Six Things, Volume 117

Aliveness | Tech Tree | Driving | Homer | Pollock | Typer

Thing 1 – Aliveness

This piece by Oliver Burkeman sat in my inbox for a while – one of those things that I knew I’d want to read but felt, even though it’s short, that I needed a bit of time to give it my full attention and absorb it and work out what I think about it.

I have now done all of those things, and commend it to you without hesitation. It’s about artificial intelligence, except what it’s really about is humanity, which is much more important.

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Thing 2 – Tech Tree

This is a massively ambitious and fascinating project, charting the development of, well, all technology. Through it you find that, for example, the land mine was developed just 25 years after the bagpipes. I don’t know what to do with this information, but I’m glad I have it.

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Thing 3 – Driving

“This driver had three and a half whiskies – her level was very much below the allowed limit”

If you’re ever having trouble explaining to a young person what life was like in Britain in the 1970s (without turning into everyone’s least favourite stereotypical ‘you kids don’t know how hard it was we never had that internet when I were a lad we had to make our own entertainment with a ball of dirt and a dead cat’ old fart), you could do worse than show them this, from 1977 – a time when health and safety were merely two moderately-scoring Scrabble words. Strange to think that within my lifetime it was considered normal to drive a car when too drunk to walk (“four pints of stout and seven whiskies”).

Four. Pints. And. Seven. Whiskies.

And yes, that is a dog on the track. Someone on the production team actually thought “hey, I know! Let’s get people plastered, put them behind the wheel of a car, and let a dog run loose as they attempt a driving proficiency test.”

Autres temps, autres moeurs.

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Thing 4 – Homer

We live in a world where pretty much even the wildest ideas have, at some point, been turned into a physical object.

So if, for example, you’ve ever thought “what this world really needs is a Lego version of Homer Simpson retreating into the bushes”, then you’ll be delighted by this, a Lego version of Homer Simpson retreating into the bushes.

jkbrickworks

A post shared by @jkbrickworks

If merely watching the video isn’t enough to satiate your Lego-Simpson desires, you can buy it here.

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Thing 5 – Pollock

I call it ‘Composition XIII’

We also live in a world of enormous over-simplification, as is evidenced by the existence of this Rothko generator and this ‘make your own Mondrian’ machine.

The allure of those two deceptively simple artists is understandable. It seems within anyone’s reach to create something that will make people go ‘oh hang on, that looks like…’, and you can say ‘Hey, look at us, we’re making art!’

And of course, in a way, you are.

But it is also, as the annoyingly chin-stroking truism has it, a bit more complicated than that – as anyone who has ever spent actual time in an actual room with an actual Rothko will testify.

That said, you can spend an enjoyable few minutes splashing virtual paint on a virtual canvas with this Jackson Pollock tool, which I think I’d prefer if it just called itself Paint Splash or something, rather than pretending that any dweeb with an iPad can create high art.

Ah well.

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Thing 6 – Typer

Back in the 1990s, when it became clear that computers were going to be an inextricable part of people’s lives, I decided I needed to learn how to type. I didn’t want to become a 150-words-a-minute freak; I just wanted to be able to do it without crying.

Ten minutes a day of Mavis Beacon for three weeks was a fairly half-arsed way of going about it, but it did the trick, and now (like many people, I suspect) I plod along at my own rate, half knowing where my fingers should be going and half leaving it to autocorrect to figure out.

Perhaps if I play Typer for ten minutes every day for three weeks I’ll get a bit better again.