Tom Hume

• PatientsLikeMe, crowdsourced health information;
• Starling, a social TV platform. I think there's going to be so much mileage in this stuff... television is a social medium;
• The literary platform, a top-notch blog covering publishing and digital content;
• The data-driven life: "without good time calibration, it is much harder to see the consequences of your actions. If you want to replace the vagaries of intuition with something more reliable, you first need to gather data. Once you know the facts, you can live by them.";
• The Five Second Test, for getting quick feedback on designs;
• Realtime visualisation of European flights, particularly lovely to look at whilst they were all volcano'd out;
• No Bugs: "This isn't a matter of finding defects earlier; it's a question of not generating them at all"
• Designing for iPad - a pile of practical hints, tips and thoughts on iPad UI;
• SCVNGR, a very interesting-looking Google-backed location-based gaming platform;
• Authenticating against App Engine from Android... slowly, slowly, tying all that infrastructure together...

Unusual objects for everyday life: "devices that rethink everyday digital devices and produce solutions that provide more meaningful and poetic interactions."

When objects refuse to interact with their users: "...an alarm clock wakes up itself before waking up you, a selfish keyboard removes all the keys except the ones that tells you its name (qwerty) and a kitchen scale turns itself over and enjoys its own weight."

I've been reading Design Noir recently on the recommendation of Mr Jones, and it's a fascinating book full of things like this: a new look at subversive electronic devices, alongside sometimes-hilarious childlike scrawlings. Go have a peek...

I've just finished reading On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins - the father of the PalmPilot and founder of both Palm and Handspring. I remember reading an interview with Jeff a few years back where he talked about how, despite his involvement in mobile, what he really wanted to do was get some of his theories about the nature of intelligence down on paper - and he's done a really good job.

In the book, he posits that building artificially intelligent machines is eminently possible - that there's nothing magical about intelligence itself that precludes this. In fact he sums this up beautifully in a chapter on consciousness, stating that "consciousness is just what it feels like to have a neocortex". He then lays out his theories for how the brain works: that basically, our minds use hierarchical structures of layers of neurons to constantly make predictions about the world our senses show to us, and feeding these predictions back into the input from our senses to evaluate them.

It's an interesting theory, and one I'm looking forward to discussing with the FP crew, 3 of whom came out of the Cognitive Science department of Sussex University and know much more about this stuff I. And I was all fired up by the epilogue, an enthusiastic call for students interested in the topic to get working on it - after decades wandering about the wilderness, Jeff is convinced that we're due for a burst of progress in this area in the next 10 years.

Thoroughly recommended - and there's an associated web site, of course.

Disclaimer: I'm a frustrated AI wannabe. Despite living in Brighton I avoided Sussex University, which has a great rep for such things, on the basis that I didn't want to spend my university years living in the family home... and I failed to get into Edinburgh, the other big UK AI centre, thanks to my dreadful maths.

I finished reading Difficult Questions About Videogames last week, and can thoroughly recommend it: it's a lovely dip-innable book cataloguing the answers of c.70 folks from the games industry, academia and elsewhere, to questions like "What is a videogame?" and "Why is playing videogames fun?".

Samples quotes:

"In one sentence, games are fun because they allow us to rehearse basic survival skills and we are hard-wired through evolution to feel good when we do that." - Noah Falstein

"People are pattern-matching machines and we find pleasure in patterns." - David Thomas

"What a silly thing it is that we insist on propagating that epithet anyway, 'gamers'. Do you ever hear Hollywood targeting a film for 'hard-core moviegoers'? Or a publisher talking about a new book that will really get the 'bookreaders' talking?" - Ian Bogost

Suzie Cardwell also had some nice thoughts on casual gaming, prompting me to google and find her powerpoint presentation on women and casual gaming - well worth a look.

Tom lent me a copy of Omori Sogen: The Art of a Zen Master at the Airenjuku Christmas drinks last week (which turned predictably WWE, thanks to a bottle of tequila that James passed my way). A really fantastic read - a book which I'd like to re-read in years to come. Thoroughly recommended if you're interested in this kind of thing.

"We got up at four in the morning, went down the mountain, and bathed in a river. Before breakfast we did the Hojo fifteen times. After that we rested a while then practiced thirty more times. After lunch we rested and did the Hojo fifty-five more times until dusk. We did zazen in the evenings.

By the third day I could shout more loudly and powerfully during practice, but my voice was so hoarse I could not speak at all. At night my body was so hot that I could not sleep. Food would not go down my throat; I had only water and raw eggs. My urine was the color of blood. The arms that held the wooden sword could not be raised. We were resigned to death. I could not go before Yamada Sensei and say, "I failed." Onishi and I got out our notes and letters and burned them all as we prepared to die.

On the fourth day a strange thing happened. The same arms that had difficulty in even holding the wooden sword went smoothly up over my head. As my arms went down, I felt a strength that was not physical coming out of both arms. It felt as if this downward cut extended to the other end of the world."

Tool use confirmed in monkeys: read the excellent "Next of Kin for a theory on how tool use led to the evolution of language in primates.