Powerful aristocrats throughout history have commissioned portraits by master artists to immortalize their achievements. Now amateur photographer and Creative Commons advocate Joi Ito is offering that immortality to bloggers, bureaucrats, coders, CEOs, and other obscure Free Software functionaries, in an expensive limited-edition “blook,” Freesouls. Ito muses, “Now the question is whether the demand for this … Read more
Imagine an unpopular, impotent, and fragile UK Government, trying to make political capital out of a looming crisis. To avoid being embarrassed by criticism of its shallow policies, it appoints an independent panel of experts, to which it defers controversial decisions. Now imagine that the panel proposes measures from which its members and their associates … Read more
Brilliant analysis on environmentalism and the legitimacy – Andrew. An aristocracy is a form of government by an elite that considers itself to possess greater virtues than the hoi polloi, giving it the right to rule in its own interests. Aristocrats were referred to as ‘the nobility’, or ‘nobs’. These days we prefer decisions to … Read more
The LHC comes at a crucial time for particle or quantum physics. In particular, it comes at a crucial time for the dominant theory, known as the Standard Model. The Standard Model has been to modern particle physics rather what the periodic table was to 19th century chemistry. It served both to organise the known … Read more
A philosophy of science that may be the best thing we’ve ever run WiReD magazine’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson has just seen the end for scientific theories. And it is called Google. The concept of the mind, and by extension that of a person, was also affected, with far reaching implications. In psychology, Behaviourism was one … Read more
Climate models appear to be missing an atmospheric ingredient, a new study suggests. December’s issue of the International Journal of Climatology from the Royal Meteorlogical Society contains a study of computer models used in climate forecasting. The study is by joint authors Douglass, Christy, Pearson, and Singer – of whom only the third mentioned is … Read more
Commissioned as a Christmas special for 2007, this was a couple of years in the making. Some of the world’s greatest artworks are turning into copyrighted properties. Five hundred years ago, Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Today, those images are copyrighted. How can ancient cultural icons become commercial properties, centuries after they fall into … Read more
>> Brendon McLean wrote to me with such a succinct summary of mobile phone angst, I invited him to elaborate. Read the result, How the mobile phone biz lost the plot, here.
Tom Melly, on the Wikification of the obituaries of his father, George Melly Wikipedia comes in for a fair amount of criticism these days from El Reg and other publications, but I can’t help wondering if we’re missing the real point regarding its status as an encyclopedia. Most of the arguments hinge on its accuracy, … Read more