Science, philosophy and technology run on the model of American Idol – as embodied by TED talks – is a recipe for civilisational disaster.
In our culture, talking about the future is sometimes a polite way of saying things about the present that would otherwise be rude or risky.
But have you ever wondered why so little of the future promised in TED talks actually happens? So
much potential and enthusiasm, and so little actual change. Are the ideas wrong? Or is the idea about what ideas can do all by themselves wrong?
I write about entanglements of technology and culture, how technologies enable the making of certain worlds, and at the same time how culture structures how those technologies will
evolve, this way or that. It’s where philosophy and design intersect.
GoldieBlox have been in the news (by which I mean the blogs) a lot lately because of their Princess Machine video. In case you missed the memo, GoldieBlox do engineering toys for
girls, by which they mean a) they’re pink, and b) they’ve got stories, because girls need everything to have a story. Think I’m…
A few months ago now (OK, this post has sat in drafts for a while) when I came to pick my daughter up from nursery I found her wearing a pink ‘fairy skirt’ (something like a tutu).
“Her trousers and her spare trousers both got wet and it was the only thing we could find!”…
Disclaimer: I do not build database engines. I build web applications. I run 4-6 different projects every year, so I build a lot of web applications. I see apps with
different requirements and different data storage needs. I’ve deployed most of the data stores you’ve heard about, and a few that you probably haven’t. I’ve picked the wrong…
The story of how the Diaspora social network adopted the hip new database technology without for a moment thinking about whether it was the
right database technology.
I’m looking for an extension that will automatically redirect-to-HTTPS for particular domains, e.g. to ensure that I’m using the secure version of Wikipedia, etc., whenever I go
there. The HTTPS Everywhere plugin from the EFF does this for Firefox and Chrome; what can I do to make this work in Opera?
