Category: Commissions
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Joi Ito’s Vanity Photo Album: Eicher
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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 book will actually exceed the number of people who appear in the book.” His concern is justified, the book’s content is freely downloadable … Read More
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Profiting from climate change: Ben Pile
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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 will directly benefit.
It couldn’t happen here, you may think. Scandal and resignations would surely follow. Who could possibly allow vested interests to profit from … Read More
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The New Green Aristocracy: Ben Pile
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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 be made democratically – the idea being that we can judge for ourselves which ideas serve our interests, thank you very much, ma’am.
But in … Read More
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The Large Hadron Collider: Anton Wylie
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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 entities systematically, and as an impetus to fill in the holes in our knowledge. The Standard Model can claim to have predicted the existence of … Read More
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Bringing it all back Hume: Anton Wylie
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A philosophy of science that may be the best thing we’ve ever runWiReD 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.… Read MoreIn psychology, Behaviourism was one favoured development. Its ontology does not include people with minds, only biological entities with patterns of behaviour. The rise and rise of neuro-science is correlated
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Climate Models vs. Reality: Anton Wylie
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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 not entitled to the prefix Professor.
Their topic is the discrepancy between troposphere observations from 1979 and 2004, and what computer models have to say … Read More