Songsterr automated guitar tabs

Just had one of those moments where the thing that I've been looking for or was surprised that I hadn't seen online suddenly appeared. I've been learning the guitar for about 8 months now and I've got to the point where I've started to look for guitar tabs online. It's almost like going back in time to the late 90's where the websites are poorly constructed and full of ads.

There had been that niggling thought in the back of my mind, surely someone could do a better job and they have. It's called Songsterr and it not only shows the guitar tabs, but you can hit play and it plays them for you. It's clearly computer generated, but the accuracy of it makes it easier to hear what they're actually doing and therefore ideal for learning guitar. It even grades the difficulty of the songs so that you can attempt songs you would be capable of.

Brilliant. Songsterr.

Publish Post

Foursquare and Ten Friends to the pub...

Ok, so the internet is full of fads. Maybe Foursquare is one, maybe it isn't. Do I know the answer? No, do I care, not particularly. Mostly because I'm just enjoying this one. Not only is Foursquare fun but it's the side of social networking that seems to make sense.

You 'check-in' to venues in your immediate vicinity and in doing so, alert your friends to your activities and location. Check in to your local pub and your friends might just think that's a good idea too. Moreover, if they're already there at the same venue you'll find out straight away.

It's early days, but my page is http://foursquare.com/user/-2248787

Daytum let's you record your life your way

If you've ever wondered how much coffee you actually drink, or how much time you spend commuting every day then an educated guess is about all you could manage. If you're Nicholas Felton you might have taken this even further - to the extent of recording elements of your daily life for an entire year and turning them into a summary graphic.

This dedication lead Nicholas and Ryan Case to create Daytum. Think of anything that you would want to record and then add it to daytum. It stores it for you and allows you to easily output the information in the form of tables graphs and random images. The only limits are your commitment and your imagination.

Sign up today at www.daytum.com. My daytum page is www.daytum.com/richgarner. It's early days but hopefully it will start taking some shape in a few weeks.

Japanese Ring tones cure sinusitis

Japan has taken that step towards your mobile phone being a medical health device by designing a ring tone that clears your sinuses... hana SUKKIRI MELODY has variable frequencies that are said to dislodge the pollen from your nasal cavities and let it fall out your nose. Will this lead to a speight of people holding their phones to their noses rather than answering them? Not sure, but it seems a little far fetched. You can download this ringtone here.

If this was such a good idea, why not come up with sounds that have therapeutic effects elsewhere? Frequencies that dislodge the earwax from your ears, or are played after closing time to sober people up for the way home, or music that makes you better in bed.... though that already exists I suppose.

LOCAL GOOGLE - INFURIATING

OK, 10 points goes to the person who can work out how to actually get to www.google.com from the UK. It's crazy.Any variation on typing in www.google.com actually re-directs me to the www.google.co.uk website. This includes:

1. Typing www.google.com into my browser
2. Searching for Google.com and clicking on the google results and still getting re-directed
3. Starting 'safe browsing' - i.e. supposedly anonymous browsing and trying the above.

You can't change any of this through your search settings.

A little research has found that it's actually google doing this at their end, when they see my IP address, so the only way to get around it seemingly is to spoof your IP address. Or, to use their new secure version of Google search which is on https://www.google.com

WORDPRESS IS MORE THAN A BLOGGING SERVICE

Ok, so if you know me well then you know that although I have my moments of genius I also have my 'slow' moments. To be honest, I think my lack of realisation that blogging sites had become web site building services is one of those. Perhaps it's because of their slow, insipid creep towards being self-building websites that it's crept in under my radar. Perhaps it's because I'm still old school enough to think that sites that build websites can't be the best approach. Either way it's naive.

Not only is Wordpress an amazing way to build a website, people with little or no knowledge of how a website works can build websites in a fraction of the time it takes to build one in dreamweaver and ultimately had far more of the social media services & functionality built in than I could ever manage. Enhancing the site involves downloading another widget and installing it. Bingo. Hours of an individual's work captured and used to your end's without you missing a single night's sleep or having to cancel that date. What happened to the geek crown of sacrifice?

