Here:
Lovely. Thank you Twitter.
It’s London, but the colour is Turkish delight. The sky being the chocolate and the sun being the filling.
Category: Technology
Internet not working
Using phone. Impossible. That is all.
LATER: Well, not quite. It seems that it was Google not working. Or something. Everything went black. Why? So after all the usual switch-it-off-switch-in-on-again bollocks, I closed all windows, black as they were and were determined to remain, and then opened just one. And that, this, worked. I found out google wasn’t working by trying another internet searcher thingy. That worked. Except that it couldn’t remember how to get here, if it ever knew. So, I closed google and opened it again, a little.
Very peculiar.
As for that using phone thing, well, again, not impossible. Just ridiculously difficult.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
The ultimate non-disruptive technology
Next Friday, my good friend Adriana Lukas will be giving a talk at my home entitled Personal Recollections of Life Under Communism. While concocting some biographical information for my email list members, I took a closer look than I have before at her Twitter feed.
Way back in 2015, Adriana retweeted this remarkable image:
It looks like some ancient oil painting, rather than the latest-thing highest-of-high-tech imagery, which of course is what it is.
GE Healthcare’s 3D-printing software works seamlessly with GE Advantage Workstation systems already working inside hospitals around the world. After a scan, the anatomy is rendered as a 3D image using GE’s Volume Viewer software, a 3D-imaging platform that combines data from sources like CT but also MRI and X-ray. The software then converts the image file generated by the Volume Viewer and within seconds translates it into a file format that can be interpreted by a 3D printer.
“In the past, it would take several days to get the images back” from an outside 3D software processor, Cury says. “The advantage of the new software is it’s in the same workstation where the technologists already do work on 3D images. The steps are a lot quicker and easier.”
More than 100 hospitals around the world have already ordered GE’s 3D organ printing software, which can be used for any type of organ as well as models of bones and muscles. GE says that as more hospitals use the software, it will be easier and quicker for doctors like Cury to share files with each other and have 3D models to use for planning and education prior to procedures.
The most impressive 3D printing stories often feature hopelessly old-school businesses, like GE. This is because 3D printing is the ultimate non-disruptive technology. It attaches itself to existing businesses and makes them better. If you know only about 3D printing, and are not willing to cooperate with a regular business, forget about it.
All those stupid 3D printers that they tried to sell in Currys PC World a few years back were just ridiculous junk for making further even more ridiculous junk.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
A better hand dryer at the Gare du Nord
I believe that many of the best photoers have a touch of the perve about them, and quite a few other photoers also. At the very least, photoers sometimes have to be okay with people thinking they’re perves, which I suppose is part of what being a perve is.
So, for instance, in order to take these photos, I had to be using a camera in a public toilet:
After we had done passport and baggage checking in for our Eurostar journey from the Gare du Nord back to London, nature had summoned me to the gents. After I had answered my summons, I washed my hands, and then dried them in the hand dryer that you see above. I had to leave to get my camera, and then go back there to photo the hand dryer. Happily, nobody saw me at it.
The solidity and cleanability of the device inspired confidence. I could see everything, so it would also need to look clean, which increased confidence that it almost certainly was clean. Best of all, the heat was concentrated in a sort of horizontal sheet, if you get my meaning. And you could move your hands up and down to where you needed to, to get rid of the last of the moisture. It felt like it needed less power to do the same job, better. And that of course is what its makers claim.
Those makers being Dyson, known to me until now only for their vacuum cleaners, and this is, as my photos had already told me, the Dyson Airblade dB hand dryer.
Capitalism just keeps on getting better, tiny step by tiny step, that being why this fact seldom hits the headlines.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Angel Bear outside the Gare du Nord
When you go by train to Quimper from London, you start by going by Eurostar to the Gare du Nord in Paris. And when you step outside the main entrance of the Gare du Nord, you find yourself next to a big red bear with wings.
Although I noticed this big red bear with wings when I first got to Paris, I only photoed it on the way back, a week later, when I and GodDaughter 2’s Mum were in less of a hurry between trains and when the weather was much better.
