I just watched this trailer and it looks……………ROTFLOL! I love the comment about Jedis — ha ha.
Whilst in Spain I had yet another surreal film watching experience. We went to see Wong Kar Wai’s Ashes of Time (Redux) which is essentially a re-edited version of his 1994 classic, starring Tong Leung Chiu Wai (the Johnny Depp of Chinese cinema in terms of versatility who everybody says my brother looks like, btw). Whilst the dialogue was in a 50-50 mixture of Cantonese and Mandarin, the subtitles were in Spanish and I found myself understanding both forms of Chinese and also trying to translate the Spanish subtitles into English in my head!
Here’s the version of the trailer with English subtitles:
It was surreal not only for the linguistic differences and “lost in translation” effects I was dealing with, it was also surreal because Ashes of Time (Redux) is a distinctively art house piece, full of aphorisms and profound Chinese wisdoms from the wuxia era and plays as a collection of the central characters’ memories, hallucinations, reveries about lost and forbidden loves and mental illness psychosis.
Despite the Spanish subtitles, my friend left the cinema none the wiser about what the film was about and meant! All she came away with was an impression of the visuals and how the lighting was very specific — reflecting the seasons.
I contextualized it and said it’s about chance and the connectedness of seeming strangers. Each passes on a communique or a chain of actions which links back to the moment the central character lost his love to his brother in marriage — a connection of unity — and the madness which splinters and affects his perspective on life and personality thereafter. He drinks a “memory wine” to forget the pain without knowing that the wine is a gift from the woman.
Ashes of Time is definitely not as easy to follow or as simplistic as typical Hollywood films: boy meets girl, obstacle appears, obstacle is overcome and they ride happily into the sunset.
Hollywood draws from the traditions of Homer and the stepwise trials of Hercules; that’s how film arcs get structured. Homer and Chekhov and Shakespeare. Chinese films nod to different reference frames: Luo Guanzhong, Cao Xueqin, Wu Cheng En and Shi Naian.
Often Chinese films are multi-layered, complex characters, multiple time-stranded and imbued with philosophies and allegories. Hollywood versions are perceptibly different — think Infernal Affairs compared with The Departed (ambiguous, mysterious,like a puzzle to be cracked rather than a straight story about two guys from opposite tracks playing cat+mouse). Give me the Chinese version any day of the week………as much as I think Leonardo di Caprio, Jack Nicholson and Martin Scorcese are great!
Other surreal film watching experiences include:The Wonder Boys starring Michael Douglas, Frances McDormand and Tobey Macguire…..all dubbed in Spanish; K9 — The Widowmaker with Harrison Ford dubbed in German with subtitles; and Cyrano de Bergerac in Cantonese.
In any case, for me, film as a medium can transcend cultural differences in ways in which the written word in the blogosphere certainly can’t! Is the pen sharper than the sword? I’d say perspectives are sharper than both!
Back in the place Brits call “Blighty” and I can’t tell readers how different the topics agenda is in Spain. We had some really interesting discussions about life after Franco, the Suarez presidency, why a generation of 40-something men in Spain are commitment dilettantes and how Zapatero is considered by the Spanish electorate to be Europe’s worst leader………..next to Gordon Brown. Apparently, the Spanish media have a seriously low opinion of the British Prime Minister.
We talked a lot about the political, media and television sectors in Spain and Latin America, and again the frames of reference are so different! My friend referred to someone the Spaniards know as the “Prince of Darkness” in British politics and it’s a completely different person to the ones Brits themselves have labelled with this moniker! Then there was also the different references between the Spanish, Imperial Chinese and British Rpyal Families, someone called the Duchess of Alba and various Spanish and Chinese restauranteurs, architects and actresses who may/may not be equivalents of Jamie Oliver / Sir Richard Rogers / Johnny Depp.
Anyway, onto our inspirational people for this week……….
