IDEAS FROM POP CULTURE TO POLITICS, TECHNOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, BUSINESS, MEDIA, SPORT, AND LIFE
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Blogger Beta is a minor upgrade for Blogger users who have their own domain and do not use the hosted option. But thankfully the software has been around long enough now that hacks have been created for virtually any missing functionality. The following is a round-up of the ones that are used on this site. All are free and most can be easily modified.
- In order to get Labels to appear on the right navigation column I followed the steps documented in the Blogger Guide to FTP Labels
- Comment functionality in Blogger is a bit clunky. Follow this guide to integrating comments using Blogkomm. This is one of the most challenging hacks to implement but worth it if you make the effort.
- For search engine optimisation I reversed the order of the page titles on permalink pages using this hack from Freshblog. So instead of all my page titles leading with the blog name, the search engine friendly titles start with the title of the story.
- Post titles are clickable on the home page of the blog thanks to another Freshblog beauty.
- My list of archive months was getting a bit lengthy and taking up unecessary space in the right navigation so it was useful to implement this drop-down-menu solution
- Thanks to 3spots and Freshblog for the very cool Popmarks button you see on the bottom of each post that allows users to bookmark or subsribe easily to RSS without all the clutter of buttons for the various services. It took a bit to customise it to my needs but it is easy to customise what services are available through it so I think it will really come in handy in the future.
Labels: blog, internet
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Surreal is a beautiful word that has been hijacked by continuous flagrant misuse so that little apparently remains of the original meaning. In the
Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930)
Andre Breton states that the surrealists strive to attain a "mental vantage-point (point de l'esprit) from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, communicable and incommunicable, high and low, will no longer be perceived as contradictions."
It was my misfortune to be woken today by a BBC radio broadcast where no less than two segments in a row featured interviews with people whose experience, attending a large rock concert and gaining celebrity at breakneck speed, were "so surreal". Basically it is serving as a somewhat upmarket replacement for "unreal" when it is so much more.
Surrealism is based on stressing the subconscious or non-rational significance of imagery arrived at automatically. It challenges through startling juxtapositions and exists at the nexus of reconciliation between representation and perception . Something is surreal when it reveals something that is disturbingly true but defies our habitual thinking and logic. This is generally something that we seek in our lives as we look to expand our ideas and perspectives in interesting ways. Poor surreal - caged like a wild tiger. Let's hope we can free it before it gets bored in the zoo. Some are already getting started.
"When it comes to art and literature, surreal more accurately means "super real". We'll examine how the wildly original Surrealist movement was -- and, for some, still is -- more than a school of art and literature. It's a way of living a life that embraces childishness, the importance of dreams, and the idea that everything happens for a reason."Labels: culture
Friday, January 26, 2007
Tensions in academia between science and social theory are largely the result on an over-inflated sense of righteousness and self-importance from both sides towards the other. Sometimes they have far more in common than they are willing to admit.
For example here at Goldsmiths computing research is developing an
algorithm for beauty, assuming that by analysing beautiful things it will be possible to create beauty through rules-based models. The assumption that beauty can be contained in variables and fixed definitions is almost laughable to social theorists considering the subjective experience and context. And the technology, as almost always, seems grossly optimistic. After all image recognition software can
barely decipher (
looking for a job?) what objects are in a photograph let alone identify the social and cultural representations that go into ephemeral beauty.
But the real issue is not if it is currently possible to do such a thing but whether it is possible at all. To that question the scientific community would advice constant testing and advancement, moving forward all the time, largely discarding the notion that not all variables in beauty can be eventually counted. When unaccountability is apparent science devises names for things that can be inferred like Dark Matter. Basically we don't know what it is (or its partner in darkness Dark Energy) but we know it is Dark Matter. After all in all the known universe only about 4% of total energy density can be seen directly, about 22% is inferred as dark matter and the remaining 74% inferred as dark energy. It sounds a bit like how sociologists view society with about 4% of what is going on obvious and directly observable, the rest inferred. Journalists love the idea by describing anything that is not observable as "the dark matter of ...".
