s3e16: If It's Just Us... Seems Like An Awful Waste Of Space, Right?
0.0 Station Ident
1:33pm on Monday, April 25th, 2016 at the XOXO Outpost in Portland. Disclosure: I haven't seen Lemonade yet, which I should probably be watching instead of writing this. Lots of bits and bobs today. HOTBLACK DESIATO continues to lumber on in a sort of undead-shambles toward signing, at which I'll be a) a lot less anxious and b) just about to embark on a whole new level of anxiety.
1.0 It's All Just Patterns
ITEM: in a Slack channel where we're used to posting real estate listing porn, a gorgeous $1.5m unaffordable house that looks like a rendering[0] but... if I just take some time to flip through the "photographs", my occam's razor goes off and says: those aren't renderings (why go to all the time and effort?) they're HDR photographs. Which, yeah, that should totally be a thing for high-end real estate listings. Chalk one up for computers again.
ITEM: taking things literally to be obtuse, one ends up with the disappointing realisation that fintech doesn't mean a technology movement intended to deal with rising sea levels caused by anthropogenic climate change, but instead means finance technology, and increasing ways to apply the blockchain and bitcoin to things. One suspects that the former might be way more relevant and awesome.
ITEM: People are actually being paid to make holonovels[1] now.
ITEM: On the walk in to the Outpost, the realization that our brains are pattern-matching machines for fitness, and that the internet is a thing for creating connection. I mean, the internet is a thing for connection in the sense that it is a network of networks, but that the web is a thing for even finer-grained connection at the, uh, semantic level (honestly, grasping for that phrase feels like being Ford and Arthur trying to do a positive critical review of Vogon poetry to prevent themselves from being spaced) ever smaller bits linked together to look for and surface more and more meaning. Everything will connect. And (handwavium alert), the theory that everything - space and time and all the things in it - are just the fevered dreams of entangled - connected - particles[2].
ITEM: Crossrail, a $21b infrastructure project of the likes [citation needed] America doesn't have the guts to commit to, is as much an IT project as it is a civil engineering project[3]. The mass transit system (integrating with the other ones that make up London and its suburbs) has a single source of digital truth [citation kind of provided], a sort of Total Information Management, where everything from LEDs to trains to pointcloud data is all stored in a single database (Oracle Spatial and, er, Microsoft Access, according to a few years ago) that integrates CAD models with ground truth laser-scanned pointcloud data enabling everything from iPad augmented reality displays to work out if you can drill into that wall to tunnels laced with fiber optics to detect strain. Here's some more information in an Atkins white-ish paper[4] as well as an award submission[5] from 2010 to the association of geographical information.
[0] 1292 Sanderling Island Point Richmond California 94801 Single Family Home for Sales, Marin & San Francisco Luxury Real Estate
[1] Holographic novel - Memory Alpha - Wikia
[2] Time Entanglement Raises Quantum Mysteries | Quanta Magazine
[3] London’s Crossrail Is a $21 Billion Test of Virtual Modeling - IEEE Spectrum
[4] www.atkinsglobal.com/~/media/Files/A/Atkins-Global/Attachments/sectors/rail/library-docs/technical-papers/gis-and-information-management-on-crossrail-c122-bored-tunnels-contract.pdf
[5] www.atkinsglobal.com/~/media/Files/A/Atkins-Corporate/group/sectors-documents/information-communications/library-docs/technical-papers/agipri-1.pdf
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1:53pm. That's all for today. Send notes! Only connect.
Best,
Dan