Also, on the way back, we didn’t suddenly see the big red bear with wings. We could see it as we approached the Gare du Nord, and I had my camera ready to go, as it had been all afternoon:
I quite like this big red bear with wings, but I am less sure about whether I admire it. It seems like a mixture of too many unrelated things. The lots-of-holes style of sculpting, which I associate with 3D printing, is one thing. Making a bear look like a bear is something else. And then, there are those wings. On a bear. Wings with holes in them. The idea of the wings is that they turn the bear into an angel bear. Something to do with global warming and the melting icecaps, I read somewhere and then lost track of. The artist, Richard Texier, is not big on logic. He prefers to stimulate the imagination. To evoke magic.
The big red bear is called, see above, “Angel Bear”, and it has an inescapable air of kitsch about it, to my eye. Like something you’d buy, smaller but still quite big, in a posh gift shop, for far too much money. I prefer a bull that Texier has also done, in the same 3D printed style. No wings. Much better, to my eye. Cleaner, as a concept.
But still a bit gift shoppy, I think. Which is another way of saying that I bet these big old animals are by far his most popular works. I suspect that Texier may be a bit irritated by this. He likes being popular and he likes these big animals. But he also likes his more abstract less gift shoppy stuff, and wishes the populace liked them more too. Things like this:
I found both of those images at the Richard Texier website, at this page.
Despite my reservations about the big red bear with wings and my preference for other Texier works, I can, when I look at his big red bear with wings, feel Paris trying. Trying to become that little bit less of the big old antique such as, compared to London, it now is. I mean, you can’t miss the big red bear with wings. Personally, I don’t find it to be wholly successful. But it is holey.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Nova behind Pavlova
Another day doing Other Things, another evening getting ever more tired, and wondering what to put here.
When in doubt … Pavlova:
I didn’t know whether to pick that, or this closer-up version, so I show both:
Behind Pavlova is Nova. Did they call it Nova to rhyme?
While I’m in this directory, here’s the lady with a crane behind her:
All three of those taken within a couple of minutes.
That was nearly three years ago, when Nova was still being readied for its first occupants, still living up to its name. The interior wouldn’t look like that now, if only because there’d be less light pouring in from the far side.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
A missed opportunity
I really like this photo I took, a couple of years ago; of a poster featuring the Wheel with its top sliced off; and behind it the actual top of the actual Wheel
However, another version of this photo might have been even better. If I had gone closer to the poster, and put the top of the actual Wheel right on top of the poster, that might have been truly impressive.
But I distinctly remember thinking at the time that what with the road being full of traffic, this might have meant a long wait waiting for a gap, and what with me already having had a long day and wanting to get home, so I said to myself: I’ll come back later.
But by the time I did come back later, the poster had gone.
If you see a photo, take the photo: Immediately.
One of the categories I have assigned to this posting is: How the mind works. But this was more a case of: How my mind didn’t work.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
There is no such thing as user friendliness
Today, I connected my camera to someone else’s Mac. But clicking through the photos on my camera proved impossible, the way I find this to be trivially easy on my clunky old PC with clunky old Windows. We could not make this work. Which just goes to prove that ancient computer truth. There is no such thing as “user friendliness”. There is only what you know how to make a computer do, which is trivially easy, and what you do not know how to make a computer do, which is impossible.
See you tomorrow. Maybe only as briefly as this. Or maybe not see you tomorrow at all.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Personalised cat flaps
And by personalised, I mean personalised for your cat.
This evening I had a Last Friday meeting at my home, and during it, I learned about a cat phenomenon that suits my Friday Cats and Other Creatures blogging habit.
It seems, or so I was told by one of my lady guests, that a recent invention is that a cat can have a chip on its shoulder – as in: electronic chip – which means that it can get in through the cat flap in the door to your house, but no other cat can do this. For all other – chipless – cats, the cat flap refuses to flap.