That's what makes the as yet untested theoretical physics concept of a "Theory of Everything" so engaging as a scientific topic. Personally I would not be happy with any theory of everything that doesn't definitively explain why all belly button fluff is blue or why bullets fired into the sky never seem to hit anything on the way down. And from what I have read this one doesn't seem to be able to do that. Instead it is a hypothetical theory that would make any postmodern proud. The idea is that everything around you is made up of tiny strands of energy that vibrate at different frequencies. Kind of like all the people on earth vibrating in their own frequency to make up the complexities of social life. It grafts together quantum mechanics with relativity in an attempt to explain the fundamental interactions of nature. It brings a new meaning to being strung out if we consider that if the universe collapses on itself after expansion (a Big Crunch) superstring theory suggests that the universe can never be smaller than the size of a string before expanding again. If you are imaginative you can imagine us all just hanging out on that string, chilling and waiting for the universe to get a bit bigger so we can fit a few couches in.
To date superstring theory has launched a number of best-selling scientific texts and television programs, most notably The Elegant Universe, while continuing to struggle with the fact that it makes prediction that cannot be tested. But in an academic paper appearing in the January 26 edition of Physical Review Letters a test has been proposed. It involves use of the incredible Large Hadron Collider, a subatomic particle collider scheduled to be fully operational in early 2008. Weaving under the borderlands of France and Switzerland, the CERN based 27-kilometer tunnel will collide bunches of protons and observe the results. It takes a proton around 90 microseconds (one millionth of a second) to travel around one uber half-marathon lap of the circuit. In tests of the Theory of Everything observations will input to substantiating the canonical forms of string theory.
“Our work shows that, in principle, string theory can be tested in a non-trivial way,” said Ira Rothstein, co-author of the paper and professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon. Now that's some postmodern dark matter.Labels: academia, science, sociology
Photo by Paul HallidayVisual sociology is a still emerging but exciting form of social practice as researchers seek to harness the powers of multimedia to contribute to understanding social life.
At Goldsmiths College, University of London my colleague Paul Halliday recently completed a 20-year photographic project of London faces and public places first inspired by a series of walks around Greenwich with his late father that opened up a new way of thinking about history, place and memory. As a module leader in Live Sociology Paul inspired my own first attempt in Deptford at exploring visual practices as an input to sociological methods.
Paul leads the MA in Photography and Urban Cultures at Goldsmiths and outlines his approach to his London photographs on the project website:
"The work is a kind of auto-ethnography of my day-to-day life harnessing the power of photography to speak a language that resonates with a part of my on-going experience of being a Londoner - in a city that fascinates, infuriates, perplexes and at times leaves me utterly lost for words. A city that I have a deep sense of shared belonging with, that continues to intoxicate me, and that I am happy to call my home."
Labels: academia, culture, london, photography, sociology
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
As a teenager in the process of establishing social and political consciousness I was swept away by John Stuart Mill's
On Liberty and questions of "the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual".
Witnessing the erosion of civil liberties first hand in London over the past 10 years is only slightly less startling than the appetite for public acceptance that accompanies it.
In June, 2006 Steven Jago was
arrested for carrying a placard without permission bearing the George Orwell quote: "In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act". Police seized Jago's photocopies of Henry Porter's expose in pop culture magazine Vanity Fair on the erosion of civil liberties in Britain and termed it "politically motivated material".
Porter's story is a fascinating piece of journalism featuring thunderous email exchanges with Tony Blair on questions of liberty. In this contradictory land of the Magna Carta and Superman CCTV Porter's quote from Labour peer Baroness Kennedy resonates: "What we seem to have forgotten is that the state is there courtesy of us and we are not here courtesy the state".
In a continuing political spin culture of "war on terror" respect for civil liberties has taken a battering. In a 2007 survey of British Social Attitudes by the National Centre for Social Research, 80% of citizens support detention without charge for more than a week, 25% back police holding suspects for up to a week without letting them see a lawyer, and seven in 10 support compulsory identity cards for adults. In December, 2005 a peace campaigner was arrested for reading out names of soldiers killed in Iraq within half a mile of Westminster.
