"I didn't bring my niece to a museum to look at a screen..."
I took my niece around the Natural History Museum in London recently, taking in the new 'Darwin' extension first. It was a liminal space of sorts with lots of broken screens. The tech had not been updated in a decade or more so you had Adobe Flash Player running, complete with the crash pop-up messages to let you know what version of Flash they were updated to.
The idea generally was to have a large touch table with a projector in the ceiling showing an image that could be interacted with. My 8 year old crash test dummy still enjoyed the screens, which was no surprise given that she is addicted to her tablet.
The touch table (however it worked) was not quite registered to the image projected on it. Some exhibits (screens) had a 'tell a friend' feature where you could enter an email address. However, all of the 'keys' were off, so you press 'Q' and you get 'W', or 'N' and you get 'M'. I persisted and entered my sister's email address.
Did she get the email?
What do you think!!!
Some of the screens had the toughest armour I have ever seen. ATMs are soft targets by comparison. I had never seen whole keyboards made of stainless steel before and found the level of vandal-proofing to be absurd.
Admittedly the throughput of the museum is absurd, in the UK every person gets to go there at least five times, once with mum and dad, another time with one set of grandparents, then with the school, then, as they have their own kids, they have to go again, then it is rinse/repeat when they are a grandparent.
The reason for going is dinosaurs. But they got rid of 'dippy' from the entrance hall.
Before you get to the entrance hall there is the begging chicane. This is a ridiculous entrance route back and fore between a dozen different begging bowls to support them financially. If you choose not to pay up, then you can then spend the next six hours not speaking or interacting with any humans apart from the ones you arrived with, except for maybe at the giftshop.
There were no annexes with staff doing talks, nobody apart from the beggars to greet you, but plenty of screens.
The brief for the new wing was to have scientists doing classification of specimens in such a way that they were on show, a 'working museum'. But nobody wanted to work in goldfish bowl conditions under the gaze of hordes of kids.
I don't want to dismiss the place in its entirety, the gardens outside were lovely even though they have a motorway-sized road next to you with considerable noise pollution. That's right, the place we send all our kids to for the big memorable day is made toxic with the filth of car dependency. The air is utterly disgusting there just because of car dependency. The whole area is full of museums and the whole lot needs to just be pedestrianised, but no, it is clogged up with those cheesy 'status symbol' cars people buy in London.
So there is this wall of cars outside and this wall of screens inside. Then the daylight robbery in the gift shop.
We didn't do the full tour, got to save some for the parents and school trip. But we did go to the earthquake room. It is modelled on a Japanese shop and shakes every few minutes. Shakes is being kind. A garden swing or any wheeled vehicle does a better simulation, clearly the hydraulics have lost some of their zest.
The 'climate change' room was also a little off. Maybe this is a leftover from when they had the likes of BP sponsor the place.
I was not going to let anything spoil my perfect day out with my niece, so I wasn't miserable about the place when I was there. However, on reflection, the dilapidation was a glimpse of the future, a future where museums have screens to interact with but no staff to interact with.
I think you're mistaken if you got the impression that the museum once had guides. This isn't a recent trend, so far as I know it's been delightfully free from tour guides since 1881.
You had to buy tickets prior to 2001, so that's changed. (Was entry free in its early history too? Not sure.) That used to be your greeting, the ticket desk.
They had an earthquake machine in 1985, it must be the same one.
I didn't think that they would have guides, it was just odd to go into a city of millions and spend all day surrounded by people yet not have any need to share words with anyone for any reason whatsoever.
The NHM is free to enter, some special exhibitions charge for entry and I think some require free booking to manage crowds. There is a very strong encouragement to make a donation though.
As a tangent, I find it a bit annoying that so many UK museums advertise free pretty aggressively and then provide such "very strong encouragement" as you put it to attend. Mind you, there's less direct pressure than there is in some places. The Met in NYC used to have an optional but not really optional policy for museum admission as you got your pin though it now not optional at all for non-NYC residents.
Free to enter since 2001. Which means now they have (more) donation boxes.
My local museum started charging for entry a few years ago, along with a refurbishment, new exhibits, a bigger gift shop and a push to attract more tourists. So now it's horrible. I'm not sure what the unifying mistake is in both models, free entry and ticketed. I think the error might be in trying to serve the public.
I would get this for my laptop screen and plug in my existing colour monitor.
In this parallel universe, I can afford the flagship laptop with the latest and greatest CPU and ample RAM because I have saved big on getting the 4x3 1600x1200 screen instead of the 4K AMOLED colour screen. I also get to eek out extra battery life big-time since the laptop goes into suspend e-reader style so I don't even know.
