Just came across the excellent Remembering Singapore site, whose recent post on Singaporean urban legends adds a new dimension to the mission to colonise the underground:

It is said that when Singapore was building the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) in the mid-eighties, the then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew consulted the highly respectable Venerable Hong Chuan about the plan. The latter warned that the tunnelings would severely damage the excellent fengshui of the island, and the only solution was to ensure all Singaporeans carry a bagua (octagon diagram) with them.
But this was impossible among the different races and religions, so PM Lee thought of an excellent idea: to design the new $1 coin with the shape of a bagua, so that it would be carried by all Singaporeans.
This urban legend was made believable due to the coincidence of the timings: The new $1 coin was launched in September 1987, just two months before MRT began its first operation.
A further addition to the rumour was the road tax label, also in the shape of an octagon, which means every car on the roads of Singapore would be carrying a bagua too.

I’d heard that the shape of the dollar coin was intended to give everyone a bagua to carry, but it never occurred to me to wonder what sort of geomantic effect building an MRT system would have. Fascinating.

Following that last post, more on the ways in which we have to become more adept at understanding machine intelligences, and becoming comfortable with the opaque nature of conversing with things that don’t share any reference points with you: Kevin Slavin at Lift. Includes the line, “New York City is becoming optimised to run like a motherboard…and you, all of you, are just loitering” (by way of Neal Stephenson).

Related: Geoffrey West on using complexity theory to consider cities as organisms, and Grant Morrison’s city-virus:

No one’s really sure where it came from or who brought it to us, but like all viral organisms, its one directive is to use up all available resources in producing copies of itself. More and more copies until there’s no raw material left and the host-body, overwhelmed, can only die. The cities want us to become good builders. Eventually, we’ll build rockets and carry the virus to other worlds.

Watching will.i.am, Nicki Minaj – Check It Out (from Simon Reynold’s Blissblog). The hyperreal turfing/locking moves and cartoon facial gestures blurred in front of me until I couldn’t tell whether a performer or an editor was responsible for each movement.

Not being able to tell the difference between reality and manipulated experiences isn’t just about being able to spot photoshop tricks or video manipulation, it’s when people start to ape the facial tics and artificial physical gestures of people – models, actors, people who need to fake enthusiasm and engagement – in the same media that are edited so inhumanly. Not just realistic light and hair textures from graphics packages, but convincing mimes of limbs moving in a non-human way, with the arrested momentum and weightless control of a Pixar film. I’d always thought that there were two classes of behaviour to think about, when thinking about real or virtual behaviour: people behaving like humans and computers behaving like things, But now I think there are two more classes: people behaving like things and computers behaving like people. The digital and the human standing either side of the uncanny valley – they’re not looking for a bridge, they’re making their way down the side to meet halfway.

Perhaps in popular culture we’re already negotiating the sort of collision between human and machine intelligences that’s struck me before: in the linked pieces I (and in the second, me and Keri Facer) mention the possible need for a curriculum that helps us learn about and develop collaboration and cooperation between human and machine intelligences. But maybe putting it like this betrays my limited perspective: maybe by the time that kind of curriculum comes around the gap it’s bridging won’t be apparent to anyone.

A sedentary lifestyle is lethal. It’s not enough to exercise regularly, you have to avoid sitting down for long periods.

This will have to affect the way we work. Offices are organised around sitting, finding places for workers to sit, finding places for guests to sit: whole industries revolve around making things that can be accessed from a sitting height. Some people use lecterns or more modern desks designed for use while standing. To be honest, I can’t see how giving yourself varicose veins is a good alternative. Surely the message from this research is that your body needs variety and activity? Lots of small movements that keep your muscles alive and awake.

I saw a Kinect in use for the first time yesterday. (more…)

[Quick thought for myself, too long for twitter]

Recently I keep coming across things (articles, posts) like this, in which people suggest that we could use points and progress bars to help children (never adults, strangely) learn better. People who enjoy games, and have done so for a long time, are the last people who should offer opinions on how games could be used for education, because we’re the sort of people who genuinely like collecting points and achieving targets, and that’s what games have historically tended to be about. We’re an unrepresentative minority: everyone else has known about games for ages but as long they’ve been about points chosen not to join in. If games are going to be used meaningfully in education we’ve got to work out how else they might motivate people, beyond simplistic behaviourist approaches.