(1.) Lord Adair Turner
Lord Adair Turner is the current Chairman of the FSA (the UK’s equivalent of the SEC / Consob / AMF / regulatory agency for the financial sector). His biography can be read here:
His recent article in Prospect magazine on the Tobin tax attracted a strong reaction from the City and its financial professionals, according to media commentators:
It’s not for the Tobin tax or the fact that he has the audacity to say that some banking activities are “socially useless” that he’s listed here in Inspirational People. It’s because he’s also interested in and committed to climate change issues:
This 17 year-old Brit became the youngest person to sail around the world single-handed. What he did shows us that achievement and inspiration are not just about passing national exams and getting good grades. It’s also about facing the challenges of nature head on — solo even — and showing perseverance, endurance and temerity. It’s an amazing triumph for this young man and now he’s planning to set up a Sail Mike Foundation to encourage youngsters to sail!
Here’s hoping he achieves his dream of taking part in London 2012 sailing competitions!
(3.) Hayley Lister
Another amazing sailing star from the wee islands of Britain! This 37 year-old today became the first female quadriplegic to sail around “Blighty” solo.
All this online traffic is an interesting case study in how a tech darling can become the target of negativity, what levels of cash burn and privacy/data protection observance are considered acceptable by users and where the current state of the tech sector in Europe is.
It’s tough out there……………………
The SpinVox situation is also a reminder about the differences between Web 1.0 and where we are now in Web 2.0. During Web 1.0 there was a wireless tech company in my portfolio. The CEO was female (and I support female CEOs with the same equivalence as male ones). The SLAs (service level agreements) signed and client lists were extensive and impressive; we’re talking about household technology brands and internationally renowned corporates. The technology was considered “world-beating”. Its investor base numbered several Tier 1 investment banks and global technology providers. At one point its valuation was in the US$ high hundreds of millions. If there had been an IPO, my bank would have participated in the beauty parade to win the mandate for IPO issuance etc.
Unfortunately, despite investors’ best efforts to right-track the company and the management team, it subsequently filed for Chapter 7 amidst legal claims of mismanagement, accounting fraud and IP infringement by management.
Hopefully, this isn’t a situation that applies to SpinVox. I’m not involved with the company in any way and only its investors, management and key employees would know and are positioned to (and mandated to) deal with whatever the situation is.
What’s noticeably different from my Web 1.0 experience and the Spinvox scenario is the presence of blogosphere threads — apparently from former and/or current Spinvox employees. The accusations on this PaidContent thread from a user called “SpinVox Insider Jr” are particularly astonishing:
This goes beyond “washing your dirty linen in public”. It’s also a revelation about how the Internet is breaking down or blurring previous concepts of employee decorum, corporate integrity and corporate PR/ reputational crisis management.
In our Web 1.0 situation, concerned employees contacted investors and we followed strict legal due processes between investors and management to try and resolve it as sensibly as possible. All of this was conducted via secure, private and confidential emails and conference calls between the parties involved. There was no open public outcry. Less than a handful of people were privy to various communications about why writing down and exiting the investment was appropriate — based on financials provided, calls about the growth strategy, future funding requirements and confidence in the existing management team.
Now in Web 2.0 the Spinvox story shows investors and companies seem to be being held to account by others besides their Board of Directors, the regulators, ethics committees, Data Protection Acts and accounting standards bodies. Online participants like the BBC’s technology correspondents seem to feel a sense of ownership over the company even when they have no equity. In a sense, the blogosphere could also be said to be democratizing corporate information in a way which is different from the previous “push” practice of releasing PR and expecting it to be accepted with minimum resistance or only light questioning. Now the feedback — negative as well as positive — is immediately pushed back. The intensity of scrutiny afforded by the Internet and some associated anonymity is noticeable.
Our world as we know it is irrevocably being changed by the Web and its contributors and commentators.
I had a BRILLIANT time — videos and a full blog post to follow next week.
On the first day a stranger came up to us whilst we were having lunch, offered to buy us some drinks, said something about how he’d had a Chinese girlfriend in LA for 4 years (which was all the proof my friend said she needed that he was interested in me, LOL), let us siesta in his apartment with its AMAZING views and wanted to take me to see the Formula 1 races in Valencia that weekend (ticket cost: EUR400). Throughout the hours we spent hanging out with him he kept telling my friend how much he liked me, he gave me his favorite CD with some scribblings about me being “mas bonita” and tried to give me GBP150 worth of multivitamins.
Minor hitch?
Well, I was wary he could be some charming drug smuggling pirate playboy with a penchant for targeting touristicas………………..