All I can say is, if you have ever wanted to build a website but don't know how or just want the opportunity to express some random part of your personality then give it a go. It's so easy it's embarassing.

ONLINE BACKUP SERVICE

Fret no more about whether or not your computer, or indeed any internet connected device is backed up. It's ok to have an external backup drive, but realistically we just don't back up to it enough. Complacency sets in and all of a sudden it's been months since the last back up and critical files are at risk of loss.

Fail rates of drives may be low, but 2% fail in some way in the first year, but it's not just that. 43% of people manage to accidentally delete files every year, plus there is the issue of theft. Only 3 in every 100 laptops that are stolen are recovered, plus there's fire, dropping your laptop, spilling water on it. I'm not suggesting it's going to happen, but sometimes these things do. Let's face it, when it does happen, it's devastating. It was the loss of my drive 10 years ago that led me to start my photo website so that I felt that at least in some part, my photos would always be there. 

Carbonite is a backup system that uses your broadband network to backup your entire drive of your laptop or your phone to the internet. Clever software you install monitors what files have changed and backs them up in the background without you doing a thing. All this for less than £50 a year. Brilliant.

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GOOGLE IN PRIVATE

Google launched something pretty cool today, but perhaps something that wouldn't immediately appear so. If you've ever wanted to search for something without your ISP knowing about it - for example illegal downloads - then you may have been concerned about using your search to do so. Not any more. Google have launched a secure version of their Google.com search which means that only Google and you know what it is that you searched for.

The same goes if you are on a public computer - you can search without worry that the next person is going to see your search history - though it may well still be tracked on your machine if you're not using private browsing. 

It's only available on the main google.com site at the moment and can be reached either by going to the www.google.com site and then putting an 's' after the http or by bookmarking that page i.e. https://www.google.com.

Now, what can I search for?

phone posting

This is my first ever phone post. seems weird to think this is publishing to the web, from my Android phone, over the phone network, on to the web, into my blogger site, onto my blog and streamed via RSS to miune. Simple? No. Impressive? Yes.

I drove an electric car today!!!

Wow. Well this is one of those moments - the first time I ever drove an electric car. It was very impressive to be honest. Not only was it electric, but it was a great car too.

Based on the Mitsubishi 'i' car chassis, the engine has been replaced by a purely electric drive train and battery that can be charged from the household mains from flat to full in 6hrs. Not bad, bit like my phone really. That charge will cost you £1, making the annual estimated bill £144. Brilliant.

Driving it is so different. The power is totally consistent, a bit more like the opposite of breaking - it's smooth and even rather than jerky, either as a result of the engine changing gear manually or automatically. Spookily quiet as well, though with the windows down - it was a summer's day - the sounds of the city were enough.

Acceleration was good - we beat a Bentley and a Prius off the lights by quite a margin - apparently it's about 30% quicker than an equivalent 'city car'. It's due out at the start of next year thanks to the government's recent announcement that they are giving £5k rebate off electric cars and although I don't think I'll be getting one myself just yet (at about £30k) if I had the cash and lived in the city I'd probably do it. No congestion charge, no car tax and less than a weekend's spending money a year on charging. Life changing.

PIPE DREAMS

So, on the massive voyage of discovery that the internet seems to be these days, in trying to work out how to 'mashup' information from the web into a single feed for my site I discovered yahoo pipes.

To say this online service is comprehensive is an understatement, it's like looking for a subway, but finding a gourmet deli counter, that's free. You can take any source of information from the web and combine, filter and tweak the information into an output format of your choice. All online. All through an easy to use visual editor.

I had no idea that yahoo offered services like this, but Yahoo Pipes is truly a killer service.

