[Geowanking] polarized light etc
steve at adam.com.au
Thu Jul 3 23:53:00 PDT 2008
On 04/07/2008, at 3:54 PM, SteveC wrote:
> Or without actually doing anything better.
That is true.
> I know this is geowanking but it's just so incredibly cheap to take
> pot shots at things like mashups in 2008 when people were doing that
I want to move to the next stage beyond map mash-ups, and part of that
process is recognising the problems that map mash-ups do not solve.
Layers do not solve large numbers of problems either. Red dots do not
solve large numbers of problems either.
An existing problem was highlighted by Feynman, who observed that the
education process presents the material without the connections. The
ability to directly perceive (with false colour overlays, etc) data in
context is a possible solution.
What are some more existing problems? Can those problems be solved
with the same approach? What approach could be implemented with what
we have now, that does solve real problems? There's no point in
creating a solution that is in search of a problem.
So I want to talk about approaches that could solve large numbers of
problems that are not currently being solved with the existing
approaches. That is very pragmatic, and does not have any relevance to
academics who blow hot air for tenure.
> 3 years ago, let alone call audacious commercial projects like second
> life lacking in 'scope and ambition'. What do they have to do - build
> a warp drive?
Yes. Or they could be content with praise from the Twitter crowd. OMG,
Twitter FTW! LOL!1!
We have computers that are enormously powerful compared to the 1960's,
we have networks that are enormously fast compared to the 1960's, and
we're still doing the same stuff that people thought of in the 1960's.
Let's not get so excited over a slightly larger Quake game that we
stop looking ahead to what we could be doing instead. Let's not get so
wrapped up in web browsers that we think something that could have run
on a Commodore 64 is "state of the art".
steve at adam.com.au
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