Category: Uncategorized

Chelsea Win

OK, so for all sorts of prejudiced social reasons, I don’t like Chelsea, but despite my view of the two significant refereeing decisions, I do believe they deserved to beat Man U yesterday,  who despite Rooney’s hard work just didn’t have the strike power. And I don’t have any time for Sir Alex’s rantings about fouls awarded or not – the cases in point were debatable, matters of the referee’s perspective.

Booking Drogba ? 100% right. OK so he was fouled and he didn’t feign injury, and yes Fletch deserved a card more than once yesterday, but Drogba feigned imminent death in full view of referee and the rest of the world. A bookable offence. Referee correct.

Terry’s goal ? 100% wrong. Drogba was clearly interfering with play right in front of the keeper – in full view of the referee’s assistant. Van der Saar didn’t even dive till Drogba had failed to kick it, he was covering Drogba’s strike. 100% offside, no goal. Referee’s assistant wrong, referee correct.

The referee did nothing wrong.

[Note : Psybertron is primarily about right and wrong in action. Chelsea FC are just an interesting  source of contentious decisions – a high-profile case-study of individual, social and authority based ethics. But, yes, I do care about football too.]

Some New Pirsig Links

A page discussing Pirsig at Reddit which I picked up from the del.ici.ous tag on Pirsig which grows all the time – must use del.ici.ous more myself.

Musicians’ Olympus

Is a 60/70/80’s mainly UK rock musicians reference site from the 90’s (pre-blogs and wikis) that has just had all its content at Geocities go offline.  Good luck to Miguel Terol getting the content re-built in Blogger / BlogSpot form.

Pelosi in Tears

I’ve not been following the detail of what’s in, what’s out of the health reform bill, and it was a close margin with only one Republican crossing the house – but a momentous vote bringing tears to the eyes.

Planning Through Complexity

If this were adults rather than children perhaps the “piss-up in a brewery” metaphor might be more apt, but I love the dead-pan delivery of the choices in planning a childrens party from Dave Snowden at Cognitive Edge. I saw Dave do this a few years ago, so it’s good to have the video to share – the point is well made anyway.

“Cross that line you little ba****ds and you die.”

Common Chorus

Audience participation for conference speakers ? The common power of the pentatonic scale demonstrated by Bobby McFerrin at the World Science Festival.

After rehearsing just two notes the entire audience is spot on the third – with absolutely no warning of where he’s going next, up or down. And it continues eventually to the tonic / octave via random intervals. Simple but very impressive.

(Don’t know anything about WSF – looks a lot like TED – but got the link via StumbleUpon.)

The Horror

Two ironic points struck me at last night’s Muse gig at Oslo Spektrum. Excellent performance by Matt, Dom and Chris as we have come to expect, and performance is the word.

(1) as Muse repertoire grows, the new stuff slots in with the old quite seamlessly, even though it clearly becomes impossible to experience all your favourites at one gig. The last two albums have been more symphonic, even “themed”, and even they fit the tried and tested Muse pattern – hence the seamless fit – and they’re so damned good at it. BUT … it’s all getting a bit 1970’s overblown pre-punk “concept” album and tour backlash. Don’t go there Muse … back to basics for future variety please, you know it makes sense.

(2) Supporting the audience. Muse have never been great at engaging with their audience, beyond the performance itself (which is of course excellent – see above). If Dom didn’t stop to talk to acknowledge the crowd occasionally – the personal engagement would be zilch. Ironic that when Muse were invited to support U2 recently, Matt noticed that “We must be doing OK, but not as well as them, clearly”. Following that “honour” I have to say Muse (or their tour promoters) need to be taken out and shot for serving up “The Horrors” as a support act to the Muse audience, to any audience.

Sense of Place

Interesting edition of Thinking Allowed. Laurie’s newsletter about forgetfulness focussed light-heartedly on the aging process of finding it harder to remember names and faces. In fact the subject matter is more about cultural change and the evolution of greater difficulty in remembering generally – a book by Paul Connerton.

Not simply displacement by overload in the information age – but primarily a loss of a sense of place since the industrial revolution. We cannot mentally attach memory images to stable locations in our environment. Major construction projects used to take lifetimes, and entire home towns and cities our daily locations could be held in view for a lifetime. With construction projects driven by increasingly distibuted economies, locations change and we travel between them so much more day by day, year by year. We are less stably “situated” and have less fixed phsyical hooks in our environment on which to hang mental images that make remembering natural. Interesting idea.

Beyond The Edge

Followed a series of links from Johnnie Moore (on more reflective, indirect approach to “problem solving” when the situation is complex and the “problem” itself not at all clear – reminded me of Terry Eagleton’s “C-Word” reaction to the macho “can do” mentality).

Peter Block …  we have a deeply held belief that the way to make a difference in the world is to define problems and needs and then recommend actions to solve those needs.  We are all problem solvers, action oriented and results minded. It is illegal in this culture to leave a meeting without a to-do list. We want measurable outcomes and we want them now. What is hard to grasp is that it is this very mindset which prevents anything fundamental from changing.  We cannot problem solve our way into fundamental change, or transformation.

Led me to Viv McWaters “Beyond the Edge” – lots of good self-organization / emergence material.

This particular post caught my eye because amongst other things it includes specifc links to the Dutch Road Traffic approach – of removing all instructional road-traffic signs – improving road safety. I frequently quote it, but was beginning to think it was apocryphal, something I’d maybe imagined. Hell no. Wikipedia has the specifics.

The idea of self-organization arising from relatively few simple rules – the old flocking / shoaling “A-Life” simulations – rather than detailed expert instructions on how to achieve some complex end result (which can never work), is fitting with two current threads.

(a) How to handle complex situations, by simplifying the “architectural approach” rather than attempting to simplify the complexity of teh situation itself – which is conserved however you slice and dice “the problem”, (Cue Einstein – “Simple as possible, but not more so.”) and

(b) the “Aha!” moment that this is entirely consistent with the ethical approach to acting local – “tending one’s own garden” – rather than presuming to address a large complex global-scale “crisis” as something with a tractable solution.

(Both also fit another current thread – that ontologies may be a red-herring. Why spend time designing or discovering the best or correct ontology for a given enterprise, and debating which is best, when you can give the means to each player to characterize the ontological relationships with its neighbours ?)

You Live and Learn

Something I didn’t know.
(Testing the LinkedIn integration too incidentally.)