As I frequently do late at night when I’m bored, I reached for my iPad and decided to watch something on iPlayer. The only thing which caught my eye (and it must have been a really very slow iPlayer day) was a documentary following the redevelopment of King’s Cross. As it’s a listed building, any alterations to it must be approved with English Heritage, and the programme followed the discussions, arguments and compromises between all the parties involved on how to go forward with the project.
The parties involved were Network Rail, trying to ensure the station would be fit for purpose for the 21st Century, the architects trying to impose their vision, and English Heritage, trying to preserve the historical character of the building.
It’s easy to dismiss the efforts of English Heritage as pointless bureaucracy, forcing developers to jump through hoops to get their projects approved, but a cursory examination of any city in this country will show why they’re necessary. It is in the instincts of architects to build things which they believe are beautiful, and which fit with the prevailing architectural fashions; by and large they have no care for the old.
Because of this, all across this country perfectly good old buildings were torn down and replaced. An example highlighted in the programme is the old Euston Station: it, along with its fabulous grand arch, were torn down and replaced with the 60s monstrosity we see there today. The same wanton architectural vandalism, veiled with the name of progress and modernism, is visible up and down the country. It’s almost impossible to count the number of town and cities where the heart and soul of the place has been torn out, replaced with weather-damaged concrete boxes, decaying in the rain.
I dread to think of the fate that could have befallen King’s Cross if they were allowed to just tear it down entirely. Maybe what they would have replaced it with would be as beautiful as the current Victorian train-shed with its towering brick facade, but there’s no guaranteeing that. There’s certainly an argument for little-c conservatism in the treatment of our built environment, and that’s without consideration for preserving buildings solely as important cultural, architectural, and historical artefacts in themselves. Whatever is done with these buildings could last lifetimes; we have a duty to treat that responsibility with the respect and caution it deserves.
I want to make it clear that I’m not opposed to architectural progress. I’m actually quite a big fan of the modern style of having lots of glass and metal. My only concerns are that we not get so carried away with ourselves that we trample all over our past, and that we have concern for what these buildings are going to be like, 30, 50, 100 years down the road. My favourite way to go is where modern additions are brought into an older building in a way that’s sympathetic with it; like the fantastic new roof over the British Museum.
This was the most satisfying thing about the programme; the architect backed down from his plans to demolish the interior features of the building, and submitted a new design that incorporated them, and merged them with the modern to create a design that worked with a balance of the new and the old. He realised, to only slightly paraphrase his words, that other people could be right. It made me feel altogether rather happy.
For a while now I’ve had a Spotify Premium account, and since I told myself it was an experiment which I would then subsequently review, I really ought to actually do that rather than just letting it roll over and over each month.
I assume most of you are familiar with Spotify; if you’re not, then where the hell have you been the last year? It’s pretty much ubiquitous now.
Anyways, Spotify Premium is £9.99 a month, and that entitles you to higher quality music, offline mode, and use on mobile devices, like the iPhone. A full comparison of the different types of account is available on the Spotify website. The main thing that drew me to paying for premium was the use on mobile devices, like my iPhone, and I have used it pretty extensively.
And, based on that experience, I think I’m going to stop paying for it.
There’s a few reasons for this: the catalogue on Spotify isn’t as extensive I would like, and has a really large number of omissions, the software is occasionally unstable, etc. but the major one is mostly a strictly human limitation. I found myself just listening to the same set of music over and over, or I was undecided about what I actually wanted to listen to on any particular day, and Spotify just isn’t geared up to make it easy to browse to find something you want. The tools available for finding entirely new music on Spotify aren’t really very wonderful, either.
What I could do instead with my £10 is just buy a new album (or two) every month, add it to my collection, and then use tools like Genius playlists on the iPhone to listen to the whole damn lot in nicely selected chunks, which I find a really satisfying way of consuming music. This plan also has the advantage that I get to keep all this music if I every subsequently decide to stop paying monthly.
Anyways, I haven’t made any final decisions yet, so I’d be very interested to see what other people think about this, any tips/tricks or perspectives to share would be great.
(Coming up soon: a series of posts about my holiday to Ireland, and hopefully just more posts in general…)
If there’s one thing that really riles me, it’s when articles by laymen / crazy people fixate on famous scientists; you know the sort of thing I mean, endless speculation about the religious beliefs of Einstein or Darwin, endless analyses about exactly how their particular arguments were in some way flawed or incomplete, inane (but mercifully not endless) documentaries about their personal life carefully contrasted against their work.
I suppose in some ways it’s the fault of the way that science is regularly communicated. We seem to really love the “Great Man” theory of History in the scientific field. We love to pretend that great advances in science are propelled forwards by the heroic efforts of individuals. It’s absolute grade-A twaddle.