On the train the laptop works fine with nobody wanting to steal my PC. If I really need colour, I just pull out my mobile phone.
But there will never be the market for that. Monochrome LCDs went at the start of the century since everyone just wants colour. It is the same on desktop where, like yourself, I would really want one and be prepared to buy one even though I would have never tried f.lux.
In the UK we have the venerable BBC which is struggling with the revenue model, cost of broadcasting and much else. I am not a fan but I think that under new leadership they could do the disruption.
In what way?
Youtube is not social media. Nobody makes new friends whilst on YT. However, broadcast TV in the olden days before satellite TV and video recorders provided a shared conversation for the whole nation. You could spark up a conversation by asking a friend if they saw something on the TV during the previous evening. Nowadays people say DON'T TELL ME, I HAVEN'T WATCHED IT YET with no further conversation possible without changing topic.
A video platform could build community by letting people know if their friends and family have enjoyed watching the same programmes. Also possible is a mechanism whereby you can have a schedule made just for you. I have two YT faves, one which is fun (parasocial relationship) and another which is intellectual. If it is early in the evening and I am possibly relaxing with food then I will want the former, not the latter. On a daily basis I could have what we had in the olden days, light entertainment in the early evening and stuff that requires some brain cells later.
Revenue is always interesting and the state broadcasters in the English speaking world might as well pool resources and supply content people enjoy as soft propaganda on a free basis with no adverts. If the CDNs are in place with everything cached with a little bit of P2P, the cost model for delivery could be improved on.
I don't know what their licensing deals look like, but they should sell subscriptions in foreign countries.
I pay $5cad/mo to get ad free access to the CBC catalog. I would gladly pay the same or even double for the BBC catalog or iPlayer (whatever its called).
They don't even offer that in the UK. Madness, imo, but true.
(iPlayer is free if you're a licence fee payer, but it's nothing close to the full back catalog, it's more like an 'aired recently' DVR with a tuner for every channel. Wouldn't at all be surprised if it's not even everything current though.)
(The Britbox joint venture with ITV was arguably closer to that, but still not, a curated collection.)
HN is mostly male. We need the opinion of the women that put a lot of effort into their appearance. Not wishing to over-generalise, but they need a thin phone that takes awesome selfies and shows that they are higher status than those with old fashioned bulky phones. Apple have ticked the boxes and they have probably booked out all the prime advertising spots to reach this demographic.
For those that are not chronically online, a mobile phone from a decade ago has everything they need. If you only have to phone the family, WhatsApp your neighbours, get the map out, use a search engine and do your online banking, then a flagship phone is a bit over the top. If anything, the old phone is preferable since its loss would not be the end of the world.
I have seen a few elderly neighbours rocking Samsung Galaxy S7s with no need to upgrade. Although the S7 isn't quite a decade old, the apps that are actually used (WhatsApp, online banking) will be working with the S7 for many years to come since there is this demographic of active users.
Now, what if we could get these people to upgrade every three years with a feature that the 'elderly neighbour' would want? Eyesight isn't what it used to be in old age, so how about a nice big screen?
You can't deliberately hobble the phone with poor battery life or programme it to go slow in an update because we know that isn't going to win the customer over, but a screen that gets tatty after three years? Sounds good to me.
I'm still want a phone with expandable storage and a headphone jack. Sony had one, but I don't know if they're selling them and I've heard they have their own issues too.
One extra 'thing' to need - at the moment I know that I can play music through anything that has a line-in, with just a cable. However Bluetooth seems to work ok - for devices that support it.
...but you have got working code and a nice refactoring job where you do everything to the agreed on coding standards, learn a bit from your colleagues in the peer review and end up with something that is done the right way that you can take pride in.
> And yeah countries like China messing with their map datum is weird. And so easy to compensate that it serves no military purpose.
They have bought into mangled maps and it would be a challenge to update everything for simple lat/lon. It would be easier to get every car in China to drive on the left, for them to change their railway gauge to 7' 1/4" or to move to the Swatch Internet Time standard. Think of all the title deeds, utility maps and everything that you need surveyors for.
As for military purpose, have you ever done any work with the military? Even though every army plays a good ballistics game, they tend not to be mathematicians. I would not want it to be tested, but my hunch is the mangled maps would work extremely well, even though their foes have had decades to do their own map making.
> Think of all the title deeds, utility maps and everything that you need surveyors for.
