Archive for July 2012
I tweeted this last week, but I should note it here:
Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and Google are Search Engines.
Wikipeadia is a Find Engine
I wrote something on Posterity Engines.
Today, all the talk is about “Search” and databases are being built up on ‘search behavior’. Google has a zeitgeist listing that tells us what people have been lookig for, and one result of this database is its prediction algorithm, which guesses what you might be searching for, or tells you what other keywords match a search phrase.
If the conversation shifted to ‘finding’, what then? We have Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia, and all the other websites in the world. Google’s dominance began with the quality of their ‘finds’ – the websites they suggested best matched your search.
If we shifted to analyzing ‘find behavior’, we would begin to build up a database of what sites we’re being accessed most often … and yes, this is already happening, and essentially drives Google’s algorithms. The site at the top is most likely to be the one you’ll want because others have chosen it as well.
Essentially, I find the use of the word ‘engine’ to name these processes of indexing databases curious, and found it especially interesting when coupled with the word ‘posterity’. It began to make me think about the data we are creating, and how it might be archived, accessed, and named. We are currently living under a ‘search’ paradigm but the future will inevitably complicate this, until ‘search’ will no longer be an adequate word.
Sight from Sight Systems on Vimeo.
One of the more interesting reconceptualizations I’ve come across lately is that of a “posterity engine” which is in Alastair Reynolds’ latest novel, Blue Remembered Earth. I have the Kindle edition which allows me some quick and easy textual analysis; the term appears four times thus:
1. “Across a life’s worth of captured responses, data gathered by posterity engines, there would be ample instances of conversational situations similar to this one…”
2. “…[it was out there somewhere in her] documented life – either in the public record or captured in some private recording snared by the family’s posterity engines.”
3.”It doesn’t know anything that isn’t in our archives, anything that wasn’t caught by the posterity engines…”
4. “He was old enough not to have a past fixed in place by the Mech, or posterity engines…”
The context of these sentences imply something not much more complicated than a contemporary search engine. The novel is set in 2162, that is 150 years from the present & publication date (2012).
The phrasing, “captured”, “snared”, “caught” speaks of today’s search engine crawl – crawling across a site, building up a database of links, content and keywords. At some point in our future, our terrabytes will be warehoused and crawled by personal search engines that will be indexed for our future uses – that is for posterity.
This is already happening. We just don’t label these processes with ‘posterity’. Our Apple computers are already running Spotlight crawls that index our local storage, and Time Machine is snapshotting our hardrives. Windows has an equivalent Start Menu search bar.
Imagine than the contemporary as laughably quaint, and imagine five future generations worth of personal petabytes stored somewhere (a central core server per home?) that requires contemporary Google-grade search to make useful.
I’m reminded of the fact that when Google began in 1998, its storage capacity was 350 GB. An off-the shelf MacBook Pro could have run Google in the late 1990s.
I saw the The Dark Knight as a Monday matinee during our August long weekend in 2008. By that time, it had been out for two weeks and had already generated a lot of buzz. It seemed everyone was talking about and praising its greatness. I did not go as a fanboy of Christopher Nolan nor of Batman, but to merely catch up, and see the sequel to Batman Begins, which I learned about late during its 2005 theatrical run and almost missed.
I liked Nolan’s Inception, and seeing that movie cemented into my mind the idea that I like his films – tone, atmosphere, cinematography. However, was that atmosphere in The Dark Knight Rises? I know in the future I’ll have this film on my system and I’ll put it on as working wallpaper … or will I? Did it have that slow-burn quality against a rich backdrop and wonderful Hans Zimmer soundtrack? Yes, the Zimmer soundtrack delivered, and yes Bane was menacing, but I feel (at this point) that the only part of the film that lived up the hype was the prologue, which had been shown in December, and which made my jaw drop the first time I saw it as a blurry pirated internet clip.
Even though a lot was familar from the trailers etc, I went in with questions about the uprising, which were straightforward: a gang of thugs, the release of prisoners, the cops held hostage.
The whole “city under seige for five months” plot at the end didn’t work, as it was unbeliveable. I think in post-9/11 it would have been a lot more panicked, and the coercion of getting the military to guard the one bridge off the island would never have worked.
I did find Catwoman’s motivations interesting: she wants software that can erase her from all the world’s databases. “Collated, analysed, what we do sticks”. This concern of her seems slightly ahead of the time but only by a week or two. That’s a plot line that will make more sense as time goes on when this movie is just another file in a database we can download with our cloud accounts.
All & all, it seems too soon to judge TDKR. As a stand-alone, it’s weak. However, in the future when we can play the series back-to-back on our own time, when a teenager can spend three nights watching the movies on their tablet before bed, then its failings and successes will be clarified. Perhaps its tone has nuances that we can’t pick up yet, but that will become obvious later.
Beginning in November of last year (2011) I began to experiment with responsive design on a new blog site – the ultimate goal of which was to move my blog from timothycomeau.com/blog (where it had been for years) to it’s own dedicated url: timothycomeau.info.
Over the course of the winter (and while I was studying Web Design at Sheridan) I hacked away at it using it as a playground to try new ideas and further my understanding of WordPress, and especially Responsive Design.
Unfortunately, by the time I came to graduate, I was caught with a mangled site which was only half-developed for what I’d then intended: not only have it as a blog, but also an archive of my previous web content. The archive part wasn’t done, and unresolved.
At about the same time, I began to look into the sites on Themeforest.net, and in order to learn more about how they were built and functioned, bought one, which I put on the site in May. I was asking myself questions: how does this theme work and, does my content stand up to its design?
However, I soon grew frustrated with the implementation. That theme was designed for portfolios mostly, and I wanted the site to function as a blog primarily. It was evident that it should be scrapped.
About a month ago, I hacked together a very simple theme for my localhost WordPress Journal. As a Journal, the end that needed to be served was reading and so design wise it needed to emphasize and encourage that.
Essentially, I ported that design over into this one. I wanted something as simple & clean as words on a page. With the basic structure in place, I think I’ve reached a final version.
Any Human Heart: the story of a 20th century man, published in 2002, written in the late 1990s, and with the fictional lifespan of 1906-1991.
A Human Heart: the story of a 21st Century man, published in 2102, written in the late 2090s, and with a fictional lifespan of 2006-2091. What story then awaits today’s 6 year old?