Jeff Buckley - BBC Soul Music Take 2

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BBC Soul Music - Dido's Lament

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Sadly music mega-corp Sony has removed the YouTube video of Jeff Buckley I had included on my earlier post about the BBC Radio 4 series Soul Music. Checking the visitor stats for this Blog it is clear the post that featured anecdotes about Dido's Lament, including the legendary performance by Jeff Buckley, still has plenty of visits.

However, the really great news is the BBC has increased the duration of the archived pieces from Soul Music and have included this edition along with many others, link above.

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The Gospel of Cognitive Surplus...

Clay Shirky has just become a bit of a UK Blog Buzz after an article about him was published in the Guardian last Monday, one in the usual round of interviews when an author's latest book is published. He has been using the phrase 'Cognitive Surplus' for a while in his talks including drawing the analogy to the recovery from drowning sorrows in gin when trying to cope with the trauma of transformation from rural to urban life early in the last century.

In a 2008 talk he makes this point:

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before - free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.

We have a positive way of making a difference, by not wasting more of the precious resource of time. It is clear how this applies to charities as well as businesses and particularly to the church. It is interesting to see that Mr Shirky is not so active online himself and along with David Keen's 'final' blog entry today issues a further challenge to be considered...

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The Apple of Discord

For many years our small (yet beautiful) company has encouraged our clients to steer away from using FLASH (Cue Queen: 'Ah Ah') on their websites on the basis it yields a 'form above function' solution. Websites built using Flash are usually extremely 'pretty', in fact, some of them do look sensational, however, customers that heeded our advice will now be rewarded bigtime.

By Friday 28th May all pre-orders for the Apple iPad will have been fulfilled and this long awaited and highly desirable gizmo becomes available in the UK. That's when every website developed with Flash will look like the iPhone screen capture above on the iPad (also affects the iPod Touch). As the iPad will probably become the bit of technology that every management and decision maker will acquire then a lot of work will need to be done to provide alternative versions soonest so the typical market sector viewer of these 'glamorous' websites is not lost! Our longer term hunches were realised completely last month when Apple's charismatic 'front man' Steve Jobs posted this open letter to Adobe about Flash.

(The example shown above is a genuine screen grab on the iPhone with the title and web address changed to protect our uninformed competitor!)

The Independent truly challenges us all...

 

I have found it challenging to find an original approach to comment on the General election... there certainly have been some 'moments to remember' and these have already been written up with great eloquence and variety.

However, today I read the Rogue's Gallery section in The Independent that certainly got through to me which makes the vital point that we, the public, are culpable for the current deadlock which writer Matthew Norman describes as a 'constitutional pile-up'. His view that none of the three current main party leaders will survive politically for much longer feels like a refreshing notion. I will not reveal what Norman says in the closing paragraph of this piece as I hope others read it and also feel the same sense of optimism and wet-eyed joy that instantly permeated my whole being!

Read the full article here: Matthew Norman: we had our chance, and we blew it

Eddie Izzard - Brilliant Britain

Well, whoever you vote for you have to agree this is excellent AND positive art?!!

Love it! h/t Martin Wroe

P (Green Party!)

Easter suffering... fuel for forgiveness

From work of the people found on their blog.

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Fundamentalism versus Curiosity...

'curiosity' from Nic Askew on Vimeo.

A beautifully shot black and white film of one of my Blog heroes Seth Godin talking so much more sense than churchy types tend to pontificate on at such length and mediocrity... I have learned so much from this man's thoughts and writings. h/t Mike Todd

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Seth Godin nails it... yet again!

This isn't the first time I've clicked through to Seth Godin's blog to find profound truth leap out at me that is so applicable to a(ny) person of faith...

I was talking to a religious leader, someone who runs a congregation. She made it clear to me that on many days, it's just a job. A job like any other, you show up, you go through the motions, you get paid.

I guess we find this disturbing because spiritual work should be real, not faked.

But isn't your work spiritual?

I know doctors, lawyers, waiters and insurance brokers who are honestly and truly passionate about what they do. They view it as an art form, a calling, and an important (no, an essential) thing worth doing.

