There are so many technology stories every week it can be hard to know what’s significant or not. But this piece on the BBC about a new sort of camera has kept me thinking all day, so I thought I’d blog something about it.

Put simply, the ‘Lytro’ camera – available for pre-order, but not yet out and user-tested – captures the entire ‘light field’ of a scene – all of the light travelling in every direction – meaning that the point of focus and depth of field can be changed any time after the shot has been taken. The video on the BBC site I think is the best explanation of it, but here is a CNET review too:

So why might this be interesting? I’ve lived through an extraordinary period where we’ve moved from totally analogue film to pure digital. You’ll know if you’ve read here at all that I’m keen to explore how our tools reshape us, as well as us shaping them – and the move to digital has had a profound effect. People expect to see images now, rather than waiting for them to be developed. But with this new development, are people going to have an expectation of being able to post-produce photographs too?

I’ll admit to being a little uneasy about aspects of this, or just a little sad. It feels as if the photograph as object is under threat – that photography is becoming entirely subjective – alterable by each viewer as they choose, rather than presented as a final exposed, controlled piece by the artist. Rather than me approaching a photograph – a finalised object, a slice of time frozen and preserved – and responding to it, it’s almost that the lytro-style photograph has to respond to me, which, forgive the pun, is a huge change of focus.

Perhaps there are general themes here beyond photography too. Is objectivity in final retreat? Must everything bow to the subjective? In the world of Facebook and other social media, is it becoming more problematic to make ‘real’ statements, or must we offer everything in a format that can then be manipulated and modified by others.

I’m not against interactivity, and not against it in art in any way. But I would still want to be able to hold on to the ability of an artist or writer to be able to make statements or produce objects that demand that the viewer or reader change in response to them, rather than the object or text having itself to morph to fit those who view them.

Very good episode of In Our Time this week, which looked at free will. 50 mins or so – and very well worthwhile listening to, especially in the context of the debate on heaven and hell which is still rumbling around the publication of Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins.

There are serious problems on both side of the free will / determinism argument. If the universe is truly deterministic then we really have no way of holding people responsible for their actions – they are simply responding to a set of initial universal conditions of which they had no control. But if we assume we have free will, then we need to work out where that comes from, and what that might mean in a quantum universe too.

This philosophical debate gets right to the heart of some of the problems of heaven and hell. If the bible is to be believed, then we have free will – or God would simply not be right to judge, because our fate would have been pre-determined. But the bible also wants us to accept that God has predestined a certain (small) number of people to be saved – and that there’s nothing we can do to change his [sic] mind.

These arguments can be nuanced in lots of ways,but what was refreshing about the In Our Time piece was the reference to Peter Strawson’s work Freedom and Resentment (appended below). As Strawson’s son (also a philsopher) explained, F&R turned the debate about free will on its head somewhat:

Attitudes like ‘gratitude’ and ‘resentment’ are impossible without free will. In a fully deterministic world, there would be no point thanking someone for a generous act, because they would have done it anyway. Similarly, there would be no point being resentful towards someone, because the bad that they have done to you was not in their control.

Strawson defines things like gratitude and resentment as ‘personal reactive attitudes’ – primitive instincts.

If we turn things round, if gratitude and resentment require a universe with free will, then given that we live in a universe within which we want to be grateful, and we find we need people to blame because these are primitive and at the heart of our humanity, we instinctively live as if we had free will whether or not we actually do.

Thus, the debate over free will may as well be closed: we need to live as if we have it.

This could be boiled down in the negative form to the aphorism ‘we are forced to live as if we are free’ – which I think applies beautifully to both over-arching consumer capitalism and evangelical Christianity.

But perhaps we can push this further. If our humanity pushes us to live as if there were free will – even if there might not be (which is, as the programme explains, proveably unproveable) – then perhaps we project the consequences of these free actions into places of judgement.

In other words: we cannot prove if heaven and hell exist, but it’s a natural response to want the world to be fair, to be sorted out and judged at some point so that justice is done. A deterministic universe it might be – just chemicals and electrons – but this is not a world that we find ‘human’ precisely because it makes a nonsense of ideas of love – and hate too.

First up: resist turning up the thermostat. Please. For the sake of everyone, now and in the future, we can’t afford to heat the huge air volumes in our houses by burning fuel. It’s highly inefficient. I was brought up in a very cold, large Victorian vicarage where we simply couldn’t afford to heat the house properly. It seems that people have become so comfortable that they expect to be able to walk around in t-shirts indoors in winter. We have to change that mindset, so here’s some better ways to stay warm:

1. Insulate. You won’t feel cold if your body doesn’t lose heat. It’s perfectly possible to be a warm body in a cold environment if you insulate it properly. It’s not fashionable, but pop another jumper on, and pull on a hat, draw a rug over your knees. Granny chic has to be in this year!

