Watching the future

My strong recommendation for this evening’s entertainment is to watch a documentary about nuclear waste in Finland – it’s on More 4 at 10pm and will be available on the Channel 4 website for a while after that (and north American readers can find dates of cinema showings here). It’s much more interesting than it might sound. I […]

The future is a foreign country

Here’s an idea to take to Hollywood. Take a large hole in the ground, where nothing is happening except a few people working to make it bigger. Take a bunch of talking heads whose professional expertise covers nuclear waste management and theology. Take a few moody landscape shots of snow and trees. Take some impossibly difficult […]

Invention as crystallisation, not inspiration

People set themselves curious challenges. Doogie Hooner’s is to explain everything through flowcharts, and his book doing precisely that is published today. One of the tasks he sets himself is to explain the internet to a nineteenth century street urchin.  A small extract from the resulting flow chart is shown below, click on it to […]

The end of history

The end of history will come not when nothing more ever changes, but when nobody can work out what has actually happened. We may be closer to that point than we like to think. In the world of organisations, historically, the creation of records was a by-product of actually doing the work. It wasn’t hard […]

The future, by the book

There was an interesting article by Marcus du Sautoy in the Guardian on Saturday about the future of the book. That’s a perfectly straightforward statement – or might have been had it been written a few years ago.  But now ‘article’, ‘in’ and ‘on Saturday’ are all a bit problematic. On the printed page, it […]

Aphorism 21

Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose that our views of science are ultimate; that there are no mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are complete, and that there are no new worlds to conquer. Humphry Davy, quoted by Brian Cox, the Voltaire Lecture, 6 April 2010