That was before we independently established a few days later that he’s an entrepreneur who sells his multivitamins (rubber-stamped and approved by the Spanish food+drugs authorities) in licensed pharmacies AND that he has an MBA from Empresa, Spain’s equivalent of Harvard.
LOL! Yeah, so I turned down the opportunity to go to Valencia with him and GBP150 of multivitamins for free. Duh! LOL.
Anyway, as readers will see from the video(s) he’s a very sunny character, :*).
The news item that’s capturing my attentions this weekend relate to Lord Adair Turner, the Chair of the FSA (UK equivalent of the SEC, btw), and his proposed Tobin tax on bankers’ deals. It’s being reported and commented upon in the UK media but less so internationally.
Whilst critics of the proposals have been quick to wave the usual autopilot flags about “protecting London’s status as a financial center” and how financial institutions and bankers would “leave London in droves” if such a tax is implemented, there are merits to the proposals — albeit, it could be strategically positioned better than Lord Adair’s approach and more targeted in its applicability.
Instead of reacting to the idea of it the way media pundits who have little or no direct experience of banking, I’m going to try to be practical about it and highlight what considerations the banking community are likely to be taking into account.
Here are a few challenges with taxing bankers’ deals:
(1.)Almost no banks are going to readily disclose the bonus structure by which they reward their deal-makers and revenue generators. It’s part of how competitive advantages are maintained by attracting and retaining top talent.
Therefore, getting any idea of the appropriate rate of Tobin tax is going to be difficult and would depend on self-administration/regulation by the individual banks to comply if the tax is introduced.
(2.)Transaction values can be difficult to pin down precisely and are dependent on the accounting rules and jurisdictions applied, particularly those involving privately-owned entities or those not listed on the major exchanges.
This would make like-for-like Tobin taxation to apply across all transactions tricky to administer and achieve.
(3.)Post-transaction valuations are also variable so it’s not always clear what contribution the bankers have made to any increases in valuation — if any — and which part is attributable to the company’s management and which to external market forces like customer loyalty and goodwill.
This is all before we need to pin down the exact people who did most of the work on the transaction — typically the Directors, Associates and corporate finance bag carriers who receive less of the transaction bonus than the lead rainmaker(s). Therefore, to tax each individual banker on a transaction at the same level would be inappropriate. The duration of a transaction would also affect the quantity of bonuses involved.
All these factors considered, the principles of Lord Adair’s proposals seem to be socially responsible ones: to make the global banking community more accountable and to increase their contribution towards socially useful activities rather than “socially useless” ones.
Coincidentally, I was discussing something related with my friend Marta whilst in Spain. About 5 years ago we had an idea for a socially responsible website to distribute goods handmade in developing economies like Peru, South East Asia and some African states. As part of the model I thought up there was also a program oriented at corporations to increase their global consciousness about social responsibilities. The other side of the equation was a ploughback into the indigenous population of 25 percent of net profits, investing in infrastructure like schools and clean water.
Marta and I revisited this model during my trip and she noted that the global financial crisis was surely making us all aware that business, as a whole, has to become more socially responsible. I pointed out that Harvard MBAs have proposed and been signing up to their own Ethics Code:
However, what’s still missing — and is a commercial opportunity gap — is the creation of companies with the types of tools, products and services which can help this and the next generation of corporate leaders to PRAGMATICALLY commit to a new modus of ethical decision making, implementation and behavior.
It’s one thing to study about Hobbes, Locke, Smith’s “invisible hand of good” et al as part of an Ivy League / Oxbridge / Top 10 MBA course on business ethics and tick the boxes which say, “Yes, we know about codes of ethics as well as corporate tort, balance sheet restructuring and Porter’s competitive matrix” and another to have tools — and here I mean tech ones — with which to systematically abide by and implement according to codes of ethics signed up to…….
Tools, products and services which foster not only changes in mindset but, more importantly, CHANGES IN ACTION.
Otherwise we’ll find ourselves in (yet another) cycle of repeated economic and corporate irresponsibility. It’s not an easy or overnight fix but it does require collective imagination, will and optimism.
The Tobin tax — although a step in the right direction — is not that imaginative. Tax is a word that’s universally hated. In Chinese, the word’s homophone is the same as for the word “broken, shattered and splintered” and “rotten in character” (yes, seriously).
