At least once a year I refer someone I meet to Danny’s superb piece on Wired UK.

I wanted to write about this now, partly because I’m embarking on a new venture, partly because there is a another bubble emerging, but mostly because I’m reminded of the “global coincidence of desires” that Danny spotted in 1994.

An amazing part of what Danny captured was what it felt like at that time: the genuine, emotive belief by an army of people that they could change the world (and many did), and how at a time when the nature of a website was something we were all trying to work out - that individual decisions fundamentally affected the architecture and building blocks that shape what we do now. Aside from the gold-rush, the underlying story of world-changing actions.

I was fortunate enough to work with Tony, Danny and Rik at Virgin Net.

I was in my mid-20s. I was an Astrophysicist and knew a bit about software. I had my own naive views of how the web might bring about the democratisation of information - both through bottom-up action and by redirecting mass-media - I had more than a little to learn.

I certainly wasn’t Wired. My move to London was enough of a culture shock - I remember my first meeting about “online community” - listening to Marketing define it as “everyone inside the M25″, me trying to describe the 800 person village on a small Scottish Island I grew up in, Tony describing Colours Magazine and Danny talking about the real things people were doing. I don’t think any of us actually understood each other.

I spent most of my 4 years at Virgin listening, watching, experimenting and learning how a coincidence of desires is impossible to execute - even within relatively small, exceptionally talented and committed team inside an international brand. Over the last 9 years I’ve learned a bit more about multi-dimensional communication; and the many impossible balances between corporate, social and personal objectives.

This global coincidence of desires is fueling collisions across all our spaces (”convergence” is never anything but a collision). The catalyst is our looming potential self-destruction - our “Resource Crisis” now encapsulates Climate Change and Peak Oil, Energy, Water and Landfill shortages, the depletion of raw materials, globalisation, the list goes on…

Each year I re-read Danny’s “What nearly happened” to remind myself how that time felt, and to re-contextualise one of the most important statements in it, a point that Tony made: “can’t everyone define the future?”.

Apart from great insights backed by luck, I’m not sure anyone understood how the web would really manifest itself today, and how long it would take. I spent at least 5 years attempting to get a YouTube-like idea off the ground, but the serendipity wasn’t fully aligned until 2 years after I stopped trying.

At ETech this year, Tom Loosemore summarised MySociety’s 5 step process for changing civil society, which includes “Leave for X years”.

Now we’re in a space where we are starting to seriously address the combination of cloud, grid and edge, open APIs, open data, openID and oAuth - watching the unfurling of everybody, unpacking system that “dump excess energy in the form of structure” [Burke] and scratching the surfaces of digital identity management.

All these are arriving, coincidentally, at exactly the time we need them - not just in a technological sense, but driven by a global consciousness that we all know: that, really, we need to do this to address sustainable living.

Friends who’ve been pushing the environmental agenda for decades have a tough time right now, having everyone else come in an “own” their parade, but mass-adoption rarely recognises the small army of dedicated individuals who created the movement. It’s a painful transition but we need them all to help us work out what’s next even if it is “move all the towns“.

The fascinating thing for me is watching the whole sustainability space not only collide with itself, but with a broader, globally connected consciousness, driven by a Resource Crisis that will affect every living thing.

The personal desire to catalyse change has been evident in every single person I’ve met over the last 3 years, from politicians to scientists, from bands to hedge funds, from engineers to activists: “everybody”.

Our challenge lies in creative execution: to create many granular, networked spaces that can flourish. How can we let these networks flourish and not only create value for them, but redefine what value means in the process? The words are coming: “Creative Capitalism“, “Philalthrocapitalism” but you have to assume that these are the sticking-plasters of change, similar to the early old-media references to the Net, rather than the radical re-engineering that’s needed. That re-engineering will, most likely, come from unexpected places.

Further to the outcry at the time, this weekend The Guardian reports;

“Channel 4 to be censured over controversial climate film”

“Channel 4 misrepresented some of the world’s leading climate scientists … Ofcom is expected to censure the network … but … it did not breach the regulator’s broadcasting code and did not materially mislead viewers.”

I’m certainly looking forward to reading how it’s possible to misrepresent the world’s leading climate scientists without misleading viewers.

The key quote seems to be “One source said both sides would be able to claim victory after a bitter dispute” which sounds like diplomacy has won over decisiveness and truth.

As if she needed to leave a greater legacy, a tape recovered from her attic 7 years ago after she passed away resets the “baseline” of what electronic music was in the 1960s.

Most unexpected of all, however, is a piece of music that sounds like a contemporary dance track which was recorded, it is believed, in the late sixties.

Paul Hartnoll, formerly of the dance group Orbital and a great admirer of Ms Derbyshire’s work, said the … “That could be coming out next week on [left-field dance label] Warp Records,”

“http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7512072.stm

That’s where studying in maths and music gets you…

At last, I think the nature of [AV] transmission is beginning to reveal itself.

Do we need a new term? Probably - many other terms (p2p, broadcast, webcast, bitcast, torrent, web2.0, hive, etc) all describe an evolutionary step, so it does make sense to have a phrase to describe this one (note that edgecasting has already been monopolised by the CDN community and doesn’t actually describe “edge” in the context we need it to).

Cloudcasting is a term to describe usage of cloud (or meta-cloud) infrastructure to super-distribute content to, and from, edge devices.

Design requirements

:: Addressability
Permanent, guessable, as per the Coatsian rules of linkage.

:: Viewer Identity Management
Viewer-controlled at the edge, as per the O’Brien rule of Digital Identity Management.

