BS — not!

Quentin and Martin took a break from inventing and went for a nice rural ramble at the weekend, only to find a formidable bull taking a close interest in their activities. Photos here. Wonder if they had a red rag.

What not to do in bed

It gets worse.

After the dentist’s chair, comes this:

Martin Heiddeger once said that technology was “the art of arranging the world so that one doesn’t have to experience it”. Precisely. Thanks to Dave, from whom nothing is hidden, for the link.

Tools for thought

For as long as I can remember, the Holy Grail of computing (at least for me) has been to find tools that actually help in making one a better, more efficient or more creative writer. And I’m not talking about word-processing but something that can do for authors what, say, the spreadsheet did for accountants and planners. The word processor is, well, just that — a tool that processes words. But where do the words come from? And can computing help in stimulating or generating the ideas that are expressed in words? So far, the answer seems to be “not much”.

It’s not that there aren’t lots of programs out there which help one store, index, organise and retrieve information, create ‘mindmaps’, even do brainstorming, etc. But none of these tools maps naturally onto the way one thinks — or at least the way I think. So there’s a tradeoff: given that I have to change the way I work in order to accommodate the software, do the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs? So far, the answer has usually been ‘”no”.

Enter Steven Johnson, a writer I admire. He’s produced several really interesting, stimulating, thoughtful books — notably Interface Culture. So when he published an essay in Sunday’s New York Times about a software tool he swears by, I sat up and took notice. The software in question is called DEVONthink. Johnson has given a much fuller explanation on his Blog of how he uses it. I was sufficiently intrigued to download the software and get it to index all the documents, web pages, images, etc. on my hard drive. It’s a very interesting tool with a fairly steep learning curve. And to get the most out of it one would (as usual) have to adjust one’s working methods to fit in with its underlying metaphors. Nevertheless, Johnson has persuaded me that it’s worth exploring it in more depth.

Oh — bad news for Windows users: DEVONthink is for Mac OS X only.

Skype now available for Linux

Yep!. Yippee! The only downside is that the kids will demand another headset. Sigh.

Dog bites man. And Google doing well. That’s news for you

Today’s NYT reports:

“Google … surprised Wall Street yesterday by announcing that its sales and profit margins grew much faster than expected in the fourth quarter.

The results were a sharp contrast to the company’s warnings in November that its revenue for the quarter would probably decline because of increased competition and an inevitable slowing as a result of its growth.

Google’s shares surged in after-hours trading, rising nearly 10 percent to more than $210, a record for the company, which sold shares in its initial offering in August for $85 each.

‘More humans around the world are using Google and they are spending more time with Google per human,’ the chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, said last night in an interview.”

Hah! Note the use of the word “human”. Those rumours that Google is developing a search engine aimed at dogs are true!