IdeaFestival

Eyjafjallajökull means

Author of This Will Change Everything and Edge Foundation president John Brockman invited Edge community members, who span the range of intellectual pursuit, to react to the ash cloud from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano and to tell him, in 250 words or less, something he "didn't already know and wasn't going to read in the newspapers."

Futurist and business strategist Peter Schwartz, and mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein pointed out that no forecasts for large scale disruption of air travel because of volcanic ash clouds had been made, and so Eyjafjallajökull was a true Black Swan event.

Emanuel Derman simply said, "more efficient, more vulnerable."

But there was one very human point to be made.

When the world maps us

Referencing a Wired UK article on "ultra mapping,"  Nokia's head of interface design, Adam Greenfield, stakes a claim to some pretty rich epistemological territory. Maps that dynamically pinpoint us render more than another coordinate or elevation. No, they are much more illustrious:

[A]ll those routinely gorgeous renderings of subway ridership or crime or air quality imply something very different when you can either find yourself within their ambit or cannot. At its rawest, the suggestion is this: either these issues affect me, or they do not. And this is true even if what is being mapped is a purely historical event. The implication is there, however faint.

Wayne

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/collectivenouns/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

World without signs?

On The End of Cyberspace blog, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang links to a great question: Could GPS create a world without signs?

As GPS and other location technologies (holography, anyone?) substitute virtual referent for physical reality, it raises questions about the role of context to knowledge, and whether, in the process of mapping everything, we add to or subtract from the understanding we get.

The Salon piece was strongly reminiscent of the ongoing debate over the place of books in public life.

Wayne

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anams/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Anthony Bourdain knows Thwip

In a continuing public service effort at IFblog, the word for today is onomatopoeia, or words that imitate the sounds they are describing. One example might mewing for the sounds a cat makes, or the murmuring of a brook in a cool glade.

So with that thought in mind, and having had some personal experience with the subject, I'm guessing that Kitchen Confidential author, No Reservations star and 2009 IdeaFestival participant, Anthony Bourdain, would say that the word for the first crunch of some Thai street food such as fried beetles would be thwip!, which, translated, can also mean pow!, indigestion for the unwary.

Wayne