PUBLISHING RSS FEEDS IN HTML

I've discovered webrss.com, which has provided a partial answer to the immediate issues of how to publish content to my site. I've managed to combine multiple RSS feeds (for Free!) into a single home page, but am starting to realise that it's only part of the solution. Because the feeds are in javascript they take a while to load up - something that you can get away with in PHP. In refreshing my website I'm also starting to realise quite how much work it's going to take to re-build my site. I just can't believe wordpress is going to provide the solution, but we'll see. I'm starting to think a combination of RSS feeds in a PHP site is the only way. I must resist.

Update (10th June 2010) - Although WebRSS works it doesn't. Sometimes nothing appears on the page at all which is a problem when most of the page is now built using feed mashups. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to publish the content through feeds without using PHP.

PACMAN HITS 30!

As if there's wasn't enough about to remind us that we're getting old, even a neon yellow ball of joy can age. Google, as per normal, out did everyone IN THE WORLD by recreating their logo as a grid for pac man. Have a go for old time's sake at the Pacman 30th anniversary site

ONE STEP CLOSER

Ok. So I've worked out how to get a self-hosted wordpress.org blog up on my site, but still haven't worked out how to maintain a website outside of wordpress but maintain the blog within it.

Currently, the only option seems to be to build a new version of my existing site, which is currently in Html in PHP because the site needs to translate the RSS feed into HTMl. There is one other option, that involves using a site that converts feeds into html. I'll give it a go, maybe this will be the first post I use when I've cracked it.

To PHP or not to PHP?

Woah, the veil of technical complexity descends. I've managed to get to a point where I've realised that most hosting providers either support external blog sites like wordpress or blogger, but if you want to have control of your blog on your site it's all a little bit tricky.

So far, I've managed to get my hosting to set up a content management system (Drupal) on the www.futurish.com domain, but somewhat inconveniently the only blog service it seems to instantly support is wordpress not blogger. I'm now a little bit torn as to which one I should use.

The only alternative seems to be to create my futurish, or indeed any other site I want to host my own blog within my own functional site in PHP - something which to date is a little outside of my abilities. The question is whether or not it's a good idea to learn PHP just to solve this problem. Part of me is intrigued but another part of me is reminded that this is supposed to be something that is accessible to all not just to the few - I need to find a formula that makes it work for all.

The saga continues...

Self-fulfilling prophecy

Whether I like it or not, once I get an idea for something that, like an old town bypass, suddenly creates a quicker route from my mental or emotional A to B, I can't help but obsess about it. It is of course, simultaneously healthy and unhealthy to have such things in mind and as a result I've developed an equal ability to suppress such urges as I have to achieve them.

One thing that has always slightly stumped me and I should doubt anyone else, is how come people have blogs or websites but rarely both. Ok, so this sounds instantly geeky, but I think that's just a quick response to a slightly more fundamental question - which is why most websites are so humanless, whereas blogs are almost a bit to personal. It strikes me that this same aspect of the human condition to be unable to be simultaneously human and functionless and robotic and functional exists on the web.

The frustration also comes from the fact that I love building and creating websites, but that online blog applications are far better at it than I, at least in the simplicity and ease of doing so. It's blog applications that have really brought personalised websites to the masses and with that they have brought both genius and placed the internet in the hands of the non-technical. Which, let's be honest, is ultimately better and what the web is really about. Right on?

Anyway, this is all a meandering pre-amble away from the fact that I have decided to conquer this particular dilemma of mine and try to develop a site which is a mix of both blog & traditional website. Please note this is not just a technical challenge but also an attempt to create a style of site that brings both function and humanity.

Here we go.

Online TV services

For some strange reason, I've only just heard of TVcatchup. Nothing short of brilliant, particularly if you want to watch freeview TV in a room where you don't have a TV already - say the kitchen or your bedroom, but you do have a laptop.

It turns your laptop into a TV, giving you a choice of all the Freeview stations, along with an EPG / TV guide that actually works. You can't record programmes through it, but you can watch, seemingly to your heart's content.