In the storm and rush to contain through legislation and law, liberty has found an unlikely ally in the form of UK director of public prosecutions Sir Ken Macdonald : "It is critical that we understand that this new form of terrorism carries another more subtle, perhaps equally pernicious, risk. Because it might encourage a fear-driven and inappropriate response. By that I mean it can tempt us to abandon our values. I think it important to understand that this is one of its primary purposes."
London is a city and scene of contrast, on one hand priding itself on a steely business-as-usual response to the transport bombings and on the other accepting glaring changes in the relationship of society and the individual without compliant. Macdonald reflects: "London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, 'soldiers'. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a 'war on terror', just as there can be no such thing as a 'war on drugs'."Labels: culture, liberty, london, sociology
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
One of the most annoying things about living in a capitalist
culture of consumption is the way third rate shysters can follow a successful and legal path to material success. Of course everyone loves a
good spammer, filling his pockets and your inbox with trash that earns on 5 in a million. That's a sweet five for his flourishing trade. The larger question is why this spamming is a successful social and economic act. But this is not strictly an internet issue.
Television viewers almost have to shield your eyes to watch the new "quiz shows"
dominating the late night UK digital airwaves. These guys take it to a whole new level by asking questions like: "Name 13 items commonly found in women's handbags". Viewers respond in mass at 79p per minute on shows like The Mint and Quizmania but
miss obvious answers like
balaclava and
raw/Rawlplugs (trade name for plugs that allow screws to be fitted into masonry walls) . But of course only a portion of viewers can get through the jammed phone lines and most of the money is made from
those who don't even get a chance to compete.
Labels: culture, economics, internet, media
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
It is odd what gets you inspired to blog again ... and again ... and again. Everyone knows that the trick to succesful blogging is to write quality posts frequently. But sometimes it is just not interesting enough to participate regularly and the Blogger revamp addresses a key issue in opening up the imagination of 21st century bloggers.
Tags have long been an innovative form of taxonomy. Let the users define the terms is a sharp turn from the controlled thesaurus prevalant in so much corporate software. But the successes of Wikipedia and Technorati amoung others has opened up a new set of terms for meta (information about information) tags and descriptors.
In Blogger what is really cool about the idea is that authors can add tags to content and have these "Labels" (categories or tags in disguise depending on your perspective) appear on the site, providing visitors with a crucial piece of access and navigation. Users of tools like Movable Type will be familiar with the ability to create categories for posts but allowing for unlimited terms to describe content extends this concept further.
The following is a guide for how to insert a list of Blogger Labels on every web page of your FTP hosted Blogger blog (like on the right side of this blog under the heading 'Labels'). This interests those who use their own domain names as opposed to the blogspot.... urls of hosted Blogger. The new GUI for Blogger is largely only available to clients with the hosting solution but workarounds are very easy to create for those with domain names.
If you want to add Labels to your externally hosted Blogger blog follow these steps:
- Add a few Labels to blog posts. Just do a couple as these will be test labels. You can add labels at the bottom of each post. Seperate labels with commas, don't use spaces between words (underscores instead) but try and limit yourself to one word labels.
- Background Research. There are a couple of key blog posts on the Web for this idea at this time of writing. The first comes from David Nicholson (Where Magic Lives) in the form of a guide on how to include a "Label Cloud" of Labels where most frequently applied terms appear biggest and least referred smallest. The code for this example comes from a customized install of an exchange between David and a user in the comments at the bottom of the post. Meanwhile Andrew Huey was working on his own solution to getting labels on a left or right navigation as a PHP include. Another Good Source is Freshblog that lists some of the latest hacks available to hosted and unhosted alike.
- It is important to note if your blog posts use an .html extension (or other) or a .php extension. If you use a .html extension you must add the following code to your .htaccess file (ask your host if you don't know where this file is).