All you need for this is to know whether the existing number corresponds to the old system or the new system and a piece of code that can convert from one to the other.
Well, the old number is 35 feet south of a medium sized pine tree and the new number is 45.1234567, if you can solve for the code we can put Esri out of business.
Get a bicycle and learn the car free routes into town and to your work. Nobody puts up adverts on cycle paths. It isn't against the law, it just makes no commercial sense to do so.
By making the bicycle however you get about, you cut down on seeing ads.
It depends on where you live, however, I noted my 'ad free life' whilst in London. I went from the usual commute on trains and tubes with the odd bus thrown in for good measure to just riding my bicycle along the Thames. I went from seeing everything with adverts to seeing everything with herons, gulls, squirrels, trees and flowers. Rather than being tuned in to the latest junk to buy, I became tuned in to the ever changing seasons and what was in blossom.
Incidentally almost all my trips are already by bicycle, with on foot and with public transport numbers 2 and 3. Unfortunately, since almost everybody uses these modes of transportation here, there actually are ads everywhere still.
(Besides the idea of me having to adjust my route to -for now- not see ads being somewhat offensive to me too.)
The research wasn't entirely hidden as they did not have a monopoly on it.
In the 1980s, as a child, I remember learning at school about the greenhouse effect, or whatever we called it then. It was not difficult to understand, and neither was the 'nuclear umbrella' that we also had to contend with.
In the mid 1990s I was working in TV weather. We self-censored ourselves regarding global warming, or whatever we called it then. None of us were paid by big oil.
The euphemisms for 'climate change' tell their own story, it seems we need to downgrade the wording for the inevitable catastrophe every decade or so, I think we are on 'climate emergency' now.
As a result of what I learned in school, I genuinely adopted a low-carbon lifestyle which was quite hard to do when everyone was going the other way. If you step inside a car (when you have chosen to not own one) then you are deemed a hypocrite. If you don't eat those cows that create so much methane then you will be called a hypocrite for owning a leather belt. If you read a book then you will be called a hypocrite since trees had to be pulped. Be green and those stuck in the past will get all passive aggressive on you even if you aren't preaching to others.
When all is done we could collectively blame the oil companies for obfuscating the evidence of climate change. Similarly, when all is done with the current genocides going on, we can blame the politicians or the media for not letting us know the truth. Yet we are all a few clicks away from seeing how our alleged enemies 'report our crimes'. Yet, consciously or unconsciously, we censor ourselves.
Yes! Actually, there are times when the data needs a manual hack, there are countless places next to a lake with a mountain behind where I would have to put in the hack so the place next to the lake wasn't rounded up to the mountain or rounded down to the lake.
As for colours, we had those graphic designers that wanted to do their own 'mark' on the product, so the maps made by them were artist impressions with stupid colours such as blue for land and yellow for the sea. This makes things difficult if the animated gifs for the icons use yellow and blue, for things like the sun and the rain and it is your job to encode those gifs. That one was resolved by sacking the designer and making base maps the more scientific way, with AVHRR vegetation index, a bathymetry dataset and so on.
You would not believe the battles that have to be had to have maps that are fit for purpose rather than 'graphic designed'.
Other mundane tasks included setting the clocks at 2 a.m. twice a year, which would be easy, had it not been for the clocks costing £40k each, with them paired up for redundancy, and that pair paired-up for even more redundancy.
The clocks worked fine, however,timings could move around during the changeover from summer time since the clocks try and correct themselves. Change one and the other clocks would gang up on it and it would acquiesce. Costing £40k the clocks obviously did not show the time as that would be too obvious, there was just the timecode on wires going around the building. Then the only way to adjust them was to solder your own lead, plug it into a laptop and then telnet in.
As for deception, look at weather forecasting as more like gambling. Forecasters have gambling mentality and a very different way of understanding the weather to mere mortals. The behind the scenes chat on a daily basis is what you want, not the forecast. You get the bigger picture listening in to their chats.
Until recent times, commissioning was how it worked. This was why we only had paintings of kings and that guy called Jesus until Bruegel came along and painted peasants. Nobody was just painting whatever they wanted to paint, hiring a gallery and selling their 'art'.
The title of 'artist' is also an interesting one. Some titles have to be earned, for example, you can't call yourself a 'genius', an 'intellectual' or a 'hero' for obvious reasons. Yet creatives can call themselves an 'artist' as job description without society deeming them to be an 'artist'. In the olden days, before mass production, artists were just tradesmen doing a good job at whatever their trade was.
