Nick's Blog

What time machines look like without production designers (although they went to town on the interior). (If you're reading the FB version, you may not see the picture.) The thing about time travel and time machine stories is that the reality is actually much more interesting than the fiction. The reality of time, that is. You don't 'travel' in time, because there is no such thing as time in the first place. There's nothing to travel 'in'. The 'in' is very interesting though, because it's a spatial term - we nearly always describe time in terms of space, and space in terms of time. More on that in a bit. One of our measures of time is days and nights. Our days and nights pass us by, we think. It's one of the main ways we think of time. But you don't need to have done much science at all to know that days and nights themselves are mostly caused by the Earth spinning on its axis. If you stopped the Earth spinning and orbiting, you'd have...

Haven't posted anything here for ages. Life's busy. But it was never a blog that was designed to be regularly updated, it's more like a personal diary that I write when I want to think about something and writing it down helps me to figure it out. The 3D article is still being finished. In the meantime if you want to watch 3D TV without a fancy TV or glasses, think of the TV screen as a window and what's 'on' TV as happening behind that window. Look through the screen as if what's on the TV is actually happening behind the window that is your screen. As if those characters and scenes were actually there behind your set, your set simply a window looking out onto whatever you're watching. Most of the time people tend to look at the screen, like staring at the window instead of seeing what's happening behind it. With a bit of practice you might get a surprise.

I have a faith. It's not a very common faith. I have faith in the world. Not the world as in the Earth, but as in everything. Just as it is. Another way of saying this is that I don't believe in providence. I don't believe there is anything steering the course of events from 'outside' them in any way. No higher power, no visible or invisible hands, no 'objective Truth' (but there are small-t truths). Nothing providential. Why is it so hard for people to respect what is given to us, in our experience? Why do we always want to add levels to things? It's easy to think this is something only religious people do, with their other-worldly gods and hellfires, but it's rampant in all parts of life. If you think there is such thing as 'society' lording over what all of us do, there's providence. If you think there are only individuals and no society, there's providence again, just in the opposite direction. If you think science peels away laye...

The Gartner Group provides some very interesting analysis of the IT world. In the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday they weighed into the iPad discussion, and gave a very good summary of the 'content' side of Apple's genius. The article was about Google's plans to launch a similar device. Gartner analyst Robin Simpson said other companies including Google would have trouble competing with Apple's iPad because Apple had already developed a strong ecosystem around its products, allowing users to buy content from iTunes with one click. There is its. There is no such thing as technology, the reason devices succeed and continue to exist is if you get the whole 'ecosystem' surrounding them right. It's all the one thing, a device or technology is not separate to getting all those other ecosystem things right. He goes on: "You can make great hardware, you can have a fantastic, easy-to-use operating system, but to make it commercially successful I think you n...

So what's the genius of the iPad? Time will tell if it sells, obviously, but it's a fascinating experiment. You always know when somebody is onto something new when others struggle to describe it. Specifically the best they can do is describe it as being 'like' other things they know. That's what most of the descriptions of the iPad have been. It's like an oversized iPod Touch, and like an ebook reader, and like a tablet PC, etc. The (always so spectacularly clever) reviewers then jump to what their hamster-cage brains then think must be the logical conclusion, that the new technology is 'nothing but' some variation on these other things. (Art and music reviewers do the same thing, and nearly always miss new talent, for the same reasons.) Steve Jobs gave an insight into the sort of there-is-no-such-thing-as-technology thinking Apple does in his presentation for the iPad. He described the iPad as fitting between the iPod Touch/iPhone and the Macbook i.e. ...

The new iPad. Just like something else, or something new? Apple has put the cat amongst the technology pigeons again with its new iPad. There are diehards for and against everything Apple does. Most technology writers and the majority of IT professionals tend to take the view that Apple produce expensive trinkets, when there are much cheaper and more feature-rich options available. I think they miss the point completely. Apple understands technology better than any of the other consumer electronics companies. And much better than most IT professionals. The IT industry in general is pretty immature in its outlook, although not in its size. It has taken a long time to get to grips with being a mass-level consumer industry, rather than a specialised cosy group of widget boffins. It's clear that it still has some way to go. What Apple basically understands is that there is no such thing as technology . Sounds a bit bizarre, but technology isn't (or shouldn't be) a noun. It...

Shaun Carney in today's Sydney Morning Herald sets out the case for the Rudd government having a longer-term strategy with the school data currently creating a fuss. So that sneaking suspicion I put in the last post might be what's really going on, which would be great for everybody. Carney sums it all up very well. The flight of the middle-class from the state sector, stimulated in part by the Coalition shovelling increasing amounts of taxpayer dollars into private schooling, has been relentless. This process has fed on itself, creating a middle-class mentality that assumes that state schools are a place of last resort for parents who could afford something better. Exactly what happened, the conservatives always do this. It's what they believe, that the public system is a safety net only and the real action should be in vibrant private enterprise. Of course politically they rarely say this, gushing about the wonders of the public system. They say the same thing about medic...