There is a great hypertext reading list forming on Ben Hammersley's site. Both academic and fiction, philosophy and summaries of hypertext, this is sort of a note to self...
interesting things: February 2003 Archives
Something I found today, via Ben Hammersley, Granta have published an issue on Groups, with a range of writing on the topic of groups. Mainly people's good and bad recollections of being in a group, quite a bit of it is online too.
I'm interested in this area and remembered a good book on Group Processes, by Rupert Brown. A classic psychology text book, well written too. Thanks Chloe.
Table football in shockwave, this is something a friend Adam made last year.
Electronics Design Chain had an interesting article from last summer discussing the process that used to create the iPod. It is a good analysis of how decided to not only outsource the manufacturing of the iPod, but also the majority of the design process. Essentially acting as a client of a reference platform designer PortalPlayer, with contributions from DSP manufacturers and Sony for the battery, plus Toshiba for the hard drive. All contributing their expertise to create something faster and better than they probably could on their own.
Maybe the article preaches to the choir a little, but still interesting reading. the end of the article predicts that elements of the reference design used for the iPod will appear in other devices over the next few months, as it will only be covered under an agreement for a short period. Hence the similar products, even down to shape that have been announced recently.
Via Doc Searls' closing comments on the sad Columbia events I found a host of stuff about Space elevators. Such a really great idea, I've been idlely thinking around writing a novel/short story/film script over the past few years about this topic.
Essentially, build a strong cable to geostationary orbit and then run cars up and down it at a fraction of the cost of sending rockets into space. Also as Dana Blankenhorn notes there is a scaleability here, as once you build once then you have the facilities to build another and you can use the first one to put everything into orbit to create the second, third and fouth. location of the ground station is a concern as it will be a very vurnerable target, however if you have more than 2 then you can have redundancy. For lots more detail on this topic have a look at the conference presentations from the space elevator 2002 conference hosted by HighLift systems.
The Radio 4 programme, The Material World 5/dec/2002, has an interesting radio interview about space elevators, RealAudio file interview starts about 15 minutes in.
The end of Dana's article makes it sounds achiveable, at least within the next 20 years, certainly the costs are less than we'll spend on the coming war with Iraq