Our idea of art is deeply tied into capitalism. Compare the art of indigenous peoples with Western art. Art is all about fame and fortune rather than a love of the subject material and the craft.
One problem with the current status quo is that most artists are not in the commissioning game. Artists want to paint whatever their thing is, not some patron's dog, fancy house, religious deity or elderly relatives. If you do know someone making a living from painting people's dogs, then the question has to be asked, are they a real artist, or just a craftsperson?
Take the case of the architect, where the client is invariably calling the shots. Are they an artist? They don't need to be since they have the title of 'architect', however, few of them are called 'artist'.
Being 'artist' also comes with some understanding that the 'artist' doesn't have to work in the conventional sense, and therefore an 'artist' is high status. It works a bit like 'foot binding' in that regard since some people will want their kids to grow up to be 'artists', as in high status and not working for a wage. Sometimes this is just to validate the parent's life choices and shore up their status.
The real art of the age is all around us and made by commercial artists.
The commercial artist has a client and patron in the company they work for. They make adverts, packaging designs and such like, working within constraints. If working for Ford, the commercial artist isn't going to redesign the blue oval, they have to stick to the style guide, working within the constraints to make something new, in time and on budget.
So yes, commission what you want from an artist that puts the customer first.
Regarding the article, in the UK we had an art movement at the turn of the century with the likes of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and their ilk, pushed by Saatchi into art superstardom. However, about a year before 2008, this hustle came crashing down. If we currently have some cooling off in the art market then that is an indicator that the economy as a whole is heading for tough times.
I took my niece around the Natural History Museum in London recently, taking in the new 'Darwin' extension first. It was a liminal space of sorts with lots of broken screens. The tech had not been updated in a decade or more so you had Adobe Flash Player running, complete with the crash pop-up messages to let you know what version of Flash they were updated to.
The idea generally was to have a large touch table with a projector in the ceiling showing an image that could be interacted with. My 8 year old crash test dummy still enjoyed the screens, which was no surprise given that she is addicted to her tablet.
The touch table (however it worked) was not quite registered to the image projected on it. Some exhibits (screens) had a 'tell a friend' feature where you could enter an email address. However, all of the 'keys' were off, so you press 'Q' and you get 'W', or 'N' and you get 'M'. I persisted and entered my sister's email address.
Did she get the email?
What do you think!!!
Some of the screens had the toughest armour I have ever seen. ATMs are soft targets by comparison. I had never seen whole keyboards made of stainless steel before and found the level of vandal-proofing to be absurd.
Admittedly the throughput of the museum is absurd, in the UK every person gets to go there at least five times, once with mum and dad, another time with one set of grandparents, then with the school, then, as they have their own kids, they have to go again, then it is rinse/repeat when they are a grandparent.
The reason for going is dinosaurs. But they got rid of 'dippy' from the entrance hall.
Before you get to the entrance hall there is the begging chicane. This is a ridiculous entrance route back and fore between a dozen different begging bowls to support them financially. If you choose not to pay up, then you can then spend the next six hours not speaking or interacting with any humans apart from the ones you arrived with, except for maybe at the giftshop.
There were no annexes with staff doing talks, nobody apart from the beggars to greet you, but plenty of screens.
The brief for the new wing was to have scientists doing classification of specimens in such a way that they were on show, a 'working museum'. But nobody wanted to work in goldfish bowl conditions under the gaze of hordes of kids.
I don't want to dismiss the place in its entirety, the gardens outside were lovely even though they have a motorway-sized road next to you with considerable noise pollution. That's right, the place we send all our kids to for the big memorable day is made toxic with the filth of car dependency. The air is utterly disgusting there just because of car dependency. The whole area is full of museums and the whole lot needs to just be pedestrianised, but no, it is clogged up with those cheesy 'status symbol' cars people buy in London.
So there is this wall of cars outside and this wall of screens inside. Then the daylight robbery in the gift shop.
We didn't do the full tour, got to save some for the parents and school trip. But we did go to the earthquake room. It is modelled on a Japanese shop and shakes every few minutes. Shakes is being kind. A garden swing or any wheeled vehicle does a better simulation, clearly the hydraulics have lost some of their zest.
The 'climate change' room was also a little off. Maybe this is a leftover from when they had the likes of BP sponsor the place.
I was not going to let anything spoil my perfect day out with my niece, so I wasn't miserable about the place when I was there. However, on reflection, the dilapidation was a glimpse of the future, a future where museums have screens to interact with but no staff to interact with.
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