2004-02-11 Notes I took yesterday from conversations: On ambient devices that had look-closer and other stuff, to check out CWI2000 Panel on products and elderly Good song Midnight in a Perfect World, DJ Shadow There is life in clouds. Literally, bacteria. But life is a spectrum of self-organising complexity: there is also life in the structure of clouds. We smell our social networks, we're embedded in them. You can't objectify the network and process it using IO (object/method), it doesn't work. Social networks don't exist as sight objects. Birds have an enlarged hyperstriatum (says Miko) - patterns, music. Dolphins have more social computing brain/nuanced feelings. # With Chris: mw: so why don't we have underwater cities yet? ch: because mobile phones don't work down there. mw. that's it. # ben: just-in-time philosophy (I wrote my talk; my credibility took a hit.) there was also this phrase 'social lensing' that I'm trying to pin down. Like the social baleen, but with a triangulation metaphor instead? # soon i'll start asking RL questions in google query language: "ibook powerbook battery life comparison [inquisitive]" # cars here are fluid, intuitive. driving like spaceships. (docklands designed on CAD with a resolution of 30m.) sippey's comment about light switches and architecture is a great measure of fluidity. # met the guy routing rendezvous networks through buddylist: rendezvous through buddylist social space == physical space it works by running an aim proxy on the local machine: it's like a high pass filter. it sends messages along the same channel to all your buddies, but the proxy filters the ones it deals with out and processes them itself. that high pass filter is a really great concept, would be able to go far with that. (or maybe I mean low pass filter. This is what happens when I don't remember my fourier transforms properly.) # stuart had a really nice, recognisable story - red riding house - but all the words are replaced by words that kinda soundalike. very cool. # was talking to one of clay's students about some gorgeous software he's developing that has low-bandwidth edge detection video in IM to accompany the text conversation. it's wonderful expressive communication, and playful, and we had a great chat about the persistence of the group as an entity, and all about social distance and what separates people or brings them together.