AddType application/x-httpd-php .html
If you are using a .php extnsion you don't need to add this info to the .htaccess file.
- Open up Notepad or another text editor. Copy and Paste the following code into Notepad and read step 3.
<ul class="labels">
<?php
define('PREFIX', 'url prefix');
define('SEARCH_DIR',
'absolute path to Labels folder');
define('THIS_FILE', 'cloud.php');
if(file_exists(SEARCH_DIR.'_cloud_include_cache.html') &&
filemtime(SEARCH_DIR.'_cloud_include_cache.html')>(time()-(60*60)))
echo file_get_contents(SEARCH_DIR.'_cloud_include_cache.html');
else
{
$output = '';
$files = array();
$dir = opendir(SEARCH_DIR);
while($file = readdir($dir))
if($file != '.' && $file != '..' && $file != THIS_FILE &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;& $file != CACHE_FILE)
{
$files[] = $file;
}
closedir($dir);
asort($files);
foreach($files as $name)
$output .= "<li><span style='color:#990000'>----{-</span><span class='flower'></span> <a href='".PREFIX.
htmlentities($name)."'>".
htmlentities(str_replace('.php','',$name))."</a></li> ";
echo $output;
$fp = fopen(SEARCH_DIR.'_cloud_include_cache.html','w');
fwrite($fp, $output);
fclose($fp);
}
?>
</ul>
- You must customize this code for your Blogger FTP weblog. Customize the text url prefix with your own web page prefix for where the labels folder is on your server (eg. www.yourdomain.com/blog/labels would equal 'blog/labels'). Next put the absolute web path to your labels folder where the text in place of absolute path to Labels folder(eg' /www/www/...'). If you use a .html (or other extension) replace the .php code with your extension (eg '.html'). Consult your ISP or support documentation if you don't know this path. Optional is also to replace the color or style options on the appearance of the Labels list in your left or right column.
- Save the file as labels.php and FTP into a root blog directory on your server.
- Customize Template. Less effort here. Insert the following code in the right or left column of your blogger template as desired and read step 6.
<h2 class="sidebar-title">Labels</h2>
<p><?php include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."location of .php file"); ?></p>
- Customize the formatting in the h2 class as required. You need to leave the second and third line but replace location of .php file with your location (eg. blog/labels.php).
- Test the output by publishing. You should see a list of Labels in Blogger. Other things to keep in mind are that you can delete the file (_cloud_include_cache.html) that will appear in your label directory if you want to see changes on your blog Labels list. This file is automatically created to make it so users will not reload the list everytime they visit the web page. The script is very easy on your server and only checks for changes every 60 minutes unless you delete the cache file.
For other interesting Blogger functionality Check out the Beautiful Beat guide to getting recent post functionality on Blogger FTP blogs and the Blogger comments guide (Blogkomm) on this site. Phydeaux3 (followed up by WebWeaver's World) offers an elegant Label Cloud for any Layouts Compatible Templates (blogspot. ... domains).
Labels: blog, internet
Monday, January 08, 2007
When considering life living in London I am equal parts Samuel Johnson ("bored of London, bored of life") and the Guardian's Lucy Magnan ("sit in a bathful of your own sweat and burn twenties"). But there is a quiet sensitivity to the city that is often underplayed. As life moves in a buzz, most of what you find comes later, like after the shutter clicks. London demands reflection.
Labels: culture, london, photography
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Back in 1999 I took a trip to within 100km of the North Pole to experience a slice of real Canadiana outdoor spirit. Coming back for Christmas from my Phd studies in London this year made me realize that this spirit lives in every outdoor ice rink, ski trail and breath of cool fragrant oxygen. It's a case for the senses really. Pine needles on the snow, looking at the stars once again but only seeing them for the first time and community, a forgotten word save the politicians. Make no mistake the reality of a Canadian Christmas at the lake is people popping by for a skate or a hot chocolate, children dancing in snow forts above their ears and friends shoveling the walk for friends. It really is like that.
Labels: canada, culture