It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t live through it how transformation technology has been. When I was a child a computer was something mysterious. My Dad has managed to work his way up from the shop floor of the shipyard where he worked and into the planning office.
One evening he broad home some computer paper. I was fascinated by the the way the paper hinged on perforations and had tear off side edges that allowed it to be pulled through the printer with plastic sprockets connecting through holes in the paper.
My Dad used to compile and print off work orders using an ICL mainframe computer that was timeshared by all the shipyards that were part of British Shipbuilders.
I used the paper for years for notes and my childhood drawings. It didn’t make me a computer whiz. I never had a computer when I was at school. My school didn’t have a computer lab. I got to use Windows machines a few times in a regional computer labs. I still use what I learned in Excel spreadsheets now.
My experience with computers started with work and eventually bought my own secondhand Mac. Cut and paste completely changed the way I wrote. I got to use internal email working for Corning and internet connectivity when I went to university. One of my friends had a CompuServe account and I was there when he first met his Mexican wife on an online chatroom, years before Tinder.
Leaving college I set up a Yahoo! email address. I only needed to check my email address once a week, which was fortunate as internet access was expensive. I used to go to Liverpool’s cyber cafe with a friend every Saturday and showed him how to use the internet. I would bring any messages that I needed to send pre-written on a floppy disk that also held my CV.
That is a world away from the technology we enjoy now, where we are enveloped by smartphones and constant connectivity. In some ways the rate of change feels as if it has slowed down compared to the last few decades.
In Canada, as with other countries a beep electronic sound punctuated the correct time. In Canada, this is called the long dash because of its extended tone. In the UK and Ireland I have heard it called the ‘pips‘ three short beeps instead.
Consistency and precision
Before we had precise time mediated by a beep; consistency was still important. The time was marked in different ways:
Church bells
Farm estate clocks
Railway station clocks
Factory sirens
While this time would be consistent on a daily or weekly cycle, it gradually became apparent that it could differ from one town to another. Accurate time was crucial for mariners looking to gain an understanding of how east or west they were – their position in terms of longitude . You compare the position of the sun in the sky, how far it is on its access at midday GMT time and then back calculate your position. But marine chronometers were not commonplace onshore.
https://flic.kr/p/4Ui54r
Half a century after the development of the chronometer, George Stephenson’s work developing the steam locomotive started what we now think of as railways and the Bessemer steel process allowed for mass production of railway tracks. Railway timetables were the point at which widespread consistency and precision were needed, with a country (or at least a time zone in the case of large countries like Russia, Canada and the United States) having a common time.
Radio
Radio programmes carrying some sort of time signals allowed a country to use watches and clocks that weren’t chronometer accurate that could be periodically compared and reset against the beep of the time signal.
The delay in propagating a time signal in most countries was not meaningful. The beep also featured on speaking clock services where a caller could dial in to a telephone line at a time of their choosing to receive the precise time to the second, every ten seconds. BT still provides the service in the UK. They are used less frequently with the rise of quartz watches, mobile phones and computers.
The Angelus
In Ireland, Roman Catholic heritage combined with the need for a time signal meant that the bells were rung on TV and radio at 12 noon and 6pm for The Angelus. When the Angelus started on the radio, Roman Catholic households would be able to mutter the prayer to themselves. Having it on the radio also served a socio-political purpose as well as a time marking purpose in the Ireland of Eamon DeValera where piousness was a key part of the Irish identity the young country looked to foster.
Modern Ireland, particularly in the urban areas is a very different, more diverse Ireland than the rural-dominated Ireland of DeValera
RTÉ aside
Before Ireland went to a 24 hour broadcast schedule on RTÉ radio 1, the station turned on at 5:30am with an electronically created interval signal that was a more tuneful version of the beep.
This repeated at regular intervals until 6am when the announcer would the start of programming. It often marked my time to get up for my milk round or shift work.
It still appears at the same time, announcing the transition of overnight programming shared with RTÉ Gold to radio one’s first programme of the day Rising Time.
Technology systems
Accuracy was improved by the invention of the first atomic clock in 1955. This built on theoretical work that had been done from the 1930s onwards in the area of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) devices. By the mid-1960s Hewlett-Packard were building 19″ rack mountable atomic clocks, eventually it became small enough to squeeze on a satellite. By 2004, researchers had built an atomic clock mechanism the size of a coffee bean.