It’s preferable to think of the Tobin tax instead as a “COS” (contribution optimizing society). It would be a variable percentage amount — rather than a fixed annual rate — allocated by financial institutions, from their transactions, towards local communities and enterprise that’s distinct from the budget allocated for promotional and PR activities or their lending practices. Variable according to the reporting month in which the transaction is booked on the balance sheet in the financial accounts.
Only time will tell whether the global financial institutions care purely about making money for themselves and several handfuls of top bankers or whether they care about local communities and the rest of the world too.
This week opens with the sad news that more British soldiers have lost their lives in the run-up to the elections in Afghanistan and the political hot potato/soccer ball which is the US healthcare reforms bill. The contrast between honorable men dying for their countries and in protection of the principles of democracy with dishonorable ones campaigning with smear and fear tactics about “evil and Orwellian NHS” could not be starker.
So here are the inspirational people for this week.
(1.) NHS workers
According to the NHS Information Service, as at September 2008 there were 1,368,200 staff which represents a 28 percent increase compared with 1998. That’s a positive sign that investment and employment opportunities continue to be made in the NHS. Yes, it’s unfortunate the system isn’t as efficient as it could be and that resources get stretched to what seems to be breaking point before recovering back to shape (or at least flexing to accommodate the additional increase in patient care). Importantly,
THE NHS DEMOCRATIZES HEALTHCARE FOR THE HAVES AND HAVE NOTS.
It’s not Orwell that that certain strata of US politicians should educate themselves about. It’s JK Galbraith, David Lloyd George and Aneurin Bevan.
The fact is that not all of us can afford to fly to the best specialist clinics around the world. Likewise, not all of us have access to a Harley Street doctor who charges GBP150 per hour for a consultation or a private dentist who costs GBP100 for a simple routine check-up. The majority of people cope with average annual household income of around GBP30,000. With this, they have to pay towards the education and raising of children, weekly bills (rent, food, electricity/gas) and other expenditure (home, travel and the odd vacation). At the extreme ends of the superrich-poverty line there are those who have to survive on less than GBP5,000 a year. That does not leave much space for private medical insurance or healthcare.
We’re also talking about elderly and infirm people who may not have relatives who can afford to take care of them or pay for their health services.
Instead of wasting US$1 million of voters’ money to produce an advert attacking the UK’s NHS, those American politicians would have spent it more wisely donating it to their local cancer hospital to pay for staff, equipment and patient care.
(2.) Usain Bolt
A different athlete from Roger Federer (a showman more than a gentleman), yet Usain Bolt is just so inspiring with that showmanship and audacity!
A phenomenal sprint to break the 100m world record at 9.58 seconds and we’re all waiting to see him smash the 9.50 barrier next!
Quite a few of the readers’ comments on the Times’s article are interesting, revealing and worth reading.
TWAIN’S VIEWS
Well, I’ve known how much brighter babies are than adults give them credit for ever since I was a baby myself, later when my younger brother was born and now when I see babies out and about. Yesterday, the whole of London seemed to bloom with babies since the sunshine brought out all their proud parents and their prams. Some were also in harnesses on their mothers’ backs or making their first attempts at walking. One little baby girl in a bright pink baby suit decided she couldn’t figure out which order her feet were supposed to go to make a step, so she plunged herself onto her derrière in protest — LOL. She’ll probably grow up to be a campaigner and do sit-ins. Another baby decided he wanted to show off his ability to put his big toes into his mouth. Cute.
Anyway, I didn’t need any Barbies / Sindys / teddy bears as a kid because I had a real live, kicking, screaming, gurgling, learning human (Twain) experiment, bundle of joy in our family in the shape of our youngest. There was enough of an age gap between us for me to actually treat him like a scientific study case rather than just go “Goo-goo-ga-ga, awwwwww,” over him!
I used to put him through his paces to test his mental, physical, audio-visual and emotional dexterity and consciousness. That started happening when he was 3 months old and my parents decided they could trust us to help him do his muscle strengthening exercises. This involved putting him on his back and gently stretching out his limbs, whilst counting to him in Mandarin with each movement and then holding up brightly colored objects to see whether he was:
(1.) able to follow the object around;
(2.) able to detect when an object had been swapped; and
(3.) able to anticipate whether we were going to put the object near his nose / his hands / us.
