Nick's Blog

I've been working on a very different set of ideas around why 3D works for a few years. It's almost done at last. Here's a taster. Click anywhere to focus on any part of this image, or click and then move your mouse, to shift the image in any direction. Watch the 3D pop out at you (hopefully). From the new Lytro camera, empirical proof of the set of ideas.

Open education. Open society in general. What does 'open' mean? In education, openness is currently a bit of a cause celebre. Rapid recent developments in 'online' education have led many to question whether standard institutions in education are under threat, to be replaced by a variety of new models of teaching and even research that take place online. Henri Bergson was a brilliant thinker on openness. And on many other things (his Matter and Memory must still rank as one of the most extraordinary books of the last 2000 years, his Nobel Prize surely had a lot to do with that book alone). What Bergson realised was that we make the mistake of trying to define open as the opposite of closed. Just as we tend to make all sorts of similar mistakes in opposing night and day, love and hate etc. To Bergson, defining openness by making it the opposite of closed is like calling somebody a boofhead, and when they object saying, "ok ok, you're a not-boofhead the...