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A few days ago I mentioned a slightly obscure bit of information I had remembered about the Japanese launching balloons carrying firebombs at the end of the Second World War. Imagine my surprise to find an article in Slate three days later about this very subject. As I have said before, it is amazing how things cluster.

In the first piece of writing I ever published on the web, “As We Might Learn: Vannevar Bush where are you now??, I began by saying:
“I’d like to begin with a mystery. Something that has been puzzling me for a couple of years. Why is Vannevar Bush not celebrated as a great American hero?”

Continue reading Celebrating Vannevar Bush

I was following a quite different trail in pursuit of Vannevar Bush, when I stumbled across this article by Jef Raskin. Written six years ago it describes the record-breaking flight of the “Laima”. The first un-manned flight across the Atlantic. As Raskin perceptively points out:
“The men who had built the craft were interested in meteorological research, but if they succeeded, they would also unwittingly show that Reagan?s Star Wars (now updated as the Clinton/Bush anti-missile defense against “rogue” nations) was useless. Just as the Germans easily found a way around what the French thought was an impenetrable thicket of defensive bunkers on the ground prior to World War II, the Maginot line, this small plane would barely be noticed, much less brought down, by anything the defense department has in its armamentarium.”
And to show you how I got here, he ends:
” Years ago, the far-seeing Vannevar Bush had pointed out that our seaports were vulnerable to a sneak attack by means of small boats, indistinguishable from pleasure craft, carrying atomic weapons. Now, every point in the world is vulnerable. Laima has demonstrated the foolishness of trying build a Maginot line in the sky.”
As I read Raskin’s piece I was reminded of a curiosity I found some time ago about how at the end of the Second World War the Japanese launched a series of balloons carrying firebombs. These were carried by the slipstream across the Pacific to land on the West Coast of the USA and Canada. Like “Laima” these balloons would pass undetected by radar.
Now as I have argued before, the threats posed by terrorism, may well be overstated and a distraction from some of the more pressing problems we face – like for example my last posting on short-termism and energy illiteracy. But, what is also clear is that if we are to deal with threats from terrorism and “rogue states” we should be avoiding hi-tech distractions like the National Missile Defence programme (more popularly known as Star Wars), which look likely to go ahead whoever wins the US Presidential elections, and focus more on dealing intelligently with the creative low-tech threats, which may pose the real problem.

It’s curious how things seem to cluster together. I found a good essay by Brian Eno in the Long Foundation‘s library talking about the way we seem to have become increaingly short-term in our thinking. Then shortly afterwards I found an interview with Paul Roberts in Mother Jones where he talks about energy illiteracy. These two extracts, the first from Brian Eno, the second from Paul Roberts, would seem to make the point.
“Now is never just a moment. The Long Now is the recognition that the precise moment you’re in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes. It’s ironic that, at a time when humankind is at a peak of its technical powers, able to create huge global changes that will echo down the centuries, most of our social systems seem geared to increasingly short nows. Huge industries feel pressure to plan for the bottom line and the next shareholders’ meeting. Politicians feel forced to perform for the next election or opinion poll. The media attract bigger audiences by spurring instant and heated reactions to human interest stories while overlooking longer-term issues the real human interest.”
“We won’t really run out of oil, because before oil runs out, it will become too expensive to use. Another way to ask that is: When will we hit peak production? The estimates range anywhere from 30 years, to 35 years, to it’s already happened. I think that we’re going to hit peak production in probably about 25 years. But that’s worldwide, and really the one you want to think about is when do we hit production peak outside of OPEC? Because when that happens — when we can’t get any more oil out of the ground outside of OPEC — then we have to turn to OPEC. And that’s a tough thing for America and other countries to have to do, because they don’t trust OPEC. The non-OPEC peak will be in about 10 years. Although OPEC countries will still have a lot of oil, they may still be as unsympathetic and as an unfriendly to Western countries as they are today.”