He was pretty good at all of these tests. His special talent was more audio than visual, though. Once he could walk the first thing he tried to do was switch the TV on for the sound. Maybe that explains his musical talents now.
Before he arrived though, I’d been experimental with kids younger than me when I was about 4. I babysat a neighbor’s little 2-year-old and earned HK$2 per day for my efforts. That baby, though, was definitely not as bright or inquisitive as my younger brother. She was quieter and more introspective.
With my own children — the ones that will make my mother a grandmother — I plan to record and document all my experiments with them. That’ll be fun!
T-MODEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS
So I was thinking about this whole issue of, “What’s consciousness and where is it,” my father’s coma situation and was also wondering whether the Internet’s version of the Global Brain might enable us to produce a proxy for our natural brain, the location of consciousness and this is what’s emerging as my model:
By medical definition, my father was considered to be “unconscious” which meant that the ECG (electrical conductivity graphs) couldn’t detect any discernible voltage that might indicate electrical activity in his brain. He also seemed to be unresponsive to instructions and actions from the nursing staff. Yet when I visited I got the distinctive impression that he was conscious so I set about doing my own experiments to test for his responsiveness — over and above whatever the ECGs and daily physical routines / procedures the hospital staff were doing.
I reasoned that, according to medical literature, we’ve identified certain areas in the brain which relate to cognisance (or recognition of faces / voices), communication and command/control over our physical limbs. Similarly, in the way in which the Net is forming we have ways of cognisance (via avatars and images), communication (text, images, IMs, emails etc) and a command/control function in the coding which paths all those IF mouse is clicked, XYZ happens or WHEN text is input, insert into database type commands which appear in Boolean, Javascript, AS3, Squeak and every other OOP (object-oriented program) which makes up what we call the World Wide Web or Net.
So I started to make the connections between all the literature (including business psychology models) I’d read since childhood, my own observations of how the brain works in situ (including young children and spending time with my grandparents as much as daily interactions with people @ work and @ play), my father’s situation and my work on the Net and this realization sparked:
* WE HAVEN’T DISCOVERED CONSCIOUSNESS YET BECAUSE WE’RE LOOKING IN THE WRONG PLACES AND WITH THE WRONG TOOLS! What if it’s not via ECGs and MRIs alone?
Then the challenge becomes, “Well what model or framework can we build to detect it and guide us to finding the right tools?”
Through the interactions with my father it became apparent that he had cognisance of who I was and also of Elvis and Pavarotti when I plugged in his music headset. His facial expressions would change subtly but perceptibly. There was also moistness which formed in his eyes and showed up on his lashes. He could sense and was moved by the music, that’s how I interpreted this moistness. I can imagine how frustrating it must have been for him: an intelligent and articulate person who was in a vegetative state.
To the hospital staff, he was a patient number. To us, he was ORGANIC: our fellow journeyer through Life’s ups and downs, evolving and mutating along the way. He was the one who — together with our mother — taught us how to walk, talk, read, write, laugh, cry, imagine, be and a billion other shared experiences (good and bad). Just as he had comforted us, washed our faces and held our hands when we were relatively young and dependent, so it was our turn to hold his hand, wash his face and do whatever we could to comfort him. The sensation of touch was another way for me to gauge his state of being.
Here too I got the sense that he was conscious and aware he wasn’t alone and that we were with him. He couldn’t grip my hand back but occasionally there was a pulsation on the tips and it would become warmer.
After a few days, it struck me that whilst he’d lost functional ability of his communication, command/control, collaboration and coherence faculties I didn’t (and still don’t) personally believe that he’d lost consciousness entirely — only the consciousness as currently defined by medical information and the tools available.
What’s irrefutable is that we haven’t definitively found consciousness or its location yet. If we had, I’d probably have read about it in The Lancet, New Scientist, Wired, Nature, Scientific American, British Medical Journal, Neurosurgery Quarterly etc. (i.e., any of the specialist medical publications listed here: http://www.medic8.com/Journals/All.htm).
So I started to think about, “What are the core elements of consciousness then — if the medical one is incomplete? Maybe once we find the core elements we might be able to narrow down the zones within the cortex where consciousness is triangulated.”