TVcatchup (www.tvcatchup.com) is dependent on you having a good broadband connection, but if you're like me and you pay to have a good internet connection then it's both a great justification for paying the extra for broadband and saves me buying a TV for a room that only needs one on occasion.

Google Whacked Out?

The seemingly innocuous task of trying to find a google search that only returns one result may have already been done to death, but with this in the back of my mind I wondered how Google images could be tested in a similar fashion. I've long been conscious of the 'safe search on' or 'moderate safe search on' elements to Google and in that vein rapidly removed them, much to my colleagues surprise when I was searching for a silhouette for a web design I was doing.



This got me thinking what terms were associated in people's minds with 'unsafe' images and what words or phrases would illicit such 'unsafe' material? What innocent phrases would result in an embarrassing desktop situation at work. I decided to try out a few phrases and in doing so, invented a measuring system for the results. It was simple; how many pages of images arose before something 'unsafe' arrived.

OK. So thought I would start with a fairly obvious, but not necessarily sinister one: Woman. You'll be pleased, and somewhat unsurprised to find that there were some 'unsafe' images on the first page, indeed the first image itself was a little risque, though not offensive. The same can not be said for the other images on the page, which frankly would have even made Pat Butcher wince. Not really sure what the ratio of safe / unsafe would be on the first page but I reckon it was about 60/40 safe/unsafe and that's including the picture of a woman with a beard and a 320 pound woman bearing down on a midget as 'safe'. So really, not that safe either way.

I'm now dreading the startlingly obvious, but perhaps less sinister: Man. Being the generic, but admittedly sexist common name for our species I hoped that the results would be perhaps a little more academic in nature. In this circumstance I was saved, though there was full nudity on the first page, but only graphically in one instance. Relatively safe and certainly not pornographic.

Although it's given me an idea for future posts I have to say I felt a little bit disappointed that Google's image search was so easily tainted.

3D over-kill for street maps or was it an April fool's stunt?

Don't, don't, don't, don't believe the hype. Well it's a bit tough at the moment to know what's going on with Streetmaps other than that is appears to have ground to a complete halt. After the April 1st launch of '3D' street view and me, for one, thinking that it might actually be the case, the removal of the '3D' version seems to have been as painful as stapling one's proverbials to a virtual table.

The service was near unusable for a couple of days and now the '3D' version doesn't seem to exist. Which is a little frustrating after having spent my fiver on some paper 3D glasses to see if it did work, but hey, I suppose I now have the opportunity to find another use for them. At least if it turns out not to be a hoax then I'm poised to take a proper look. 

Facebook Divorce Catalyst

Ever been dumped on facebook, or caught your partner facebook stalking someone else? Well, you're not alone. It seems that it's more common than we thought. Latest results show that 19.78% of UK divorces in 2009 quoted Facebook as being a factor.


















Let's be clear on this. Not that facebook was hard to use after a tough break up because they saw their partner having loads of fun or that they couldn't bear to look at their profile with all the history there in their face. No. Nearly 1 in 5 quoted it as a factor. That means that they either perceived the use of facebook or did use facebook in order to cause partial grounds for divorce. Wow. I'm clearly not using facebook properly.

Having said that, in the early days of facebook I did 'marry' my beautiful friend Natasha, only to receive loads of calls and texts from people who were upset I didn't invite them to the wedding and who was Natasha anyway. Natasha will always stand as both my first facebook wife and my first facebook divorce. I suppose that makes me a facebook widower.

Suppose I better get on with the trudgery of finding someone else... now, it's got to be time for a new profile picture...

Travelling without moving

In search of a break from city life I found myself looking for a holiday online but was just confused by the choice and scared by the prices. Not only do you have to try and work out where's good to go, but how you can justify the cost to yourself. There has to be an easy way... Could it be possible to have a cheap break from the comfort of my home?