This deals with the habit that cats have of following each other into their various “homes”. Apparently, cat flaps of the more primitive sort have been allowing passing stranger cats to take occupation in your home when you are gone. And your cat can’t stop them, if it is not a dominant sort of cat compared to the invading cat. If your cat is not dominant, your house can become a house for all his dominant acquaintances. Scary for you, and even scarier, I presume, for your cat. But now, your can avoid all this grief, because if you have one of these new style cat flaps, only your cat can get into your house. Your house becomes his safe haven.
Presumably what my lady guest was talking about was something like this:
SureFlap cat flap with microchip identification is made of plastic material. All cats can go out, but only cats with corresponding microchip can come in again. …
When you think of it this way, cat flaps must have made quite a big difference to the lives of cats, good for some and bad for others. And these personalised cat flaps are another big change.
Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog
Talking with – and without – a microphone
I like doing podcasts, and have recently resumed doing this. The difference between these and earlier efforts is that I am not making the mistake of trying to be the interviewer, a role which I have learned, the hard way, that I am utterly unsuited to.
I do not, however, like doing podcasts because I assume that I will reach a huge audience with my brilliant insights and opinions. Rather is it that I deepen my friendships with the people I share the microphone with. The first is a mere outside chance. The second is pretty much guaranteed to happen.
Although neither I nor any of the other people whom I podcast with assumes that we will reach a huge audience, we know that we probably will reach some sort of audience, probably very tiny, of friends and acquaintances and general passers-by, and that means that we had better say things we have thought about and which we mean and which are worth saying. We need to be at our conversational best, just in case.
Compare that with two or three of us just chatting in a pub or an eatery or in one of our homes, but with no microphone on. The level of conversational intensity, so to speak, is, in those circumstances, far lower.
Almost all of my renewed podcasting activity has been with Patrick Crozier. I recall with particular pleasure the first of these recent efforts that we did about World War 1. Who else has listened in? I have no idea. But I listened. He listened. I can listen again, and I have, more than once, because so many interesting things, I think, got talked about.
More recently, I took part in a group podcast on the subject of freedom of speech, alongside Jordan Lee, Bruno Nardi and Tamiris Loureiro. On that occasion I can be sure that others were listening, because there was a room semi-full of people, listening, right there, in the Two Chairmen, where Libertarian Home meetings now all seem to happen.
The microphone that Bruno placed in our midst was distinguished by its size and its striking appearance. I photoed it:
That photo, for me, illustrates the bigness of the difference that a microphone makes to a conversation. Jordan, Bruno and Tamiris are all slightly better friends of mine now than they would have been if we’d not done this.
Why then, do I not switch on a microphone during my Last Friday of the Month meetings? Maybe I will start doing this. But for now, I believe that a roomful of people, assembled to hear a particular person speak on a particular subject, achieves that same heightened level of attention and conversational concentration that a microphone achieves for a smaller group of people who are talking amongst themselves.
It is also helpful for speakers to be absolutely sure that their talks won’t go straight to the www, and that means that they can confidently take an early shot at a new subject, with all the errors, hesitations and confusions that might occur. Ideas need to be nurtured and shaped and polished, and that is far easier to do if such early efforts are not being bugged.
This Friday, I have another of my Last Friday meetings. Dominic Frisby will be doing an early dry-run version of his Financial Game Show, which will be having a run of performances for real at this year’s Edinburgh Festival. I’m pretty sure that me threatening to switch on a microphone during this out-of-town preliminary try-out version, so to speak, would have been a deal-breaker.
There’ll be another early version for this show at the King’s Head, Crouch End, on May 22nd. I attended the very first outing of it at the same venue last Monday, and I can report that I and the rest of the small crowd had a lot of fun. As Frisby reports at the bottom of this piece in MoneyWeek:
We had fun. My MoneyWeek colleague, Ben Judge, turned out to be the winner, prompting many in the audience to make accusations of an inside job.
Yes. This was a pity, because actually what came across rather well was how imperfect the knowledge of financial experts often is, and how other people, with direct experience of whatever it is, often know more than them.