Read the full post here.

Pete Rollins... insurrectionist theology

Greenbelt Festival darling Pete Rollins in excellent form... love the pub tour idea! h/t Mike Todd

PB

What matters now...

Seth Godin is attempting to break all previous records by providing a new e-book to download for free on his Blog site and inviting everyone to virally market the message of its availability. I think this is a really interesting experiment in itself with the added bonus of receiving the excellent ebook.
Essentially the book is a collection of inspiring short thoughts and anecdotes from some high profile authors including Seth himself, Acumen Fund CEO Jaqueline Novogratz, business guru Tom Peters and Greenbelt Festival speaker Karen Armstrong.

Wonderful stuff!

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Imagine a world...

Came across this when following links from Seth Godin's blog which made me think. Some amazing and pertinent statements from Acumen Fund's CEO, Jaqueline Novogratz:

It takes embracing the World with both arms and expecting no thanks in return. It takes moving beyond trite assumption and petty ideology and really listening to one another.

Yep, challenging stuff...

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What If Jesus Meant All That Stuff?

Now this made me sit up and take notice! How amazing (and, I would venture to suggest, how Christlike?) that regular Greenbelt speaker and author Shane Claiborne has this hard hitting article in the mainstream blokey magazine 'Esquire'? It starts with a challenging apology:

To all my nonbelieving, sort-of-believing, and used-to-be-believing friends: I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians. Christians who have had so much to say with our mouths and so little to show with our lives. I am sorry that so often we have forgotten the Christ of our Christianity.

Forgive us. Forgive us for the embarrassing things we have done in the name of God.

As we accelerate towards Christmas it pains me to sing some of the choral stuff we do, gorgeous tunes and harmonies, yet words that bear no resemblance to the real thing. Shane doesn't miss making this point either:

It is this Jesus who was born in a stank manger in the middle of a genocide. That is the God that we are just as likely to find in the streets as in the sanctuary, who can redeem revolutionaries and tax collectors, the oppressed and the oppressors... a God who is saving some of us from the ghettos of poverty, and some of us from the ghettos of wealth.

Go read the full article!

h/t Greenbelt Blog

Uncommon Sense

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One of my regular reads is former BT futurologist Peter Cochrane's Blog on the technology news website silicon.com. A recent posting of his provides food for thought on the current economic crisis, some sections I quote here:

Where do these times of monetary and market instability come from? There appears to be a limited number of fundamental mechanisms over and above human ignorance, greed and stupidity.

First, I would cite the fundamental tenets and assumptions of economic theory that are obviously wrong:

1) Infinite resources - Not true for the atoms on this finite planet.
2) Infinite markets - Not true for a finite population and ecosystem.
3) Linear channels - Nothing to do with markets is wholly linear.
4) Continuous growth - Was never, and never will be, possible
5) Known behaviours - People and markets are increasingly unpredictable.
6) Understandable - Probably beyond the grasp of humankind.

Second, I think we can identify a set of new and progressively growing factors of increasing influence:

1) Complexity - Managers and people no longer understand products.
2) Connectedness - Everything is now related and not isolated or standalone.
3) Scale - Everything is now huge and networked globally.
4) Machines - They perform more trades than people.
5) Fundamentally non-linear - Chaotic and probably beyond human control.
6) Short-termism - The focus is on the immediate and making money now.
7) Speed - ICT has improved speed and removed latency.

The first set of factors set the scene for beliefs and the illusion of understanding, while the second present ideal components for the occurrence of one economic crisis after another. Perhaps the most critical, given (5) and (6), is the reduction of latency (7) as a prime factor in a world of non-linearity, chaos and strange attractors.

Read the full article here: Peter Cochrane's Uncommon Sense

A Beautiful Mind - Living by Numbers

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The Billion Dollar Gram - a brilliant visualisation of where the money goes. Click the link or the image to see the numbers.

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Sacred idleness...

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Work is not always required; There is such a thing as sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is fearfully neglected.

George MacDonald (1824-1903)