Atomic clock time codes are a crucial part of global positioning satellite signals. Mobile operators have used these. Then there are several radio stations around the world on shortwave and long wave transmitters who send out a regular time code. These timecodes are used to correct clocks and watches including Casio watches with the ‘Multiband 6 feature‘.
Prior to widespread adoption of the internet, computer network workstations, be they Mac or PC would have different times on them, usually set by the user or the system administrator at the computer. While mobile phone networks could distribute accurate time signals to mobile phones, they often didn’t. Some networks supported the summer time transfer, others didn’t.
The internet and workstation grade PC operating systems provided an opportunity for widespread use of network time protocol servers. Sudden your Mac and later on your iPhone and iPad would all have the same time.
Internet time problems
The internet, while providing a format for distributing relatively accurate time to machines has presented its own problem propagating time to humans. There can be a substantial amount of time difference between different ways of receiving broadcast content. The difference is most apparent between internet streaming and terrestrial broadcast radio and television. A good deal of this is down to the nature of best effort packet networks that support the modern web. Video and audio are buffered to provide a seamless experience rather than a precise experience. So time signals on IPTV and audio streamed radio are indicative at best rather than having precision.
Old money style has been a pre-occupation behind the recent fascination with quiet luxury a la Zegna and Loro Piana.
Loro Piana advertising
The fascination with old money style isn’t new. Streetwear brands and hip-hop culture borrowed from preppy style over the years. Brands like Stüssy, A Bathing Ape, Phat Farm and Sean Jean had pieces that aped preppiness – a second old money style. Prior to Phat Farm, Ralph Lauren had trodden the same path and it inspired ‘Dad style’ in Japan.
Barbour jackets moved off the grouse moors and on to the backs of yuppies in the 1980s and 1990s UK – an urban preoccupation that is still maintained today.
Normcore is the practice of wearing great fashion basics that aren’t heavily branded. More related content can be found here and here.
Harry Farrell and Abraham Newman on the weaponisation of the global financial and trade system highlighted in their book Underground Empire. If I had one criticism it would be viewing this purely as an American trait. A classic example would be Chinese policies (cyber-sovereignty, shadow trade sanctions, coerced technology transfer), Russian food terrorism or EU sanctions on Russia.
Bill Gates feels Generative AI has plateaued, says GPT-5 will not be any better | Technology News – The Indian Express – Gates also predicted that in the next two to five years, the accuracy of AI software will witness a considerable increase along with a reduction in cost. This will lead to the creation of new and reliable applications. Interestingly, he also said that he anticipates a stagnation in development initially. The billionaire said that, with GPT-4, the company has reached a limit, and he does not feel that GPT-5 will be better than its predecessor.
I started thinking about Canon semiconductor manufacturing disruption when I read this article: Canon looks to nanoimprint tech for 2nm lithography | EE News Europe. Canon semiconductor manufacturing disruption looked on the horizon with the announcement of its nano imprint technology. Nano imprint approach is something that has been explored for a a couple of decades, but had so far been rejected due to challenges of implementation.
Future Ventures on Moore’s Law
Canon now claims that they have it ready for production on middle edge processes with a potential address current leading edge processes. Canon has stuck with nano imprint as a development approach because it is adjacent to Canon’s core technology expertise in inkjet printing.
Canon semiconductor disruption depends on whether it can change the technology roadmaps of memory chip makers and other fabs. This is going to be unlikely, but Canon semiconductor manufacturing disruption could disrupt the outlook for other vendors, notably Dutch equipment maker ASML.
Canon semiconductor disruption seems to be part of a wider movement to rethink how semiconductors and adjacent products are manufactured to better facilitate further scaling at reduced capital costs, but few if any will be successful: Dracula plans Europe’s largest OPV plant with inkjet printing | EE News Europe
A New Age Of Genderless Brands? – Branding Strategy Insider – Mikimoto pearls managing to attract men. I see this as an extension of century’s old ‘dandy’ culture from the pearly kings and queens, to 1970s African American style in Detroit and some of Dapper Dan’s work that looked to come up with ostentatious looks.