Sure, Einstein was smarter than your average bear; he figured out a great many things over a short period of time and for this he is justifiably famous. In 1905 alone, he postulated the photon, explained Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect, and laid out the first exposition of what came to be known as Special Relativity. It was a fantastic year, and is rightly known as his annus mirabilis.
The fact remains though that all of this work was riding the physical zeitgeist; for instance Special Relativity simply pieced together the work of Maxwell and Lorentz and many other contributors into a coherent framework. The pieces necessary were all ready and in place for the discovery, so somebody would have figured out the final piece — the principle of relativity — sooner or later. It was ripe for discovery.
Nor has that venerable theory gone unaltered since Einstein. It received a fairly substantial boost (no pun intended, physics fans) when Minkowski noticed that the theory made the most sense when cast in the form of a 4D space-time, which was named Minkowski space in his honour.
I apologise for the physics examples, but it’s just what I know best; I’m sure evolution and Darwin suffer ever more greatly from this phenomenon, where the central character becomes mythologised as law-giver.
This mythologised status, and the invented infallibility which goes with it, irritates me because it neglects that this sort of foundational work was done an awful long time ago, and science hasn’t been sitting on its hands for a hundred years. Today it doesn’t matter one iota what Darwin or Einstein did or said. That is relevant only as historical curiosity; as practical science they have been superceeded. Nobody learns mechanics by reading Newton’s “Principia”, or learns evolution by reading “On the Origin of Species”. These are not unquestionable sacred prophetic texts, but merely starting points on the road to a fuller understanding, to be amended or discarded as appropriate.
What got me immediately riled up was this article that John Gruber was dissecting, which falsely attributes some fairly odd platitudes to Einstein (as a side note, I desperately hate it when people over-extrapolate physical concepts beyond their range of applicability. It’s moronic). It shouldn’t matter what Einstein said, or thought, even if those thoughts weren’t just invented ad hoc by a lazy journalist. He was a good physicist, but his opinion would be fairly worthless in most fields of human endeavour. He was smart, but not an expert in everything!
The fact is that Darwin could have raped kittens for fun and it wouldn’t make a jot of difference to the correctness of evolution. He could have screwed up one of his arguments, or mis-interpreted evidence, and it wouldn’t matter. Newton was an absolute bastard, but it doesn’t invalidate his ideas about gravity. His wacky religious ideas and theories on alchemy are rightly discarded and forgotten, because they’re nonsense, even though they’re from a figure as towering in the history of science as Newton.
I suppose it’s far easier to teach and understand the simplistic great man narrative; maybe it speaks to something which we want to believe. Alas, I fear it’s a way of thinking which does nothing but give succour to our enemies. It’s a bit like the terrible, misleading, New Scientist headlines, I think.
As those of you who follow me on Twitter will know, I took the plunge and bought myself an iPad, as a kind of post-exams, post-degree celebratory splurge.
I have to say, so far I’m really rather enjoying it. It feels like this slab of glass and metal has just arrived from the future; it has this sense of violating usual expectations simply by existing.
The screen is glossy and beautiful, and it feels dense and sturdy. It’s heavier than you’d initially expect, but certainly not uncomfortably so. I’m not exactly a bulgingly muscular he-man, but I don’t find it uncomfortable to hold. They’re not wrong about the keyboard being large, it’s actually pretty comfortable to type on with the iPad in your lap, and you can get a pretty respectable typing speed with a little practice.
Pages load fast, browsing is fluid, and video on sites like the iPlayer work great. I started watching a Bettany Hughes documentary on Atlantis earlier on here, and it was a very pleasant experience. YouTube videos too look great, and I just last night found a service (although I now remember being told about it by Will Otter) called TV Catchup that allows me to stream live TV directly to my iPad, which is pretty cool.
As apps go, iPhone applications look flat-out ridiculous on the iPad. There’s not really a way around that one. They run, but you have the choice of running them at normal size, isolated in the middle of your display, or blown-up to fullscreen where they really just look appalling, pixellated, only having the iPhone keyboard rather than the superior iPad one, etc. You’ll want to use dedicated iPad apps wherever possible.
The catalogue of available iPad apps is comparatively smaller than its iPhone stablemate but there are already some pretty impressive apps available, and the number will only increase as more developers make iPad optimised versions of their existing apps. For instance the brilliant Google Reader client for the iPhone Reeder should be releasing and iPad version soon, and I can only hope that the Twitter for iPhone app formerly known as Tweetie will too receive an iPad version.
The in-built apps all look and work great, and one thing that surprised me was that even on the wifi-only model, location still seems to work fairly accurately, if not pin-point. I thought there was no GPS hardware, so I suppose it’s doing a trick using wifi hotspots to figure out my location. Whatever it’s doing, that’s quite cool.
I have a feeling that i’m going to change my habits quite a bit having this. I’ve already been tempted to impulse-purchase a movie from iTunes, and the iBook store would look terribly appealing if I didn’t already have a backlog of physical books (currently going through Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman) and I can see a lot of sitting in bed, browsing, tweeting and reading email in my future. Apart from high-powered hard-core gaming and writing code, there isn’t a huge amount of reason to go turn on my PC any more.