The first result was Earthcam - a network of webcams across the world. There's some great kitesurf location webcams, but they're not that great for the fast action of kiting. Similarly, the webcams from the ski resort of tignes is great for checking what the snow is like, but not great to give you a sense of being there.Princess cruises offers you a view from the bridge of each of their cruise ships, but again it's only updated every 5 minutes.

Basically, I'm left wanting. It's clearly possible to explore the world via the web, but we're a long way from an experience to remember... but then... I remember to check Google.

Just so happens that on the 1st April, Google started making some of the cities in their Street View available in 3D. Finally, a use for those old 3D glasses! Unfortunately the one's you've nicked from the local cinema won't work..

The glasses you need are Anaglyph glasses Red & Cyan, which can be bought for about a fiver from www.ebay.co.uk or www.bestofferbuy.com. I just ordered some from ebay.

I checked and the Opera House in Sydney and that's available in 3D, so I'm going to make a list of all the places to visit for when my 3D specs arrive.

Global Hypertwitter

Before the days of twitter, people had to make do with technology that was a little more physical. Take Global Hypercolor as a brilliant idea. You wear clothes that change colour according to your body temperature, therefore giving a generation of kids a great excuse to grope each other in the name of science. Touch and learn kids.

The easy bit of course is that you could literally see the affect, something which technology these days seems to lack. What is the affect of twitter? Where is it how can I see it other than seeing iPhone users constant sweeping their screens with their fingers. Wouldn't it be great if you could see Twitter in action, maybe by people's messages being displayed on the back of their phone whilst they are holding it up, or even projecting it out onto a nearby wall.

Or, even more simply, a phone that changes colour as you talk, sensing your mood or listening out for particular words or intonation that tells people whether or not you are open to be interrupted or even groped around the waist, just for the sake of creating body heat.

Living Forever..... what are the chances

It's almost accepted these days that everyone has some kind of online presence, even if it's just a facebook page. But as we hop from myspace to facebook to twitter to chat roulette, what kind of legacy do we leave behind. What happens to all the images on flikr, on countless pages across the web? As the year's pass they seem to dissipate and become less relevant as the latest fad takes over.

In a way it seems like a bit of a shame. Why should all these things be lost and fade away like our memories, is it just a product of human nature that things should becoming increasingly difficult to recall or fuzzy around the edges. Either way, the web is starting to move away from broken links and missing pages to a place with a defined core. Imagine a web with no broken links where everything was linked to everything else in a meaningful way, the same way people are linked to us in our lives - our photos are the traces of our lives and our interactions online the building blocks of a digital future that persists.



What kind of legacy does this leave, 20, 30, 50 years down the line for our family and friends? What would it look like when our lives are documented and recorded. It's certainly a lot harder to lose people these days, indeed we're far more likely to hear about someone online than we are to bump into them or hear about them second hand. It's important to make sure as we move into a world where our world is increasingly online that we are able to make choices about what is stored and how that information is used. Having more open controls over that on a global scale (i.e. I control the information about me) is going to be critical if people are going to be able to learn to trust the internet of the future. I would like to see more transparency, even a website that allows me to control what there is of me out there. Copyright and ownership issues aside - If my digital life is going to live on forever, I'd like to at least be able to write my digital grave stone.. i.e. "I thought it was just a virus"..

Tomorrow's world

Today. I really wish this show still existed. It not only inspired a generation that became the technocrati of today but somehow managed to capture the excitement that comes from doing something never been done before.

Dragon's den has got it's place on TV for inventions as has the gadget show, but none really go into the research and science that lead to the innovation nor do they embrace the profession of the inventor. Bring back tomorrow's world, please...!

Technology has let me down

This is still far too difficult to be easy. I'm surprised.

Wearable technology - here and now?