Some years ago when the Web was still young, I came across the writing of the Canadian theologian David Lochhead. While I am not a religious man – in fact I tend to fall into the anti camp – Lochhead’s writing impressed me with its humanity and insights into computer technology.
The other night after shouting at Microsoft’s Word for insisting on inserting a huge space – nearly half a page – between two sections of text and to continuing doing so despite all my best efforts to over-ride it, I began to reflect about what I liked about digital technology and what I hated.
This reminded me of a piece Lochhead wrote in 1988, three years before the Web was born, which I must have first read in about 1995. In “The Magical Computer” Lochhead talks about the relationship of computers to power and of power to magic. If like me you are not a Christian, you may have to strip out some of the overtly Biblical language to get the message. But if you do you may find it reads more powerfully today than it did when I read it nine years ago.
Here’s some of what he had to say:

Continue reading The Possibility Machine

George Nelson wrote beautifully on architecture, design and creativity. Sadly, his books are now out of print. But you can get a flavour of his writing from Stanley Abercrombie’s excellent biography. Looking at it yesterday I found a quote I seemed to have missed before:
“What the creative act really means is the unfolding of the human psyche in the sudden realization that one has taken a lot of disconnected pieces and found, not done, a way of putting them together.”

I have recently been working with a bunch of students helping them with their dissertation work. They are a very bright, lively, creative group who have done some very interesting stuff. But working with them reminded me of something that has puzzled me for years. They didn’t seem to know how to ask powerful questions. They asked plenty of questions about the task they had been given, including the potentially powerful question of why they had to do a dissertation at all. But the idea that questions were a way of exploring the world and opening new possibilities was something they hadn’t come across in their previous education. Questioning seemed to be confined to confirming the world.
My question is how can this be?

Continue reading The Art of Asking Questions

I’ve just been reading a lecture by Philip Pullman. If you care about the education of our children I suggest you read it. It is filled with much I agree with in his critique of current practice. There is a particularly good description of what it feels like to write creatively and the difference from what children are being now asked to do:
“Writing a story feels to me like fishing in a boat at night. The sea is much bigger than you are, and the light of your little lamp doesn’t show you very much of it. You hope it’ll attract some curious fish, but perhaps you’ll sit here all night long and not get a bite.”
And he goes on to elaborate the metaphor, describing some of the perils and rewards of creative work. All this in contrast to what children are now being asked to do by the people who devised the system, which, as he says, misses the point:
“They miss it because they don’t know how anyone writes a story. They think that the way to write a story is to spend fifteen minutes planning, and, by the way, fill in the planning format to show that you’ve planned it properly; and then spend forty-five minutes writing the story according to your plan; and then you’ve done it.”
But despite the fact that much of what he had to say resonated with me very strongly, after my first reading I felt a sense of unease. On my second reading that unease hardened. The problem is that I think he is missing the point.

Continue reading Fishing at night

Feeling the need for a little moral sustenance, I went on a trawl for Zygmunt Bauman. In a short essay of his “Does Reading Have a Future?” I found this lovely quote from Milan Kundera:
“The art inspired by God’s laughter does not by nature serve ideological certitudes, it contradicts them,” Kundera notes in The Art of the Novel. “Like Penelope, it undoes each night the tapestry that the theologians, philosophers, and learned men have woven the day before.”
Bauman continues:
“Artistic fiction defends hard-won human freedom and redeems human imagination and daring; in a world waging a war of attrition against contingency, ambivalence and mystery, the novel is a perpetual training in the difficult but badly needed art of living under conditions of uncertainty, in the company of polyvalence and among a variety of life forms.”
And concludes his essay with the sombre warning:
“When we worry about the future of books and book readership, let us take a closer look at society and its trends. To make books fit for the society we inhabit, let us try to prevent it from becoming unfit for books.”

A few days ago, I posted a short piece on the attention economy. In a sense it was a bit of a cheat. What I had actually written was much, much longer. I cut it short because the trains of thought it prompted created a whole set of new starting points, but didn’t make for a very coherent piece. When I then collided with the concept of Low Latent Inhibition the thought processes exploded.
One of the places this took me to was back to the idea of Purposive Drift and how what I seem to be saying there could be reduced to two grammatically inelegant aphorisms that seem to apply as much to organisations as they do to individuals like you and me:
“You are what you pay attention to”
“If you want to change who you are; change what you pay attention to”