Recently, while watching 4OD – Channel 4’s Video On Demand service – I saw an advertisement for Google’s ubiquitous web presence. In this video we can see snippets of the life of a little girl growing up, and various information linked to her first years. Pictures, videos, e-mails, but also a caption of Google’s street view was included into this short and emotionally appealing spot from a company that was founded in 1998, and hence is relatively new. Google has…
I’ve been back in Edinburgh for over a week since my little trip to Norway, and as an epiphany the sudden realization of how much I have to write until mid-August. I’ve picked up many interesting points the last week from doing experiments with Open Data, and visualizations learned from the book Visualizing Data by Ben Fry. In addition I read the first half of Clay Shirky’s Here comes everybody (This book was recently listed on the Guardian’s 100 best…
This text started with the title “Technological meditations”. The text is not so much written to be a result as it is written as a stimuli for a process where my goal was to get a deeper understanding of the technological phenomenon. Technology plays an important role in how we perceive ourselves as human beings, how we perceive nature and how we organise our lives. Technology is an integrated part in most areas of our lives, and several disciplines are…
The computer is a good tool in many areas but within its defining field, computations, it is great. With over a million computations per second even a big, large and heavy book (in its physical manifestation) can be sorted in just a blink of an eye. A while ago I tried to sort the King James version of the Bible. Inspiration During the last few years you may have encountered Jonathan Feinberg’s Wordle. This visualisation of word frequency in text…
As I’m writing this I’m watching the clouds over the mountains between the east and west of Norway from above. On this DY 1354 flight to Edinburgh with Norwegian Air Shuttle I was promised Internet connectivity, but technical errors occurred and I had to write this blog post in my OpenOffice editor instead of in the WordPress back-end. I got a bit disappointed, but now writing and having a cup of coffee I’m satisfied. Internet aboard airplanes is not a…
Earlier this week Magnus and I went to audit a guest lecture with the famous language philosopher John Searle at the University of Oslo. John Searle, who is professor at University of California and who did an exchange semester to Oslo nearly forty years ago, is famous for his theories on speech acts. In these theories he presents a typology of actions a language can perform. This can be exemplified by assertive acts which tells us something about the world,…