2. Do some work. Heat and Energy are the same thing. Work is the process of transferring energies, which always has heat as a by-product. So if you are cold, the best way to warm up is to change some energy stores into heat: ie do some exercise. There’s no way you’re going to warm up by sitting around shivering! A brisk bit of hoovering? Quick bike ride? Game of chase? All going to leave you feeling toasty.

3. Localise heating. You don’t need to heat the whole house to warm up. Localise your heating with hot drinks and snacks, or, if you have to, locking down radiators in parts of the house so that only certain places are being warmed.

Whatever you do though, turning the thermostat up by 2 degrees is the worst possible way to gain 2 degrees!

The story of the Chilean miners has been one of the most incredibly moving events I can remember. There’s something of the two-fingers-up-to-nature which is both exhilarating and troubling, and something of the deeply archetypal and transformative about the rescue…

33

Sliding, encased, through the bowels the earth
thirty-three steel turds are evacuated
into the gleaming bowl of bright white.
Infernal, labyrinthine, twisting
this intestinal mine had tried to digest them
blocked their way out
enveloped them in darkness
suffocated them in rancid air
left rotting in the guts to be absorbed
into the black rock.

Mother Earth, consumed by anger
at we who quarried your depths
and tore at your womb,
we were not vanquished this time.
With heavy bits we drilled down
into your belly, not ready to give
them up, and now we winch them
one by one from your hole,
dragged filthy, squeezed slowly
out of your pits to be transformed again:
these little shits that you would have
broken up and absorbed
are embraced, and tenderly taken
to sobbing children and aching mothers
and regenerated as fathers, as lovers
as men, walking proud, and waving;
not dirt, our minds and tools
lifting them from their certain graves,
heroes, testaments to our winning spirits
for now, for now we will not be taken
as detritus, but sing and embrace as
loved sons and daughters of this bright heaven.

©KB 13/10/2010

Another extraordinary snippet from the WSJ interview with Eric Schmidt concerns the future of what Google wants to be able to do:

“We’re trying to figure out what the future of search is… We’re still happy to be in search, believe me. But… I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions, they want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

If that sounds sort of…creepy…then his elaboration hardly makes things better:

“Because of the info Google has collected about you, we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are. Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are.” Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there’s a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you’ve been reading about took place on the next block.

“A generation of powerful handheld devices is just around the corner that will be adept at surprising you with information that you didn’t know you wanted to know.”

There are many things I don’t know. But I do know that I don’t want Google harvesting information about my every move in order to tell me things it thinks I might want to know. Why? Well, partly because of the way we know this will be paid for:

“The only way the problem [of insufficient revenue] is going to be solved is by increasing monetization, and the only way I know of to increase monetization is through targeted ads. That’s our business.”

“The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.”

In other words, this represents the final victory of consumer capitalism: at every turn we are fed information about what we should do – for which read ‘what we should buy’ – while data from our every act is harvested to more accurately target us for further marketing.

Our addiction to shiny new devices and technologies has to be fed somehow, and the big brands know this. They know that we will lap up ‘free technology’  – without quite realising that our free will will have been vanquished as we pay for it in advertising.

Now more than ever we need to tread carefully and this wisely about the places we want to allow big technology companies to have free access.

Absolutely fascinating programme on BBC Radio 4, looking at the cases of Sidney Bradford and Mike May, both of whom lost their sight very early in life, and were then lucky enough to be able to have it restored years later.

What is it like to grow up blind, and then be able to see again? One might think it would be happy and miraculous. But in the case of Sidney Bradford, it was far more complex. ‘He was a very successful blind person, who became a rather disabled seeing person.’ Having fantasised about seeing for so long, the visual world, when it finally opened up to him, was a huge disappointment. He became clinically depressed, and died only two years after his sight was restored.

Sight, it would seem, is not the ability to see, but the ability to understand and comprehend the visual information that is presented to us. “Without accumulating visual experience from which the brain can make sense of what the eyes see, vision is of little use.”

Like all good radio, I’ve been left with lots of interesting thoughts which need some time to process. If Jesus did restore Bartimaeus’ sight, did he do anything to help him cope with this trauma of seeing? Indeed, after all of these miraculous changes that we read in the gospels – people being brought back to life, cured of life-long illnesses – there’s little sense of the huge pastoral task that Bradford’s case suggests should be in place to bring people to genuine wholeness.