:: Distributed storage
Both at the edge and in the cloud, as per the Loosemore box of imposs and the O’Brien rule of infinite scaling.

:: Open, anonymous publishing
Via tor networks, embedded on every mobile, home router, myth … devices.

:: Access control and content-owner identity tracking
Enabling edge-to-edge rights-control and reporting for those who want/need it. Commercially-enabling is important.

A cloudcast needs to enable content owners to be identified so that they can be paid (via direct and/or syndication channels) but doesn’t need to explicitly identify users, only views, which can be managed via oauth-escrow.

A p2p+tor+S3+mythTV+hive+impossibox mash-up, but with good addressability…?

The Science and Technology Facilities Council in the UK has managed to create a terrible situation which could destroy fundamental research across the country. This would have a devastating impact on not just the lives of people who have dedicated themselves to their fields, and not just to the UK’s reputation, but would be a massive loss for everyone.

One institution, Jodrell Bank (where I used to work), is listed as “threatened” (BBC News), and this story a great showcase for what’s at stake.  What’s really at stake isn’t even visible, so I’m going to use JB to give tiny insights into what this could mean for a broad community of brilliant minds and projects, and what we might lose that we can’t imagine and can’t measure.

In true British fashion, Jodrell is an example of how spectacular scientific endeavour is completely under-represented and unappreciated in the UK.  We have a world-class, thought-leading, inspirational, world-changing, unique facility, and it’s not considered as an imperative to sustain.

Jodrell (with MERLIN) is as powerful as the Hubble Space Telescope. It has been for over 15 years. (I believe Nasa spend more on marketing the HST than Jodrell’s entire budget).

I went to visit some friends at Jodrell a few years back and as they we updating me on some of the progress a few nuggets dropped into the conversation - like the fact that more data was flowing across the MERLIN network than the WHOLE of the UK internet. One of the engineers showed me their own self-build multi-gigabit router (because nothing commercial was quite cutting it).

Jodrell was instrumental in Apollo missions. It was the only instrument in the Western Hemisphere that could track Sputnik. It led to the discovery of Pulsars. It helps us map the entire universe. It finds new physics.

The people who work in this field, using instruments like Jodrell,  help not only to literally uncover the mysteries of “life, the universe and everything”, but to create fundamentally new technologies, push boundaries and inspire generations to drive innovation - they do this as a side-effect to their daily work. One colleague wrote 100,000 lines of PERL to help with data processing tasks, so they could carry out their own astrophysics research.  I was part of an international team of about 10 people managing about 1 million lines of Fortran that carried out data and image processing.

While I was there (in 1993-95) I helped to set up their first website. We did this in our lunch breaks, as a means to an end - helping to share information.

Of course it’s not just Jodrell, it’s all the fundamental research that we use to fuel  our innovation, which ultimately fuels our economy, and could help us address the many global issues that we face as a species.

To find ourselves in a situation where this level of innovation is threatened is, at best, atrocious, at worst immoral.

Interesting2008 lived up to its name today. I gave a rather rapid (7 minute!) summary of Acoustic Cosmology. As a few people mentioned afterwards that they would be interested to know more, here’s a few links;

Acoustic Cosmology (Interesting2008 presentation PDF)

Acoustic Cosmology: Summary essay

My own music

Lovely stuff.

STEAD James, age 107 (b. 1901), passed away peacefully in his sleep on Sunday 8th June 2008 on his beloved Isle of Arran. Loving father of Moira; grandfather of Gavin and Sheena, and great grandfather of Thomas. Funeral service 12:30 Monday 16th June at Kilpatrick, Whiting Bay, Isle of Arran and thereafter to Lamlash cemetery. All are most welcome.

This photograph is from 14th July 2007, when he was 106 years old and Thomas was just 3 weeks old.

As the UN sets out its food crisis measures, and setting aside the climate change, population growth and other globalisation issues, this image caught my attention

and made me wonder, what colour *should* it be to start actually balancing trade “balances”.

One very naive photoshop crayon trip later, I coloured in a different perspective.

I wonder what the outcomes would be…

The Long Now essay by Daniel Hillis on “Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine” contains some fantastic, inspiring nuggets, which I couldn’t resist quoting from … they really remind me of conversations at Jodrell Bank.

“… we planned to connect the processors in a 20-dimensional hypercube …”

“In retrospect, if we had had any understanding of how complicated the project was going to be, we never would have started.”

“… he distrusted abstractions that could not be directly related to the facts.”

“Since the only computer language Richard was really familiar with was Basic, he made up a parallel version of Basic… “

“Like many physicists who had spent their lives going to successively lower and lower levels of atomic detail, Feynman often wondered what was at the bottom. One possible answer was a cellular automaton. The notion is that the “continuum” might, at its lowest levels, be discrete in both space and time, and that the laws of physics might simply be a macro-consequence of the average behavior of tiny cells. … If the universe in fact worked this way, then it presumably would have testable consequences, such as an upper limit on the density of information per cubic meter of space.”

“… a typical Richard Feynman explanation … on the one hand, it infuriated the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it delighted the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real understanding of the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality. “

Balancing vast complexity with the ability to genuinely communicate ideas is a remarkable skill, and very hard to find. As someone who takes quite a long time to understand the complexity, I’m eternally grateful to the handful of people I’ve met who can do this. The chasms between science and its representations in business, politics and the media are intensely frustrating, and very hard to navigate.

Has anyone documented best-of-breed examples (like Feynman) to try any cement those bridges? Why don’t we have better communication? We have great examples of interconnected silos, but no real cohesion…

(image from http://www.longnow.org/about/)