Tag: music

  • New developments in ‘i’

    Engineers have announced today some astounding new breakthroughs in their latest version of i.

    • Empathy – the ability to see the world from the perspective of another. To have a genuine, shared sense of pain. This ability is developed through twenty-year long training process called ‘childhood and adolescence’.
    • Embodied cognition – a way to develop understanding that emerges through the unique physical characteristics of each ‘i’ and how it moves through and experiences the world.
    • Music – audio signals organised into patterns and created by individual or groups of ‘i’s to communicate information that can’t be captured in a .txt file.
    • Culture – a collective intelligence that emerges when several i operating systems do things together.
    • Gut-feeling – a parallel processor providing checks and balances against the logic board.
    • Sleep – a remarkable sub-routine that both repairs the operating system and identifies new patterns.
    • Love – a higher order circuit that guides priorisation, builds system resilience and provides additional energy when resources are low.

    This technology is completely free and open-source.

  • If you want to save the planet… have dancing lessons

    Serendipitously, as I was preparing for my first dance teaching workshop this morning at the Idler Festival, I spotted a quote in one of my other open browser tabs a quote from David Flemming.

    Commons are cooperative enterprises; they therefore depend on trust, on reciprocity, and on social capital. The market economy can get by, for a time, with a gravely-weakened culture and social capital, but the commons cannot. If you really want to save the planet and to give human society a decent chance of living on it, the first thing you should do is to join a choir. Or have dancing lessons, or both. That is not quite the hyperbole it seems: in enduring communities, the thing which defines and distinguishes them is their culture of dance, music, story and tradition—so intertwined with trust that it is hard to tell cause from effect. 

    David Flemming, in ‘Lean Logic – A DICTIONARY for the FUTURE and HOW to SURVIVE IT’

    We always said in the Mudflappers that our mission was to make the world slightly better through the medium of dance. Well here is some compelling philosophical underpinning to back that up. I shared this quote with the dance workshop today and it was well received.