Intense doesn’t quite cover it. Every day so
far I’ve woken up feeling like a kind of colonial-era explorer, complete with khaki hat and walrus moustache, faced with a big unexplored thing like a jungle
or the moon or something. I am fascinated all the time.

Things I have learned:

A powerpoint presentation is called a
‘deck’. An orchestrated dance sequence isn’t as
good as a flashmob when you want to be relatable. A good argument is LOGOS + PATHOS = ETHOS. Things become more interesting when they
are quotidian, like milk and vodka. It’s actually nice working late on
something you enjoy. I am probably working ‘above the line’.

Things I have seen:

A sewer explode ten feet away from me. Folks attempting to look round the agency
because they think it’s a shop. The inside of a padded cell. A lot of adverts, some rather good ones.

A big thanks to everyone
for being lovely and making week one fun, clever and mad. Here's to week two!

The iWatch. No-one
knows much. It’s an Apple product rumoured to be in development, made of curved
glass designed to fit around the wrist.

It sounds cool in a
Napoleon Dynamite sort of way; chic and geek in equal measure. Central to chatter on the subject is the
pervasive question of whether it will actually be made; Apple’s continued silence on
the issue of the iWatch has driven various tech-bloggers giddy with the sweet
smell of conspiracy. 

What's more interesting is its direct link to Science
Fiction. Watch out, it gets a bit nerdy from here on out.
The device will apparently name and describe objects at which it is pointed.
This is a tricorder, not a timepiece.

You could look at the iWatch as part of a slow trickle of technology conceived at the
final frontiers of space-y genre lit. Similar examples abound. Another supposed
Apple product in the pipeline – the iGlasses
– purports to record what you see, edit out the bad stuff, and replay it, see
Minority Report and the Matrix for more details. There’s even a nifty working prototype of a
hover-car flying about
out there.

The fields of
fantasy-technology and real-technology seem destined for cross-pollination. This
piece takes the position that Science actually uses sci-fi to test out ideas,
as a kind of virtual lab. Simpler is the notion that a few kids watch Star Wars
and grow up into product developers with a burning desire to make a robot-hand
that actually
feels things.

Its interesting to think of sci-fi as ‘the manual of the possible’. That the genre has a kind of mapping function –
sketching the contours of the land, the limits of what we can think up – which then challenges us fill in the gaps with actual
stuff. It’s cool and it lends credibility to a big swathe of nerd culture
that is too-easily overlooked.

—–

(Thoughts courtesy of Planning Placement newbie James.)