22nov2002(later): The
Aztecs exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art is sublime. Perfect
curation gives a real sense of a culture coming together from the roots
of earlier civilisations, assimilating their art and culture, then finding
its own voice over the centuries... finally becoming assimilated itself
when the conquistadores arrived. The ten galleries are a two-hour walk through
a thousand years. What's more, you can see just how Erich
von Daniken and a lot of other woolly thinkers were fooled - on the carvings
you can easily mistake headdresses and costumes for spacesuits, complete
with rayguns, oxygen tubes, backpacks and moonboots. But it's a red herring.
There are just too many forms life is capable of taking for there to be
any chance at all that aliens actually look like us. After
all, there's nothing ideal about the human form. Like every other creature,
we're just the latest result from a billion years of blind natural selection
according to different environments. Even on one of the potentially Earthlike
worlds now being tracked down, there's no chance we'll find anything remotely
like h. sapiens - or, indeed, anything closer to us than a rattlesnake or
jaguar.
22nov2002: I know it's not
something to laugh about, but I
laughed anyway. Were the Nigerian riots really due to that newspaper
article, or perhaps over the cancelled bikini round?! Expect a fresh rash
of 419 spam as brothers and wives of the dead discover secret bank accounts
with millions of dollars in them.
21nov2002:
'Die Another Day'. I'm in two minds about the new Bond. Brosnan
handles a gun more convincingly than even Connery, and the altogether non-Bondian
pre-title sequence - capture and torture in North Korea over many months
- showed a lot of promise. At the start, I was thinking it might even be
the rebirth of this tired series. Because let's face it, the
Bond franchise is in trouble. The Matrix gave characters an excuse for superhuman
antics that beat Bond's fistfight scenes senseless; XXX openly poked fun
at the whole secret agent paradigm, and the Cold War, 007's credible backstory,
has collapsed into a grubbier mix of religion and terrorists.
There's aren't many places these days you can't get to by package tour;
even North Korea isn't off limits. And the mainstreaming of weird technology
has led to wilder and less believable gadgets for Bond (invisible Astons?
Tactile VR? Not in 2002) making the film more Harry Potter than Harry Palmer.
The whole 007 concept - of a single arch-villain and heroic protagonist
battling it out amid fast cars and explosions in exotic locales - is embarassingly
dated in a networked world of pocket phones and gigahertz laptops, where
amateur climbers can get up Everest and ski down the other side. Where the
ex-head of MI6 is on the book-signing circuit and where one decent computer
game uses the skills of 200 coders. There are no henchmen or palace guards
any more; everyone's a Bond or Blofeld these days. (In some
ways, the series admits this. Off camera, Bond's architecturally amazing
MI6 building is - er, the real MI6 building in London. Ten years ago, the
British government still denied MI6 even existed; now you can take photos
of its HQ. The ice palace has been done before; a major hotel inside the
Arctic Circle rises from the ice every winter. And the bad guy's dome-home
is something far greater away from the camera: a botanical biome housing
living examples of all the world's natural habitats.) So having
Bond spend 14 months behind the kind of bars that don't serve vodka martinis
should've had some impact on the character. Bond was never supposed to be
dimensionless. BUT - All it takes is a shower
and shave, and Brosnan becomes an entirely normal Bond again. The interesting
possibilities of how torture affects the mind are abandoned. And the film
goes on like that, good scenes and characters alternating with unforgivably
bad ones. The pre-title sequence works. But a Python makes
a terrible Q, even when two gadgets in the lab (briefcase and jetpack) appear
to be the genuine props from 60s films. Halle Berry works without a sexually
hinted name, but Miranda Frost is the most unconvincing evil woman in the
series. Too young, too flabby, and not alluring enough. (What's with the
one eye twice the size of the other, anyway? Are Bond girls now chosen with
an eye to some weird equal opportunity thing for ugly bugs? Will we see
Whoopi Goldberg coming out of the sea in a bikini in the next Bond film,
'Never Say Die in the Next Axis-of-Evil Country Added to the List?')
The skating-over-frozen-lake-chased-by-laser scene works fine - but
seconds later, the surfing-down-collapsing-ice-wall scene looks rankly amateurish.
(Hey Cubby, hire some of the guys who worked on Blade II and let 'em teach
you about liquid and translucency.) Moneypenny's fooling around in Q's office
works, but Bond getting Berry into bed for the first time is so artificial
it's almost a parody. The switchblade bailout works, but the big kill-the-baddie
climax is so anti- it's not true. The Big Issue here is that
the world has changed, and if Bond changed with it, there wouldn't be a
Bond. (There'd have to be a hundred Bonds working pro-actively as a team,
generating synergies.) How can killing one man save the world, when in real
life there'd be dozens of board members ready to take over the World Domination
Plan (and who probably had the knives out for the bad guy anyway?) Why should
we be impressed by stunts and beaches when we can go parasailing in the
Caribbean tomorrow? And how can Bond expect us to think in terms of nations
and governments when corporations and individuals belong to wired communities
and interest groups, where laughing currency speculators joust with sums
of trillions, a bunch of oilmen own the Oval Office, and Britain's ruling
party is as ineffectual as a school debating society? I
think the real world has overtaken Bond. Nothing wrong with the
films; you just can't go on retrofitting 60s stories into a 21 Century context
and expect everything to work. It may be time to hang up the PPK, Jimbo.
20nov2002: It's significant that in
many bookstores, the computing section is in two parts: O'Reilly
books, and everything else. It's the right arrangement, because
the O'Reillys are in a class of their own. They cover abtruse technical
subjects in incredible detail - they're used even by people who create web
standards to explain back to them what they created - but remain immensely
readable even for a non-coder. Rosenfeld & Morville's 'Information Architecture
for the World Wide Web' is a good example - it's out of print now, but remains
a great primer for anyone building a website. Like Strunk & White's
'Elements of Style' and William Zinsser's 'On Writing Well' for copywriters,
it's a book I re-read once a year. This shelf of neat fat paperbacks
covers things I'll never do for a living: XML, XSLT, Java and J2EE, Cascading
Style Sheets, HTML & XHTML. But a couple of days skimming through imparts
a sense of all the main concepts of these technologies, and - more importantly
- their context. The reason why certain technology choices are better than
others. Jon Udell's 'Practical Internet Groupware', again out of print now
O'Reilly focus more narrowly, is one example. And finally,
the O'Reillys are just a better user experience. Fold-out crib sheets, a
clear index, sensible chapter headings, suited to both cover-to-cover and
dip-in reading... using an O'Reilly book after the others is like using
Google for the first time after a life of Altavista and Excite. You get
what you pay for, of course: O'Reilly's authors are the best-paid in the
business, and since the books are aimed at deliberately narrow audiences,
they're expensive. (Unlike some of the other book ranges that seem to sell
by the kilogram - '1000 pages for $19.95!') I'm experimenting
with some wild CSS layers today for the new Redpump
site, and three O'Reillys are open on the desk. What ideal technical consultants:
they don't need salaries, they know the business, and they always deliver.
