I’ve spent the last 10 minutes since the last post devouring Strange Maps, and with titles such as The Dykes of Doggerland it’s bowel obstructing stuff.
‘Homer (not the slouch of Springfield heralding the end of Western civilization, but the blind, semi-mythical poet at the dawn of Greek history) was seen by Strabo and the Stoics as the father of geography. His overarching geographic concept was of the world as a flat, round disk of land, completely encircled by Okeanos, the world sea.
All this was enclosed by the fixed dome of the Heavens, filled with cloud and mist close to the Earth, but with clear aether closer to the sky’s dome. Sun, Moon and stars rose from the eastern waters of the Ocean, moved along the dome and sank again into the western waters. The whole thing is reminiscent of nothing so much as of one of those snowdomes that are the staple of any self-respecting tourist trap.
This vision is expounded in the Iliad, in which Homer uses Achilles’ shield, forged by Hephaestos, to metaphorically describe the universe as a circular island, surrounded by water. Human activities, celestial objects and stellar motions are described on the shield, which is actually a map, on the threshold between a purely mythological and an nascent scientific view of the world.
Homer’s world vision is almost certainly meant to be symbolic rather than realistic – no ships are sailing on the all-encircling sea, which is intended to emphasise the unity of the Oikoumenè, the whole inhabited world. But this vision is based on real geographical knowledge, and shows the Greeks of the eighth century BC had a good grasp of the layout eastern Mediterranean – Homer’s Iliad and especially his Odyssey are replete with references to routes and places, both real and imagined (or at least not yet identified).’
Everyone who know’s me and some people do but they just don’t know it yet, will know that I love maps and occasionally stats. So imagine my gross national product of joy when my colleague Philine sent me this:
‘The creator of this map has had the interesting idea to break down that gigantic US GDP into the GDPs of individual states, and compare those to other countries’ GDP. What follows, is this slightly misleading map – misleading, because the economies both of the US states and of the countries they are compared with are not weighted for their respective populations.’
… my iPhone was a plastic figurine it would look something like this and as I upgrade to Version 2.0 and watch all my tunes, contacts and diary settings disappear off a virtual white cliffs of Dover, this image pretty much sums it up:
Ah Techcrunch, purveyor of the worlds dwindling venture capital money as it slowly get’s crunched like a man with a peanut allergy eating a brazil nut.
Last week, saw me have a phone interview with the delightful (sounding) Heather from Techcrunch HQ in the US, to see whether my witty submission for Qajack to feature at TC 50 in September was enough to enable David and I to dress us as grey clad web revolutionaries in matching dark grey berets and walk onto that hallowed stage and pitch our ‘thang’ to Silicon Valley.
It didn’t go so well. ‘Don’t worry’ soothed the wife, ‘When you think it’s gone badly it sometimes goes well.’
Liz Gannes at newteevee, uses a recent Lehman Brother’s report to take a closer look at what we can expect from the displacement of analog with digital.
The take home:
‘So if that all works out, studios would be making $5.8 billion from sales of movies and TV shows in 2015, down from $17.7 billion today.
OK, so what are the potential implications?
* It could be that the audience comes away from the studios into more niche, focused content creators. That might be nice.
* It’s hard to make creativity more efficient, so it could lead to dumber, more sure-bet movies and TV shows. That would not be nice.
* But at the same time, ridiculously inflated budgets would be evolved out of the system. That seems like the natural order of things.
* As people find it easier to not pay for content, monetization methods could get more personal. But while personal sometimes means helpful and relevant, much of the time it means invasive and insidious.’
Creativity can be more efficient if it’s branded entertainment as evinced by Eurostar’s funding of Shane Meadows’ Somers Town.
I’m with her on the ‘invasive and insidious’ and would add to it ‘immune to and bored by’, but by employing the creativity she fears may be lost, we’re looking at better brand spend on a higher quality product and goodbye $6m car commercials, hello twisted psycho flick in which our busty heroine drives the latest automobilitron.
Whilst Web 2.0 is all about making friends, poking them, pretending those you don’t really know are in fact ‘friends’ as their isn’t a ‘let’s be friends of friends’ option. Using friends to make other friends who may or may not be able to hook you up with the friend’s girlfriend who is now single and looking for a friend with benefits, come to think of it wouldn’t FriendFeed With Benefits be a great web app?
Reality TV is sadly not like that, which is why it’s entertaining and FriendFeed is like crack. Good crack, happy crack, not dirty on a spoon in a bedsit crack.
The Onion makes me cry as I rub it’s finely sliced rings in my oh so satirical eyes, but I’ve just discovered Free-Ass. Press - because newspapers are for dog shit and bird cages, and now I have a new God.
‘INTERNETLAND — Digg.com users registered their insatiable discontent in a perfect storm of negative comments about so many articles that they unwittingly buried the entire Internet.
Within seconds of the interruption, the NASDAQ dropped 47 percent. The New York Times covered the NASDAQ story and tried to post it, but Digg users immediately buried the article for being inaccurate, boring and older than eight seconds. Read the rest of this entry »
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