infinite ideas machine

The BBC gives us back our stuff

Wednesday's Press Release, BBC Creative Archive pioneers new approach to public access rights in digital age, shows encouraging signs that this autumn the BBC are going to open up at least some of the archives that we, the license payers, have been funding for decades.

This is somewhat gratifying for me as, when I worked for BBC Digital Media Education in the late 90s, I proposed something along these lines (namely assets for schools and colleges being made available under an academic license, possibly from a bbc.ac.uk service) as a stimulus to growth and development of digital education content across the UK.

Of course, that never happened and it's unlikely that the education archives will be made available now either - especially in the light of more recent developments, i.e. the £150 million Digital Curriculum initiative.

There's still some evidence of 'Auntyish' thinking in this interview with Paula Le Dieu, Joint Director of the Creative Archive, 'Providing the Fuel for a Creative Nation':

Was it because the decision content has been paid for by the public, so should be there for the public to use?

We didn't start from that premise. We started from the premise that we had this fabulous archive and we had a requirement in our last charter, the one that we're currently operating in, that expressly asks us to open up our archive. There had always been a strong feeling that we hadn't done that as well as we could.

But I applaud whoever (Greg Dyke?) provided the final push within the Corporation to get this long-overdue process rolling, and look forward to playing with the results :)

N.B. This also looks like a bit of a triumph for the Creative Commons project, chaired by Lawrence Lessig, as it looks like access to the BBC Creative Archive will be based on the Creative Commons model. I just wonder what the lawyers at Henry Wood House will make of the license...

UPDATED 14/6/04: Rupert Goodwin's Creative Commons gives the BBC uncommon creativity covers some of the history and context and his previous article, Auntie opens her drawers, outlines some of the risks.

Oh come on!

While I can't say I have been following the 'story' closely, it has been hard to avoid the whole David Beckham, did he / didn't he? situation recently. But I saw a headline in the supermarket today that really underlined the hypocrisy of the whole sorry affair - something along the lines of 'My marriage agony, by Victoria Beckham'.

Puh-lease! The only difference between any pain that Mrs Beckham may be feeling right now and that felt by any number of other women who find themselves in similar situations is that her marriage troubles are being splashed all over the media. And this is because... its precisely how she has chosen to live her life!

I am certain the Beckhams are going through a complex, painful, conflicted time in their lives - but they have got there through the choices they freely made. We do not need them held up as totemic of our more pedestrian feelings, for celebrities (as portrayed in the media) parody emotion; they celebrate the surface, the shallow, the unreal.

P.S. If Victoria were a real artist, she would take her pain and create something out of it - not use it to turn (yet) a(nother) quick buck.

Currently reading "Impossibility"

Subtitled "The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits", this is a whistlestop tour around the very edges of what we know - and, indeed, what we can know...

I've enjoyed John D. Barrow's books since I read "The World Within the World" at college, and this one (although a few years old now) highlights issues and raises questions that other popular science writers might shy away from or gloss over. Particularly mind-expanding is his explanation of what we can and cannot ever discover about the Universe.

That's Universe with a big 'U', i.e. everything that is, rather than the paltry visible universe (visible to us, that is) to which we are limited by the speed of light. We simply may never be able to prove some of the conjectures of physics / cosmology about the nature of the Universe, even - if 'inflation' due to gravity becoming temporarily repulsive occurred in the early stages of growth of our portion of it - whether it had a beginning or not!

Look out for the graph charting the growth in complexity of computers versus the (neuronal) complexity of the human brain.

Adventures in reality

My good friend Dave Kebab gave me this book of practical experiments by French philosopher Roger-Pol Droit last year, and I have been dipping into it again recently. There's something for everyone in it, from the casual 'coffee table' browser to the more committed (commitable?) intellectual explorer.

The author invites us to reconsider our most ordinary actions as unexpected philosophical events. Peeling an apple, trying to lie in a hammock, watching someone sleep, hearing your voice on an answering machine, playing with a small child - activities that, when considered outside of their routine, invite us to experience the familiar in startling new ways.

For example, have you ever actually tried counting to one thousand? Its neither as easy or as boring as you might imagine - and you end up with not just a sense of how big a thousand is, but an inkling of just how huge a million must be.

[Click on the image to check out the book at amazon.co.uk]