Culture, I thought, must be in there somewhere. Each of us is born into a particular culture and that DNA inherited from our parents must contribute to our consciousness, its course and its shaping in our histories, here and now and futures.
My father had a sense of his own culture because when I spoke with him in Chinese, again there were those subtle changes in his face. When the nurse(s) came to follow through with their procedures and addressed him in English I could see that his face was expressionless. If I read a passage to him from a book on plants, that expression was different from when I read a passage from a historical Chinese novel. When he was listening to Pavarotti there was a glow to his face which was different from if I played a Chinese female singer from the 1940s and 1950s.
Anyway, more recently whilst tracking developments on the Net and the building of “The Global Brain” I realized that culture is a core component here too. We talk about Semantics and yet the definition of semantics means different things to different people (around the world, across genders, traversing cultures and educational / professional reference points).
To Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C it means a set of ontologies to help us classify data objects. To me, it means those ontologies PLUS taking into account cultural and perceptual factors like subtle nuances, double entendres, potential lost in translations, the differences between male-female communication etc.
I think also of the coherence component. We can have ontologies which stand up in their own right and yet are not coherent in the whole. So, for example, the logic of their classification doesn’t synch with another’s. Paris in RDF form is a location, a proper noun and a fictional character from Homer’s Odysseus but, presently, if we went on the streets and asked people, “What does Paris mean to you?” the answer would not be “Capital city of France / Paris Hilton / Paris, Prince of Troy.” John / Jane Doe on the street is more likely to say:
* It means romance.
* It means the Eiffel Tower / Sacre Coeur / the Louvre / La Rive Gauche (the Left Bank) etc.
* It means Sartre / Voltaire / de Beauvoir etc.
* It means an eye line that’s different / compact / elegantly distinguishable from London, New York and Toyko: fewer skyscrapers, more central planning.
* It means expensive / chic / beautiful / etc.
So is this set of classifications coherent with the noun set? No, it’s not. That’s because the adjectives set hasn’t yet been accounted for in the W3C design (I’ve accounted for it, though, in my model and algorithms).
Within the coherence component we also have to think about the clustering approach and whether the Bayesian tree filter approach is the optimal model for clustering. I would argue not (but that’s another post and some more emails between me and the MIT Collaboratorium team).
Once we crack the coherence component, the next ones to focus on would be consideration and creativity. What tools can be developed to harness or enhance those?
Again, if we compare the Net’s potential Global Brain with the actual human brain we can see that according to my model, if we can establish the definitive components and where they reside (cognisance, communication, command / control, collaboration, coherence, creativity, consideration and culture) we may pinpoint the holistic manifestation of consciousness itself.
That’s something good and positive to work together towards…….
Here’s a photo of the central lounge of the location where we shot my segment of the documentary on global consciousness, how it applies to the Internet and what I hope the future holds.
On the day we went to do some location reconnaissance a handful of paparazzi were lurking in wait outside. Not for me, of course; I’m simply a Jane Doe. It was for a singer/reality TV/gossip tabloid regular called Peter Andre, who’s estranged from his glamor model/reality TV/gossip tabloid regular wife, and who was apparently in the building for lunch.
The juxtaposition of this made me LOL. Here we were creating a documentary involving consciousness, intelligence, sharing knowledge (art, science, culture, business and the Internet) and the evolution of our species, and outside was a pap pack interested in capturing Peter Andre’s state of being over his estranged wife’s new involvement with……………….a cage fighter.
LOL — life IS weird and its weirdness is what makes it so wonderful!
Anyway, during the shoot itself we were in one of the meeting rooms where the director (Alex) and his editor/assistant (Bron) set-up the lighting and decided how they wanted the visuals. They made it a really relaxed and enjoyable experience which was great. I’ve seen and read about the hectic and pressurized nature of film shoots involving up to 1000 people with mechanical cranes holding equipment to control the lighting, sound and cameras so it was quite interesting to experience a small crew.
I have good faith the documentary’s going to be successful and will challenge us all to re-imagine what consciousness means to each of us, to others and what we can do about contributing to global consciousness about major issues which need solving. Plus simply as a piece of directorial art it’s going to work well, even if my segment isn’t going to be as visually amazing as some of the other contributors’.
The documentary will be showcased in September (more details later).
