Synchronicity, yet again...

My brother recently asked about the (social interaction) process by which I arrived at the "On the bench" photographs. (Several others have asked related questions.)

In the course of answering, yesterday morning, I made reference to portraiture as a joint enterprise between portrayer and portrayed (in this case, photographer and subject). While still thinking about that, I found the following Unreal Nature extract from Deleuze's Cinema 2: The Time-Image:

“… The author takes a step towards his characters, but the characters take a step towards the author: double becoming. Story-telling is not an impersonal myth, but neither is it a personal fiction: it is a word in act, a speech-act through which the character continually crosses the boundary …”

Which seems much the same thing ... and could apply as much to characters in a novel as in a film. Perhaps all arts are a similar contract. Perhaps social interaction itself is, too.

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• Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2 : the time-image. 2005, London: Continuum. 0826477062. (Original: Cinéma II: L'image-temps, Collection "Critique", 1985, Paris; first English trans 1989).

Burrowing into the bran tub

Intelligence organs of a fairly small but technologically proficient country managed to clone the email and document bases of a fairly large but unsuspecting company with an active and diverse research operation. Not the research results bases themselves; just the email and document archives. The immediate benefits of the theft were obvious, mundane, and irrelevant here. More interesting from a scientific computing viewpoint (if no more morally or legally defensible) were the spinoffs from applying statistical information mining techniques to the combined database contents.

As a direct result of the operation, other companies, seen as friendly to the small country's interests, received repackaged and anonymised material suggesting productive new lines of enquiry. Patents resulting from these have already been filed; others are in the pipeline. The large company which was the target of the operation, significantly, remains unaware of the opportunities which exist within components of its own activities which have never been brought together.

The story illustrates a truth: that much knowledge is locked away in information stores assembled for one set of reasons and never reexamined in other ways.

Less melodramatically, and less dubiously, information openly published on the internet forms a huge field within which to prospect potential information seams - "The low user entry barrier of the Web has resulted in massive amounts of unstructured and weakly structured data referring to objects, concepts, user interests and communities", to quote the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at Galway. As SAS's David Smith points out, tweets and blog entries can contain pointers to early identification of potentially vital phenomena. This is an aspect of what is known in the industry as pharmacovigilance, which "can be defined as a set of practices aiming at the detection, understanding and assessment of risks related to the use of drugs in a population, and the prevention of consequential adverse effects [or] in a narrower sense ... postmarket surveillance"^[1]. [More...]

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1. Langlitz, N., "Pharmacovigilance and Post-Black Market Surveillance" in Social Studies of Science, 2009. 39(3): p. 395.

On the bench

My apologies to anyone who has come looking for this post, which showed a series of photographs of people using public benches in a south coast English seaside town. There are plans afoot for those pictures, including an exhibition (physical, on a wall) and a book. While things are worked out, the copies here have been withdrawn for the time being.

Red sky at night...

Over Richmond, a beautiful evening sky of flung streamers across a million songs in red and gold and grey against a turquoise backdrop. I haven't even attempted to photograph it.

Lunch date

With (unusually) time to spare near Manchester Square, I've spent a quietly pleasant hour renewing my acquaintance with Madame Perregaux.

No reproduction, ink or digital, can ever match the physical presence of paint.

Severance

I know that this bronze (Nic Fiddian-Green's Horse at water, at London's Marble Arch) should evoke for me all the positive equine characteristics ... but, ever since it was erected last year, I can't shake off flashbacks to The Godfather.

Something new under the sun[less sea]

Most of us live full, productive, valuable lives, contributing to the world but without fundamentally changing it.

I certainly see myself in that way. My involvement in research has discovered new things, but they were things which filled in small crevices entirely within what was already known, confirming rather than challenging existing structures ... they might be surprising, if I was very lucky they might prompt me or others to think differently, but they didn't upset anything or break new ground. I take photographs which I am satisfied earn their place in the world, and some which people buy, but I haven't taken the arts by the ears and taken it in a new direction or invented a new way of seeing. Same for my writing. I'm very happy with that as an epitaph: he kept the garden growing, he helped to keep it free of weeds, he left it a little tidier and perhaps just an imperceptibly tiny bit more colourful than he found it.