Anyways, I really like it, so there. This post was entirely written on the iPad.
So Google are in a bit of trouble because they captured a bunch of data from open wifi access points using their Street View cars.
Personally, I’m going to apply Hanlon’s razor to this: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
Google were collecting wifi data for the purposes of performing rough geolocation without the aid of a GPS module; if you collect the approximate position of a wifi access point (identified by its SSID and MAC address), then you can later calculate the location of a mobile device by cross-referencing with what wifi access points it can see. This is perfectly legitimate — all this data was being broadcast in the clear into public areas, it’s not personally identifiable, and Google were never going to disclose it directly anyway; only the results obtained from the use of the data.
The contentious bit is that they hoovered up payload data as well as just SSIDs and MACs. This means emails, web pages, downloads etc. etc. This isn’t too horrendous as anything actually important and sensitive e.g. financial stuff, is encrypted at the transport layer by SSL anyway. The collected data could potentially be compromising and embarrassing however, and it is legally very dubious to collect and store.
Given that it’s a PR disaster and potentially illegal, I think the most plausible explanation here is cock-up. Somebody on the Street View team got sloppy and used some code from another part of the company without asking too many questions about what that code did, over and above what they were going to be using it for; said guy is now probably getting one hell of a bollocking.
Ages ago, I saw a guy playing a set of drums made from a bike.
He played this:
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(Incidentally, I know about the weird broken layout to do with comments. Not sure yet how to fix it, got broke by a Disqus update. Edit: Fixed! Although in a supremely hacky way…)
I had kind of a crazy day yesterday.
It started with an exam in Quantum Field Theory. Painful, but I think it didn’t go too badly. Had a bite to eat, then it was straight into some last minute revision on the Queen’s Lawn for the second exam of the day in Optical Communications Physics, which was actually sort of pleasant, in a slightly strange way. Less like the hideous mental assault which constituted my other exams, anyway.
To celebrate, Rowan, Susan and I took a trip to our customary haunt — Nando’s — and proceded to consume chicken. It was delightful.
After that, I decided to take a trip into central London to grab some comics at Forbidden Planet, and as I was strolling up Monmouth Street I walked past none other than Neil Gaiman, award-winning fantasy writer and graphic novelist. By the time I’d realised it was him he’d already walked past me and gone round the corner. It took me a few more hours to realise that I was in fact carrying in my bag a copy of his “Sandman” graphic novel “Dream Country”, and that asking him to autograph it would have been incredible. I later found out via the wonder of Twitter that he would have signed it if I’d asked. Never mind!
So yeh, went to Forbidden Planet, grabbed a new Buffy comic and a Penny Arcade book, and went and sat down on a wall just up Shaftesbury Avenue and read my purchases for a while, and watched the world go by. I don’t spend nearly enough time in central London, which is a shame because I love it dearly; it’s so full of life and bustle and remarkable buildings and architecture and it goes on and on in all directions.
Rather than go home, I decided to take a bit of a walkabout. I set off east towards Holborn, passing whichever way took my fancy.
The first thing I discovered was what looked to be the entrance to an underground tramway.
I wonder how long it’s been since it was used, and where the other end of it surfaces, if it still has another end.
I wandered over to where a section of street had been blocked off by Crossrail signs. This old building, a sign on which read “The Ivy House” was abandoned, encircled by signs exhorting me to visit the site office. The building across the street bore the likeness of, and a dedication to, John Bunyan. It too looked decayed and abandoned; I turned the corner into a desolate alley, and leaned to look through some railings; through them smelt of damp and decay.
The building was apparently called “Kingsgate House”, and despite appearing to be derelict, somebody still seems to be in habitation, judging by the light and the open window.
It appears that I’m not the only one to find this building interesting.
Places like this fill me with wonder, make me think about their history, why they were built, and how they fell on hard times. I wonder if Crossrail is doing any good to this little microcosm of Holborn at the moment; I must confess that apart from the Astoria, I’d never really considered the impact the building of Crossrail would have.
I turned north, and found that Warner Brothers keeps replicas of the Hogwarts house insignia in the Foyer of their offices.
From there I wandered into a residential district, near Great Ormond Street hospital. Houses draped with the flag of St. George, people in bars, drinking and chatting, the beautiful chattering sound of people enjoying themselves wafting over the streets. I walked down an alleyway that passed through a building, joining the street through a crack in the facade of a shop. Behind this was tucked a little house, sounds of a party coming from inside.
It was getting late, so I headed in the direction of Russell Square tube station, marvelling at water fountains, and a house draped in lights for some unfathomable reason. I came across a park called Coram’s Fields. The sign above the gate read “No Unaccompanied Adults”. I thought this was marvellous.
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