MY HANDS AND FEET
Readers may have noticed that in my own mini videos I never appear onscreen. Only my hands and my feet are given any airtime so the documentary will be a first: the first time my face appears. I only decided to agree to this because the subject matter is a serious one, “What is global consciousness and what should we individually and collectively do about harnessing it in relation to the Internet?”
The reason only my hands and feet have appeared to-date is because I believe we’re not about how we look. Who we are and what we mean and represent is about the journeys of our lives, the people we touch and what we can do that’s of value — hence hands and feet.
Yes, I do have very distinctive, smooth and expressive hands. Alex the director called them “particular”. Over the years people have suggested that I could become a hand model for adverts and magazine shoots. I just regard my hands as the vessel through which I can write, type, paint, code, knit, cook, hold / shake people’s hands, take out the trash, move objects around and play instruments with.
In fact, they’re not that special. It’s my brain that’s really “particular” — except that can’t be seen on screen except me as a “talking head”. LOL.
Would be quite interesting to see a scan of my brain when it’s twaining concepts…………….Ha ha!
I’m currently making arrangements to catch-up with someone I haven’t seen or thought about much in many many years. She’s the person for whom I wrote the poem, When, and was Master of Ceremonies for at her wedding ceremony. The poem was my insight on how people from completely different worlds can collide, discover that what they share in common matters more than differences, fall in love and have hope for their family’s futures.
I added the addendum because recently I had a dream. In the dream, her husband appeared to me for the second time in a year.
Readers should be aware of — but not spooked out by — the fact that her husband passed away several years ago. The circumstances I don’t know and I didn’t ask; if she wants to tell me when we meet she can. Although at some period in our histories we were close, by the time he passed away, we were no longer in touch and I discovered purely by accident that she’d been widowed; the photographer at their wedding told me.
They were a well-suited, intelligent and glamorous couple: both doctors, both from “good families”, both professionally driven. Now, she’s a widow at a young age — too young.
Naturally, I sent my condolences but I have to be honest and say I had no particular desire to see her again and to be reminded of memories which were upsetting for me. The last time I saw them both I demanded to be let out of their car at a busy roundabout because I didn’t want to listen to them any more and I walked to the nearest metro in the pouring rain.
Her husband had spent some time trying to get me to leave my job in the big bank to do something for them. I refused, sense prevailed and we broke off contact.
Anyway, her husband has appeared in my dreams in what I interpret as seeking my forgiveness and my help to enable his wife to overcome her grief and to move forward in Life. He knows well that I have the ability to transform situations and people, to make things good and whole again — not in some supernatural / religious / mumbo jumbo way but simply with my humanity, my humor and my smart sense.
The reason they asked me to be Master of Ceremonies was because as he said, “You’re the only person we trust to make sure everything runs smoothly on the day, to give everyone a great time and be the person who ensures war doesn’t break out amongst our families and friends.” In fact, her parents and most of her other friends disapproved of their union and I was the only one who was steadfastly there for them throughout their courtship.
As it turned out, their wedding day was simply………..BRILLIANT and beautiful and a triumph of love. My MC-ing and coordinating of the guests, the caterers, the band, the photographers, etc. went well. Luckily, the sun also contributed a lot to the success of the day.
I am “different” and I’ve always had some awareness of this. My friend herself has commented on my uniqueness and how special I am — like others whose life paths have crossed mine. My brother says that I’m the “driver of our family”; that is, when I’m at the driving wheel of anything, we all journey and get to the right destinations on time. When I’m not, things don’t get done with the same effect. My dearest friend GC noted that it took me 8 hours to produce a strategy for Project ART which would have taken him 8 years to (and he’s got 50+ years of professional experience, lol).
None of this means that my ego shoots off for Pluto. Instead, I’m conscious of my responsibilities, my relative position in our colony of billions of ants, bees, ladybirds, locusts, spiders and butterflies, my Life’s purpose and what really matters.
So I will see her to be that connection, that conduit, that channel from loss to love again.
What recent events reminded me of is that our lives and we are constantly evolving and moving forward, but sometimes we need to reach a hand out to the past too. That hand that may help someone get back up onto their feet and be ready to walk the path(s) of their own Life and discover its wonders once more.