The same is true of most people I know. I know and have known some extraordinary people, who have done extraordinary things and made huge differences to others; but none of them altered the way the world is believed to be. Or, so I thought this time yesterday. Just after midnight, in a quiet and undramatic sort of way, that changed.

Kyle Reynolds is the first named author on a paper whose abstract I was sent last night. Having read the abstract, I had to go and fetch the whole thing and read it through: New Molluscan Larval Form: Brooding and Development in a Hydrothermal Vent Gastropod.

At this point, I should fess up: my claim to "know" Ms Reynolds is something of an exaggeration. In fact, the whole extent of our acquaintance is that we once exchanged elusive jazz CDs ... and by post, at that, not in person. No matter: the buzz is real.

If you have an interest in the biological sciences (you don't have to be a biologist; I'm certainly not), you will follow the link in my footnote below and realised how exciting it is. The illustration here, copied from the full article, shows the position (bp) of the brood pouch.

If not, then you may well have decided to stop reading by now ... I did try to develop an explanatory analogy, but it just sounded silly so I gave up; you'll just have to trust me: it is exciting, and will require that part of existing conventional zoological wisdom be revised. And have I mentioned that I once exchanged jazz CDs with the primary author?

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• Kyle C. Reynolds, et al., "New Molluscan Larval Form: Brooding and Development in a Hydrothermal Vent Gastropod, Ifremeria nautilei (Provannidae)" in Biological Bulletin, 2010(219): p. 7. Abstract available from: http://www.biolbull.org/cgi/content/abstract/219/1/7

The three amigos

Steve Wheeler's posting of a photograph showing the ICT kit he packs for attending a conference (or, more accurately, TTMF's subsequent expression of surprise at the size of that kit) prompted me to consider a comparison photograph of my own. I haven't yet taken the photograph, but I've done a lot of resultant thinking about it.

What I take to a conference isn't, to be honest, radically different from what I carry all the time. The real difference is where I'm travelling to. Much of what I carry, and upon which I rely without much thought, in a day to day existence within the industrialised urban cocoon, ceases to be useful when I venture outside. So much of it depends upon batteries, for instance.

Steve Wheeler's photo contains a Nintendo DS, an Apple iPhone, and an Apple iPod Touch. I vaguely wondered why both Apple devices, since the Touch is essentially an iPhone without the phone bit ... but not enough to try and find out. My own rough equivalents of those three would probably cause equal puzzlement to many other people: a Nokia E63, a very battered, down at heel and (in most people's eyes) elderly Sony Ericsson K750i, and an Apple iPod Touch.

Oh, very well, I give up ... prodded by one reader only seconds after putting up this post for the first time, I've taken the time out to photograph at least those three gizmos after all ... there's the pic, on the left. You can see how worn at the edges the Sony Ericsson is

I have a number of love/hate things to say about Apple in general and the iPod Touch in particular, and I really don't have time at the moment, so I'll put that one off until another post, but ... why both the E63 and the K750i, you may ask (and if you don't, my students will – all the time)? Aren't they both internet connected 3G phones?

Good question; two answers.

First, they do (in my personal cosmology) different things. The K750i, despite it's other capabilities, is a good phone to actually talk on ... it is my voice communication device. The E63 is my "on the hoof" text communication device of choice (SMS or checking, and even sometimes quickly replying to, email) and at a web viewer ... and, as I've mentioned before, my diary. I like to be able to look at my diary while discussing arrangements on the phone, and can't be arsed with hands free wires dangling from my ears while I do it.

Second (and this, really, is the point): if I'm going to be out of reach of mains power, the E63 will have given up the ghost after 48 hours or so while the K750i will keep going for up to ten days. If I really need to, I can shut them down at night and get longer battery life that way ... but it works better with the K750i than with the E63, emphasising the difference all the more.

(As an aside, the K750i is also the better built. If I'm scrambling up a cliff face, slipping on wet rocks, or dropping a heavy rucsac on it, it won't turn a hair. I wouldn't like to try the same with either of the other devices.)

I won't forget my promise to discuss the Apple thing. Later. Watch this space.

Now playing

After two days of heavy rain, this morning brought brilliant sun again over ground still wet with birdsong.

Now playing: The Hollies, "Bus stop".

Windows of opportunity

Today, according to a Buddhist calendar note in my diary, is an Auspicious Haircutting Day.

On the other hand, so is Sunday, when I'd planned to do it anyway...