One thing that's always fascinated me is invisible technology. A solution that is so neat that you don't even have to watch it do it's stuff... it just works. MIT came up with a concept a while back called 'air', not so original you say, but this was a bit - it was the idea that technology was like air - you can't see it. Similarly, they launched a concept called pollen - the idea that information was spread from person to person without needing a network backbone.
This has been adopted in Haiti and disaster areas where the wired infrastructure has literally collapsed. Networks have been built by person-to-person contact through mobile phones, transmitting information over short distances that needs to cover great distances. Yes it's slow, but it gets there. Like everyone is your own personal carrier pigeon.

So, the technology moves on and you end up wearing it and it's everywhere rather than being in your hand. Cute technologies produce fabrics that achieve this.. You can hug someone from a distance by sending them a text. Sensors in the material respond when the message is given to make you feel like you're being hugged. And yes... it's ok to text yourself.

Text to speechless

Hands up if you're fed up of fighting with touch screen text messaging?... Damn it's painful. There has to be a better way.

Well there is. The answer is text to speech. Imagine talking to your phone to do something. This goes way beyond 'phone my mum'.

The idea is that you don't need to fiddle about your phone writing a text messsage. You just dictate it to you phone and tell it who you want to send it to. Easy. Which is the point. Publish please.....

Huh?

If this works, then it is the future.

If Obama can get it, why can't the internet?

It seems fantastic to believe that the internet might receive the nobel peace prize, but then after Obama's surprise win maybe it just might be possible.

But even then it seemed the prize was given in anticipation of what Obama would do in the future... after receiving it, how could he not live up to the promise of the award in his actions that followed?

All this aside, I can't help but be distracted by who would represent the internet and accept the prize? Maybe Sir Tim Berner's Lee or maybe a grid server on a trolley? Maybe Microsoft could bring the paperclip out of retirement, I know he's been vacationing around the internet since he stepped out of the limelight.

I know he's not the greatest example of the face of the internet, but then what or who is? If there's no-one to receive it, what's the purpose in giving it?

But that is to misunderstand what the internet is.. It's no longer just a load of information and applications, but it's the interconnections between people across the world. The internet is one of the best representations of the whole world working together.

And if it wins the internet collective will receive it, far and wide, all over it's front pages and across it's global network of sites, congratulating humanity for having created something that has changed the world for the better, united the world for a greater good.

I, for one, would vote for the internet and when we won I would hope that, like Obama, our actions to follow would demonstrate why it was the right choice.

See internet for peace for more

So long and thanks for all the Google

Seems weird to think that Google can 'opt out' from a country, or vice versa, but it seems that the world's largest online and the world's largest offline communities have split for good. On paper, there's something subtley communist about Google's policy of egalitarian ownership of the web, but there's nothing similar about their political views on freedom of information.

It's a tough one, trying to determine when censorship becomes restriction of people's freedom. My min tracks back to when we tried to place a keyword based adult filter on blueyonder.co.uk's search engine, which at the time was powered in part by Google's back-fill. Myself and Guy Spivack sifted through about 10,000 potentially 'adult' words to decide which ones were acceptable and which ones weren't. I have no idea what gave us the authority at the time to make that decision, but at the time we felt like we had no choice but to try and do something to stop kids from being able to see adult content on the web. Surely it's only like putting a gate at the top or bottom of the stairs, to protect kids from their own curiosity.

Is it so different from the Chinese government's perspective to want to control the political content of what people search for. Does the analogy hold? Is it just protecting people for what they believe is their own good? I can't help but doubt that altruism is their core motive, but what's for sure is that once you start to control one piece of what people see you are on a slippery slope to having to make decisions about everything they see.

Either way, the dominant search engine in China, Baidu, seems happier to oblige and so they would. Alexa recently ranked Baidu the 8th biggest site in the world. No doubt, with Google off their back, Baidu's use will only increase further. Particularly if everyone starts typing 'Google' into Baidu.

Chat Roulette

Just when you thought you were safe to stay at home some bright spark comes up with chat roulette. It's webcam roulette - you become one of the random people in the tombola that turns every time you, or the person at the other end clicks 'next'.

