Matt ‘blackbelt’ Jones has created this superb pastiche of the now fetishized British wartime ‘keep clam and carry on’ poster. However, when I first encountered the ‘keep calm’ posters and found one of the originating sellers I rather preferred one of their other offerings, being a geographer:
I notice with great sadness that Tom’s Pies is no more, it has been credit crunched. Tom’s, set up by a graduate of the university, was a purveyor of many fine pies that have fueled the School of Geographical Sciences over the last year or so. We now have one less alternative to the ubiquitous sandwich and significantly less choice for a hot take away meal for lunch. I hope they manage to resurrect the business sometime, there are far too few opportunities to eat a good pie, thank goodness for Pieminister!
A clever chap at MIT’s Media Lab Pranav Mistry has created what he calls “a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information”. This has been picked up by quite a number of people, from Wired to The Sun, Mistry also spoke at TED, and has been touted as a vision of the future. So, it’s not as polished as the MS stuff but here’s another ‘future vision’ video:
Mistry has more information and more videos on his web page about sixth sense.
According to istartedsomething and Steve Clayton, Microsoft’s ‘Business Division President’ Stephen Elop ‘premiered’ the ‘future vision 2019‘ in a presentation at the Wharton Business Technology Conference in February.
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“The future will be better tomorrow” - Dan Quayle
“with faith in the future, let us together build tomorrow today” - Gordon Brown
Last week the British media treated us to a swathe of coverage [Guardian, BBC, Telegraph] of the Metropolitan police force’s apparent fear of a ‘summer of rage‘, set to take place this year, 2009, as a result of increasing disenchantment with the economic state of affairs. One might argue, dismissively, this was either a cynical or ill-thought statement by the Superintendent in charge of the ‘public order’ branch. On the other hand we might see this in the context of a somewhat seedy and calculated suspicion of guilt applied to the general public in advance. The nebulous claim of a ’summer of rage’ would in this way becomes a tool, both to ask for more resources and to set the grounds for requesting more ’special’ powers.
I have been collecting together ‘vision’ videos for future(s) computing on my YouTube ‘favourites’. I’ve decided to post them here and categorise them as “past computing futures” posts with the aim of cataloguing what I find. I welcome suggestions and links!
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