Guerilla Economics

James Burke Connections

James Burke. Genius, historian of genius, maker of one of the greatest TV programmes ever.

Let me explain. Back in the 1970s the heavily regulated British TV environment was responsible for adding some true gems to the world repository of human knowledge. Because there were only three channels, and two of those were the BBC, you didn't have to worry about competitive strategy, so you could make programmes to satisfy other objectives. OK you laugh now at the safari suits and flares, and you compare the stilted narratives and all the rest with our hyperaccelerated graphics and everything louder than everything else sound (and you know, us engineers should take a Dogme vow forswearing the use of heavy compression on the master channel.)but let me tell you something. In ten years time, if anything exists of our current creative models, everything we produce now will look just as stupid as old stuff does now. They'll be lining up comedians to say unfunny pieces to camera about Big Brother just as we do now about say The Tube or whatever.

But, like whatever. I loved this when I was ickle. It got me interested in the history of innovation, which is not normally a nice easy linear progression but a set of fits and starts, jumps forward and backwards. It also got me interested in the betweens, which are the really important factors. That is to say, the things which only happen when you connect up knowledge in different fields. We can easily become knowledge islands. So build fucking bridges.

Anyway here's JB at his best. This ep of connections links the atomic bomb to the stirrup. It's clear and it's compelling and it's very interesting. Part One here.

Get the rest while they're still up. I promise you that if you are interested it will reward you. Now to only disconnect, as we might deliberately misquote Forster. You can also get connections here

But why would you. £243 for fucking DVD box set? Are you taking the piss. Yes you are. Thank the ineffable Tao therefore for  a modern knowledge connection method. Here. Thank JamesBurkeFan at youtube for sterling work in uploading to the 'toob. Be careful with the 12GB vols 1, 2, 3 set (it will take days to dl.)

And remember to ding a dong every hour, when you pick a flower, even when your lover has gone....

Trendalyzer

There is on the internet a quite wonderful site called ted.com. It's worth spending a few days poking around its innards, as it is full of the most genius stuff from very interesting people, among them luminaries Matthieu Ricard and Larry Lessig.

And this bloke: Hans Rosling. A professor of public health at the Karolinska Institute (the people who give out the Nobel for medicine), he saw that a fundamental problem was the gap between databases containing wonderful flavours of information, and people who needed to know it not being able to really see what was going on from the numbers. So he invented the trendalyzer a fantastic presentation widget which runs realtime multidimensional and user controllable animations of the data.

The following is an embed of his 2006 talk on the use of the trendalyzer (there's an equally fascinating updated one also on Ted, and many more "gapcasts" linkable from his gapmider site)

There's nothing actually revolutionary about any of this. It should be obvious that data presentation linking information from different public databases is a good idea. But it took until 2006 for someone to produce a way of doing just that in a simple and accessible manner. That, ladies and gentlemen, is part of the essence of genius: doing what was too obvious for anyone to have thought about doing. Google has, of course, acquired the trendalyzer. Given a fair wind and the ability to import databases (as yet not available, though surely no 1 on the list of desired features) its a tool which can simply give context to the most boring of presentations, give us new ways to interact with data, and stimulate all kinds of discussion about the results.

And that would be revolutionary.

ETA. For some reason I couldn't get the ted.com talk to embed directly, but luckily, supporting the power of the open internet, ted has also kindly put everything up on youtube too. But do visit ted. There are many more quite brilliant talks there too.

ETA 2: No Youtube isn't embedding either. Go to the link for now. Isn't it wonderful that someone makes technology simple and someone finds a way to make it complicated again.

ETA 3: Aha. Typepad wonderfully tell me I have to do th embedding in html view. OK. I sit corrected!