You can text chat whilst you watch their webcam until it's time to move on. This can be seconds or minutes, you just don't know. Try it out - it's quite intense - though don't be surprised if you see a bit more than you'd want to, or if you get rejected a few times.... by people who have more than chat on their minds.

http://www.chatroulette.com/

Back to the future

1.21 gigawatts? 1.21 gigawatts? Great Scott! Even Scott wouldn't have figured that we could build a machine 3,000 times greater than a time machine. But that's what the geniuses at the Large Hadron Collider have done.

As of today the official figures - 3.48 trillion electron volts was achieved when charging particles in the largest of the world's particle accelerators. All of which is gearing up to smashing sub-atomic particles together in order to discover whether or not the previously untestable theories of particle physics are correct.

We really are at a point where our view of the universe could change dramatically. It's incredible that, 14 billion years since the universe began we could be at a point where it's secrets will be revealed.

For more, visit the CERN site

Meta-morphosis from web2.0 to web 3.0

I'm a name, not a number said the internet. Not so, said the community of people that created it and the community that now formed it's web 2.0 core. You shall be 3.0 and you will understand the meaning of sentences, questions and narrative just like this. Does that mean I can tell that you're being condescending. Not yet said the community. That's web 4.0.

It seems that not only can we publish standardised text such as html documents to the web, but now we are becoming part of the semantic web, a web that understands that documents are linked over the web, over time and therefore their relationship. It's a web where people can essentially digitise their lives, in fact, become inseperable from their digital self.



A whole heap of questions arise from this, like what happens to my digital self if I die, does it live on? Who owns my digital self - do I write a digital will? In a world where we increasingly create gigabytes of data about ourselves what happens to all this information? Where is it stored? What value does it have and how does it all relate?

All this is the next evolution of the web and ultimately the goal of web scientists - to evolve the internet to the next stage where it is our friend, or ultimately an extension to ourselves. Let's be honest, it's not a million miles away now for some, but it's fair to say the existing interface has a long way to go.

Wendy Hall believes standardisation is the way forward. Taking the existing model that formed the internet - html and creating documents and data structures that mimic the complex needs of different and distributed types of information. The new format? The Rdf.

So, some 15 years after it's inception the internet is going to start to become smarter and more human. It's about time. Now, will it be able to answer the ultimate question facing humanity... where do the all the odd socks go? Only time will tell.

What flavour was the primordial soup?

I can't imagine it would take off as a flavour, but somehow it was the taste of early life. I don't suppose they were that choosy, but I wouldn't know. Someone is trying to work it out though by creating the world's largest simulation model - of how life began.

The project's aim is to create a model of the evolution of life from simple basic chemicals by modelling them at an atomic level, slowly scaling the interactions up to create virtual organisms, that can then be turned into real biological simulations. Maybe one day we'll all be able to try the soup out too, with a loaf of crusty bread...

http://www.evogrid.org/index.php/Main_Page

Tried watching the movie, scared me a little bit though.

And so it began.

In times like these (whatever that really means), it’s important to consolidate. Like eating plenty of fibre in your diet.

I suppose i’ve needed more fibre for sometime, so this is it. Futurish. It’s not new, far from it, it’s been around forever, but this is the first time that it has taken this particular form.

So, you cry, what are you talking about? Well it’s simple is about the future, but I’m not arrogant enough to assume that I know what the future is so it’s kinda ish. Most of what I want to talk about is happening now, but is emerging or new, something that hasn’t yet become normal or mass produced or pastish. That didn’t really work did it, I’m just trying things out. I wont use it in future.

It’s also about us – why were here – using our grey matter to predict the future is why we have brains, why we think and why we talk so that we can talk about what’s going to happen and make sure it’s mutually beneficial. Hence futurish.

I can’t guarantee I’m going to get this right first time, in fact I can guarantee that I wont, but I hope that, in the future, futurish will form a compelling shape.