As an addendum to my note on the influence of cosmology on cartography, a quote from Peter Schwartz:
Cosmology actually matters in the long run. In the geocentric universe, you did one set of things. Suddenly when the sun is at the centre and you’re going around the sun, you start answering those questions differently, you imagine different possibilities, the future looks very different. And of course, once you discover that the sun is only one of many suns, and that it’s part of a galaxy, and [the galaxy is one of] many galaxies… and now you’re into a real universe, it’s a really big thing. Your sense of who you are is now very different. Now we’re even at maybe multiverses, right? We’ve thought about stellar travel, intergalactic travel, interuniversal travel, woah.
He’s talking about generating ideas, but imagine if you can this scale of thinking applied to mapping and our conception of location. Woah, indeed. From his really great The Art of the Really Long View lecture (available to download here).
I have become terminally nomadic of late. No, I have not become an incurable drifter (boom boom), but on a pretty much daily basis now, I swap between computer terminals.
Not only that! My promiscuity extends to operating systems too; until recently my eye wandered only occasionally to other blue gradiated desktops, but in the last few weeks I have skipped between Windows, OS X and Linux with abandon. A while back, I gave Microsoft the shove, who I had been seeing since the days of DOS (it’s been something of a shotgun marraige ever since, given that we had offspring to support) and started an enjoyable liason with a very sexy new Macbook Pro.
I think it’s curious how not-jarring all this swapping back and forth is. I imagine if I had to drive a few different cars, or use a number of different phones every day I would be uncomfortable. And I use my computer much more than I use either of those.
Then again, I’m always reading a couple of books at any given time, usually a cross-section of genres to appeal to different moods, so perhaps OSes work the same way. OS X is Douglas Coupland or Stewart Brand, Linux is Michel Foucault or maybe Dave Eggers, and Windows is Christopher Marlowe or Dan Brown; what am I in the mood for?
Also, driving or phoning are boring activities, whereas I enjoy tinkering with computers and find interface design interesting.
In a somewhat circular move, I’ve been delving into the UNIX command line also. It’s odd; here I am 15 years later, learning the command line all over again. ls -l is the new dir /p.
Life rumbles on, even if this blog lies fallow. I live in Dublin now, and do all the Dubliney things that it entails; reading on the Dart to work in the morning, meeting up with old friends in the evenings, going to some exhibitions with Paula, driving home to Galway the odd weekend.
And the evenings are getting bright. Shadows stretch long along the ground and crawl up onto buildings, the sky is getting blue, and the low hanging sun glares on the road; time to get the camera out again, the photographic light has arrived.