Archive for the ‘Space’ Category
More complexity theory & humanity 2.0
Our world might be a giant hologram
Craig Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, reckons “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”
For the past seven years, a team in Germany has been searching for gravitational waves – ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 hasn’t detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.
Check this out.
More on Punk Capitalism
Someone asked me yesterday what exactly Punk Capitalism means…
Punk was all about a DIY revolution, rejecting authority and hierarchy, working for yourself without taking cues from the mass market, setting up businesses that aren’t fussed about competing and place purpose over profit, advocating that we should produce as much as we consume. Nowadays we’re all working more independently and struggle with crappy managers / bosses, we want richer experiences and creativity is our most valuable currency. We’re coming to the end of the Industrial Revolution cycle… the final nails are going in the coffin for mass production (and in turn mass marketing) – starting with the internet making it free to transmit stuff digitally ourselves. Now punks in lab coats are working on things like 3D printers, already in use by Adidas, BMW, Sony etc for making prototypes. Once these are available in our homes there will be no boundaries left between producer and consumer – just creativity. It’s not far off Star Trek replicators! Then nobody has to be bribed to do shit jobs. Phew! What we deem piracy is the best form of distribution in a Punk Capitalist world.
My previous post mentions this here; and refers to this book as the ultimate Punk Capitalism and piracy resource.
Equilibrium and fractal business models
A fundamental law of physics (in one formulation) states that left to itself any closed system will always change towards a state of equilibrium from which no further change is possible. One example is swinging a pendulum… if you hold it up to one side it’ll be in a state of extreme disequilibrium, then as you let go and it swings back and forth, gradually losing energy, it’ll come to a standstill.
Other examples include many media agencies and advertising agencies. You know why.
Someone said to me today, ‘but we need to prove the ROI – how much is it [implementing a vision that gives power to the people, to cut a long story short] going to cost and what will the return will be? How do we show that listening to the customer has better ROI than direct marketing?’
Errr…. I’m not even going to answer that.
Our obsession with plotting loads of numbers in loads of rows in so-called forecasts, that ‘demonstrate ROI’ may be a comfort blanket for some, but are forecasts ever accurate or meaningful? If we look back at them later (which we seldom do thoroughly, because they’re so irrelevant and unfriendly) we’ll be astonished (or not) at how far off the mark we were.
Way too many business models set themselves up for equilibrium. A scalable business model should be fractal in nature… infinitely scalable, independent of any company’s resources. You should be able to zoom all the way in… or all the way out… and see a repeatability, recursiveness and simplicity. We should focus on setting ourselves up to leverage the unforeseen opportunities, rather than attempting to predict the unpredictable and produce reams of comfort crap on autopilot.
The rotary motion of a harmonograph produces a series of complex drawings influenced by relative frequency, amplitude and direction.
Brands should communicate with a harmonic balance between relative frequency (WHEN… don’t interrupt), amplitude (WHAT…loudness…don’t shout / broadcast) and direction (WHERE… targeting, permission).
Companies should seek to produce beautiful pictures… not chaos (disharmony / dissonance). Business models that can be boiled down to a simple, beautiful picture tend to have inherent scalability.
Plonkerisation
“As for intelligent life I’m putting my money on the fact that in the whole universe, we are pretty much unique.” [Dr Michael Perryman, European Space Agency]
Duuuuhhh! You’d think if we’d learned anything in the 470-ish years since the scientific revolution kicked in, it would be that we should hold our own knowledge in greatest suspicion.
I’m sure those 16th century dudes would’ve put their money on the fact the Earth was at the centre of the solar system.
A few words from Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan) are in order:
“The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are:
a. the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) than they realise;
b. the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organised in history books than in empirical reality); and
c. the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories”
Where’s my replicator?
On the subject of TECHNOLOGY NOT BEING THE POINT… I am, smugly, young enough not to be excited by new technology (!)
In fact, where is my goddam replicator??? Where’s my reasonably priced holiday in space?? Not only that, but why can’t I even browse the internet on my freakin’ iphone at a decent speed?
We marketing / mobile / futurist / geek types get very excited about new cool technology… we dish out awards to agencies for creating fancy stuff that uses the latest breakthrough thing… when really we’d be better off concentrating on the people of the world, first and foremost. The technology is (well, it should be) a given. Marketing isn’t rocket science. It isn’t quantum physics. We’re not limited by our inability to build machines that bend space time, or by particle accelerator breakdowns. Let’s get real… we’re only really limited by our imaginations; and by our understand of what the hell human beings will actually benefit from.
Out of the Silent Planet
Here’s a pertinent passage from C.S. Lewi’s ‘Out of the Silent Planet’…
‘Ransom, as time wore on, became aware of another and more spiritual cause for his progressive lightening and exultation of heart. A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of ‘Space’: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now – now that the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it ‘dead’; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren; he saw now that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the Earth with so many eyes – and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name.’
So often what we see en masse / as mass (’above the line’) is only 0.00000001% of what’s actually going on in reality. The long tail enables us to realise significant profits from selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, so it’s worth remembering all the resonance taking place in the ’space’ between mass (marketing). The combined sales of less-popular products can now surpass the total sales of top-level, big hit products. The real opportunity for serious growth lies in the niches.
We thought the earth was flat. Then we thought the earth was at the centre of our solar system (with everything revolving around us… funny that!). We thought there was ‘nothing’ in space, when our limited senses didn’t allow us to see anything there. Then we noticed the effect, while we still couldn’t see the force causing the effect (e.g. gravity, spin, dark matter).
Let’s keep thinking (not necessarily just looking) beyond the obvious and tangible.
Supermassive black hole jets
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