Chinese Bloggers Might Soon Be Required to Display Their Real Names on Social Media Platforms – the government already knows who they are, this seems to be an effort to expose them more to the general public – which can be volatile and vindictive. And so, this is likely to be an effort to use crowd pressure to reduce divergent or innovative opinions, so the party becomes the originator.
Amazon is thinking about quantumcomputing | Patent Drop – Amazon’s tech essentially acts as a middleman between a quantum computer and the user interface. First, a user makes a request with this service through an “edge computing device” — their own device that isn’t connected to the quantum computer itself. Then the system will “automatically translate the quantum task, quantum algorithm, or quantum circuit” into a representation that a quantum computer can understand. This system will then pick the right quantum computer for a certain job, and work with it on the back end to complete the request
Dot as a post came out of me being zoned out and listening to a podcast while shaving as part of my weekend morning routine. Then it hit me whamo! The podcast I was listening to was by CSIS – a US think tank called The Truth of The Matter hosted by Andrew Schwartz.
https://flic.kr/p/2p9uyL4
The Truth of The Matter podcast in Apple’s Podcast app
At the end of the podcast I was listening to, they gave out the web address for the Center for Strategic and International Studies
C-S-I-S dot O-R-G
The Truth of the Matter
The first thing that struck me was ‘dot O-R-G’ rather than ‘dot org’; but then I started to think why wasn’t it period org (or O-R-G) for that matter.
In the UK and Ireland we call the dot at the end of a sentence a ‘full stop’. In the US they call it a period. Which made me wonder how we got to describing email and internet addresses in this way?
The history of top level domains has been well documented, but the history of the linguistics of top level domains hasn’t been.
Top level domain names potted history
What we would recognise as top level domain names like found in URLs and email addresses seems to have come about as part of the ARPANET developed and ran between 1969 and 1990. The Stanford Research Institute was responsible for the HOSTS text file that mapped IP addresses with domain names, it was assisted in this by part of the University of Southern California. It was a small network, so this ad-hoc system worked at the time. This evolved into a database based domain net system (DNS) in 1983, developed by University of Southern California when HOSTS performance started to slow the network down excessively.
Use of ‘dot com’ as a term
Since we are delving back into pre-web times, I used Google Books Ngram tool as a way of understanding the use of the term over time. 1993 was when the term took off.
This clip from NBC’s Today programme sees one of the presenters pause after each domain element rather than say ‘nbc dot ge dot com’
By the time I was watching The Site on my landlord’s cable TV in 1996, Soledad O’Brien, along with her animated co-host Dev Null* were dotting their way through email addresses and URLs like it was perfectly normal.
It’s usage peaked in 2001 and then declined as it became associated with the first internet business related bubble. Other domains such as org and net follow a similar track, but at a much lower volume.
Now the address in written form is enough, or even just a QRcode to be scanned. Oral usage lives on all around us.
The Whole Earth Catalogue was a publication that sat at the centre of so many movements over the past six decades and its influence is still with us today. The publication was founded by Stewart Brand in 1968. Brand had been a participant in the counterculture and environment movement that sprang out of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. Brand was particularly interested in a strand of counterculture that saw hippies follow in the footsteps of pioneers in America and go back to the land.
In order to do this and become more self sufficient, Brand looked to collate and share knowledge on how to do things and the best products to get in order to facilitate it. This became The Whole Earth Catalogue which provided access to tools and knowledge.
The marble in space
The first issue published in 1968 featured a NASA satellite picture of the earth in space, the first picture of its kind.
https://flic.kr/p/2p9hyLc
Colour photograph of the whole Earth (western Hemisphere), shot from the ATS-3 satellite on 10 November 1967.
The publication of the photo of the earth floating like a marble in a black void gave emphasis to how fragile the earth was to environmentalists.
The Whole Earth Catalogue stopped publishing on a regular basis in 1972 and instead went to a sporadic mode of publishing until 1998 including related publications like Coevolution Quarterly, various Whole Earth Catalogue compilations and Soft Tech which predicted the empowering role of technology that influenced early netizens including The Grateful Dead. While The Whole Earth Catalogue stopped, its influence lived on through The WeLL, the Global Business Network (acquired by Monitor Deloitte), Wired magazine and The Long Now Foundation.
Stewart Brand revisited some of the underlying philosophy around the environment that begat The Whole Earth Catalogue with his 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline. Now The Whole Earth Catalogue lives on as an almost complete online archive of its issues and related publications.
Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter – The Verge – “Thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.”
They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie? | The New Yorker – “‘When you look at [Gino’s paper], it just makes no sense,’ [one professor] said. But, he added, ‘even in safe spaces in my world, to bring up that someone is a data fabricator—it’s, like, ‘Our friend John, do you think he might be a cannibal?’” – on Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino’s research
Neil Shen plots global expansion for Sequoia’s China spin-off | Financial Times – venture capital giant HongShan, which announced its split from Sequoia Capital this year, is establishing a global footprint as a slowdown in the domestic economy pushes it overseas. Neil Shen, the group’s founding partner, who led Sequoia’s China business for 18 years until it was forced to separate under political pressure in June, is seeking business opportunities and investments worldwide to benefit HongShan’s Chinese portfolio companies, according to seven people familiar with his plans – expect regulatory roadblocks in the west
Goldberg: The fracturing of the U.S. political left over Israel, Hamas – San Jose Mercury News – Many progressive Jews have been profoundly shaken by the way some on the left are treating the terrorist mass murder of civilians as noble acts of anti-colonial resistance. These are Jews who share the left’s abhorrence of the occupation of Gaza and of the enormities inflicted on it, which are only going to get worse if and when Israel invades. But the way keyboard radicals have condoned war crimes against Israelis has left many progressive Jews alienated from political communities they thought were their own. – I am not surprised that this has happened. The left wing terrorists of the cold war era trained in the middle east and there is a latent sympathy on the left
The End of an Era: Update on the Johnny’s Idol Scandal | J-List Blog – TL;DR – Japan’s equivalent of Simon Fuller turns about to be Japan’s equivalent of Jimmy Saville. The Japanese media was complicit, but have so far come out unscathed, and hundreds of people in the entertainment industry are struggling to work. Johnny’s victims are still scarred.
The return of Mansur Gavriel | Vogue Business – Mansur Gavriel is launching MG Forever, a resale programme for customers to buy and sell used handbags and for the brand to sell off samples. It’s the first big launch since co-founders Rachel Mansur and Floriana Gavriel reclaimed the brand, resuming their roles as co-creative directors this year. And, it’s a statement: Mansur Gavriel is not trend-led, its products are timeless – this sounds like a definition of classic luxury rather than new luxury. Read with Platforms race to take a slice of the vintage jewellery market | Financial Times
Kazakh telco provider Altel gets AI-nnovative in new campaign | Analysis | Campaign Asia – Faced with dwindling market shares and an over-saturation of foreign imagery making up their key brand campaigns, Kazakhstan’s oldest telco provider revamps their brand persona by using AI to tap into the look, feel and desires of their national consumers. – this is going to be a problem with Image libraries (iStock Photos, Getty Images etc). When I think of the number of campaign assets I have worked on in the last 18 months alone that relied exclusively on image libraries rather than campaign photoshoots – the impact will be huge.
Driving Impact through Inclusive Advertising: An Examination of Award-Winning Gender-Inclusive Advertising: Journal of Advertising: Vol 0, No 0 – Theoretical and managerial contributions include (1) identification of how social impact is conceptualized in award-winning inclusive advertising and how impact functions through awards, (2) development in the definition of inclusive advertising to include social impacts as an outcome, and (3) a reimagining and expansion of the concept of inclusive advertising through a proposed Inclusive Advertising Spectrum, which encompasses representation
How the attacks in Israel are changing Threads | Platformer – In my dim and distant memory, I can recall how not being able to log into Friendster drove early social media users to MySpace and Facebook. Twitter has a similar issue, not in terms of being able to physically log-in, but in being able to discuss topics in a less toxic environment on other platforms. This could be Twitter’s Friendster moment.
How to use Japan’s new self-checkout supermarket carts | SoraNews24 -Japan News- – We found the system to be very convenient, but it doesn’t come without concerns for locals. One of the most glaringly obvious worries is the chance that some customers might fail to scan items, leading to a loss for the supermarket that might result in price hikes that would negatively impact all customers – but would still be far less prevalent than in the UK
BMW’s Next Car Launch Is Happening In Fortnite | Jalopnik – alignment between buyers and channel is poor, BUT, if you think about this more as aspirational brand building its spot on. And probably a better decision than a motorsports programme nowadays
