Douglas Adams in Hitchhikers's Guide to the Galaxy

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.

300

This is a film about creating a myth about the myth about the Spartans. They were a pretty tough bunch of warrior men who could the knock the arses of those namby pamby slightly camp Persians (see Xerxes left!) In battle they could see off armies, elephants, and strange hunchback giants with their swords, shields and big shiny teeth.

This is a film of comic book genre, think Sin City stroked with a smattering of Apocalypto. Its for teenage boy who likes video games and to feel harder than he really is. I loved it! I did flinch a bit at the Neo-Conservative mindset on parade and my paranoid mind wondered if the republican party or the US army might have funded its production.

I think there was a little bit of history in there with the Spartans holding off the Persians until the other Greek city-states joined forces to open the can of whip-ass (again, George Bush?) those marauders from the East deserve.

Uninspired

Almost empty blog.

Kangaku

Probably the best part of my intellectual life in Oxford are my kangaku lunches with three others who love thinking about the future of education. Okay we have a strong bias towards the application of technology but its all sincere and based on our love of learning. Of late its been about so-called MMOs or software that promotes mass participation e.g. Flickr, World of Warcraft and Second Life.

We are four in Kangaku and we are equally divided between two positions (probably based on our backgrounds: hard and soft sciences). When we look at technology we can focus on (a) its effects on society (b) the quality it gives to our ability to represent or explain. I am in the latter, I tend to tune out when we hypothesize about how a blog entry gets into a national newspaper; wow I think, so what. So knowledge is moving with new dynamics, maybe faster, maybe through new social networks. There is no paradigm shift, just more of the similar.

For me its about re-representation as they taught me at Sussex, and specifically it is our ability to explain with more than natural language. What I dream of is a language of graphical simulation, a language that is easy to learn and tuned for the understanding of complex systems. In fact I will be bolder, it is a language that moves the zeitgeist towards a 'common sense' that understands everything is a complex system - there are no simple solutions, no black and white heuristics just a world that we can only strive to understand and represent but will of course never get there.

The more we learn the less we know we understand. The rate limiting step in our education system is our ability to represent and so explain. Society is dying to tear itself away from the paper and pen, we are at a juncture, a time when we will enter the simulation and begin the complete representation of knowledge, the rationalisation of words into properties, algorithms and graphics. After a librarian stage we'll then pass through into a period of great experimentation as a feeling meaningless consumes us - once we've re-represented everything we'll have a game that won't take very long to play. This is the time when we'll re-surface from the halting machine and open our eyes again to take a large new batch of empirical information.

Into Great Silence

A Christian monastery is the home of a great many love affairs with god. A couple of extremely funny scenes punctuate the solemnity of the strange habits that dress the inner walls. Its a little clearer why people do this religion thing - they are in love with the god sensation. If I think with tradition in mind then the concept scares me, with wanting to hide from the world then its a little more like disgust, if I think these people are getting out there too and spreading a little more humanity and reminding us all about heart...then I am okay with it. I don't understand how cutting yourself off and worshipping an old text can ever help do this.

I see the point of silence though. We live in an ever-more distracting world, messages everywhere.

Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring Again

This is a gentle film about a boy growing up with a Buddhist Monk. They live on a floating island in a tranquil lake. It is a meditation on cruelty, lust, revenge, repentance and then much more aside. Snakes, fish, a frog, a cat, and a statue of Buddha all intermingle with calligraphy and mantras. A veritable soup of spiritual charm.