May has been more successful at coping with his new sighted life. But has also had to deal with disappointment. Seeing was the be-all-and-end-all that he hoped for. When it came, he realised it was only one sense among many, and he was far better using the special skills he had learned as a blind person to help him to continue to negotiate this strange world that ‘crammed so close to my eyeballs.’

It’s as if the human unconscious has its own microscope which has always been aware of these bizarre life-forms, which are so similar to the stuff of science fiction books that were written ages before any technology to see these tiny creatures existed.

Very interesting report today in the Telegraph that NASA have detected a large solar flare erupting from the sun – which is likely to cause some spectacular displays of the northern and southern lights.

These ‘coronal mass injections’ are actually a source of immense worry for disaster planners, as the largest eruption could result in every electrical device on earth having to be switched off to protect it from destruction. This has happened before: the ‘Carrington Event’ of 1859, in which the few electrical machines of the time burst into flames, and telegraph operators were sent flying across the room.

Hearing about this on the BBC science programme Material World inspired me to write a short story, which I’ve uploaded here for the first time. For those of you who enjoy short-form fiction, hope you enjoy it. The story concerns an astronaut turned monk, who is called out of his hermitage by a forward thinking Pope hoping to reinvigorate support for Catholicism and help a cash-strapped NASA by putting a man on a Voyager-style probe on a journey out of the solar system. As the solar storm hits, those in mission control know that the astronaut will not survive, but as he struggles with loneliness and dwindling faith, they wonder if it would even have been right to tell him of his fate…

Download and read the PDF here: Into Great Science Aug 10 And do it quick before your devices get fried

(Update thanks for all those who downloaded this and read it free. As an experiment I’ve removed the PDF link and have now published this on Kindle. UK link here, US link here.)

Interesting piece in The Independent about the battle over the right to remain anonymous online – especially as waged in World of Warcraft recently. That’s not a world I have ever ventured into, but many many have, and, as Rhodri Marsden sets out:

Female players were particularly concerned, very aware that revealing their gender could invite unwanted attention from the kind of men who spend long hours sitting indoors seeking the Reins Of The Bronze Drake within the Caverns of Time. Some respondents during the ensuing 2,000-page discussion on this topic dared to suggest that privacy wasn’t really an issue, but they were forced to eat their words when a Blizzard employee, after revealing his real name in defence of the system, suddenly found his phone number, address, details of his parents, siblings and spouse, and even pictures of his childhood home posted online by Warcrafters trying to make a point.

He goes on to quote comic artist John Gabriel’s ‘Greater Internet F****** Theory‘, which runs that Normal Person + Web Anonymity + Audience = …. well, let’s say ‘idiot’, to keep it for a family audience.

This highlights again the paradox of online presences: we have the potential to be more ‘ourselves’ because we don’t have the pressure of others watching us, but we are also able to be incredibly stupid and cruel for the same reason.

Interestingly, this paradox is nothing new. The screened off confessional has always been a place both where people can unload and be honest about what they have done, but also open up some of their darker desires, and we can see this duality in the way it has functioned as a place in cinema and literature.

Indeed, one could argue that the robes of the priest, which are meant to anonymise them, also bring the twin dangers of increased honesty and increased indiscretion, and that Gabriel’s theory works for any ‘masked performers’ whether ministers, comics, puppeteers or musicians.

Once again, we have to evolve to live with it. Rather than turning off the web, or demanding everyone is unmasked, we need to learn new social skills of how to deal with anonymous commenters, online flaming and general idiocy.

I’ve said it many times here before, but if you haven’t already tuned in to Radio 4′s ‘In Our Time‘ archive on your iTunes, then you’re seriously missing out. Listening to it I’m always reminded of the great quote in Good Will Hunting where Will quips to a Harvard student:

you wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.

Where else can you find in one programme serious discussion of science, philosophy, religion, mathematics, history and the arts? It’s brilliant.

If you don’t know where to start, you could do worse than the recent programme discussing William James’ book ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’:

For the first time, here was a close-up examination of religion not as a body of beliefs, but as an intimate personal experience. The book laid the ground for a whole new area of study – the psychology of religion – and influenced figures from the psychiatrist Carl Jung to the novelist Aldous Huxley.

I’ll be blogging some thoughts from the programme concerning the roots of happiness. In the mean time, point your podcaster of choice right there, and get a brilliant education for free.