For them to become conscious and to love instead of going through Life as sheep, robots or sleepwalkers. To actually…………LIVE and not simply exist.
Search — we seek the digital gold here, we seek it there…….It’s right under our noses and we can’t see it.
This is a most cryptic Twainism which might even have Holmes saying, “Watson, I can make neither heads, tails nor tongue of it! The young woman is a most peculiar cat! Isn’t she supposed to be Alice rather than Cheshire?” Everything will become clear after my wee segment in the documentary, folks.
I am following the FB and FF tie-up with some interest. We have a situation where, only a few weeks ago, Microsoft inked its search deal with Yahoo! Microsoft owns a minority stake in FB (bought at peak price and, seriously, with my corporate strategy hat on? Google’s acquisition of YouTube was a much much more cost-efficient and smarter move.) Plus Microsoft is indirectly hiring former Googlers, the founders of friendfeed. In any case, the blogosphere consensus seems to be that it’s all about that magic word “search” again:
The difference with this deal is that the emphasis is on this notion of “REAL-TIME” search and real-time updates from friends which implies implicit trust. Again, what “real-time” achieves is related to speed — a scalar value — rather than relevance, accuracy or reliability which relate to search orientation and direction which derives velocity, a vector value.
So I have this Devil’s Advocate question, okay?
If I run faster will I arrive at the right destination sooner? Superficially, we may think the answer is, “Yes, of course!” However, it’s a trick question which tests our lateral thinking.
The key part of the question is “right destination”. You can run as fast as Usain Bolt. However, you may be racing towards the Grand Canyon whilst everyone else is headed for Hawaii………….
Rivals to the iPad will come in similar shapes but all screen sizes, judging by the launches here in Berlin on Thursday of tablets from Samsung and Toshiba (pictured). The competition is also packing its cheaper devices with features the iPad may not have for some time, such as cameras with video calling. Tim Bradshaw gave […]
Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, Hulu and Sony are all providing a way for viewers to purchase video content online. However today’s Lex writes that content providers might not be fully on board just yet: “While renting out old shows and films individually or on subscription generates some extra cash, there is little incentive to […]
There are two ways one could think about Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab. One would be to look at its slick casing, its compact 7-inch form, the latest Android software and extensive 3G support from European mobile operators, and say: here is a device which proves the iPad isn’t the only show in town. The other would be […]
Apple is making a more serious bid for the set top box market with 99 cent TV and $4.99 new movie rentals that are streamed through a smaller version of AppleTV. Chief executive Steve Jobs introduced the new device at an event in San Francisco. It will cost $99, down from $229, and is available for […]
Sony is challenging Apple and Google with an internet “cloud-based” music streaming service that will be available on many of its networked consumer electronics products. The MusicUnlimited service was announced at IFA, a major consumer electronics show in Berlin, barely an hour before Apple’s own music-themed press conference in California. After the jump, […]
The FT tried something new today. We took to Twitter to answer questions about one of the day’s bigger news stories in the digital-media world: that the UK’s advertising regulator, the ASA, is extending its rules on accuracy and decency into corporate websites, social networks, blogs and mobile apps. Seeing as many people already discuss the […]
Just ahead of Apple’s expected announcement of an autumn refresh of its iPod lineup today, SanDisk has unveiled an update to a rival portable media player in the sub-$100 category. SanDisk claims parity in market share with Apple where the iPod shuffle plays and says its Sansa Fuze+ has far more features. Daniel Schreiber, head of […]
Hewlett-Packard is announcing an entertainment-oriented refresh to its notebook computer line today–and the most notable addition comes with its own 3D glasses. The HP Envy 17 3D’s glasses automatically turn on when the user is watching a 3D Blu-ray DVD on the machine and then turn off again, giving the glasses a projected year of […]
This is a guest post by FT Media Editor Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson Not much has been heard of Beyond Oblivion since the FT pulled back the veil on its ambitious vision of tackling piracy by asking devices manufacturers and broadband providers to pay for music consumed over their products and services. At the time, we reported that Adam […]
One of the trickiest challenges for a company is continuous innovation - to keep updating and refreshing its products when the excitement of a product launch is past - so I take my hat off to Google. In contrast to Microsoft, which in the past let products such as Internet Explorer and Hotmail get […]
