoritarian techno-managerial capitalism - perhaps like China today?). “

 ”Through myriad projects, from cash- heavy prizes to magazines such as Encounter and international conferences, the beneficiaries included WH Auden, AA Milne, Nancy Mitford, Mary MacCarthy, Stephen Spender, Jackson Pollock, Isaiah Berlin and George Orwell.”

Monday Book: Intelligentsia and the CIA
Independent, The (London), Jun 28, 1999 by Julie Wheelwright

Who paid the piper? The CIA and the cultural cold war. - Stonor Saunders

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19990628/ai_n14226234