Inadvertent dinosaurs [post 49/100]

[NB: The blogging hiaitus is still on – due to a few personal matters, I’ve needed to reduce my areas of focus. I plan to pick it up after the summer holidays and finish these 100 posts I so recklessly allowed myself to get muscled into all those months ago. In the meantime, this post demanded to be written, so …

Little mysteries [post 47/100]

This morning I updated my iPhone to the latest version of iOS. About an hour later, I left for the airport. My phone was in my jacket pocket, as usual. My headphones were in and I was listening to music on Spotify, as usual. Only this time everything got a bit weird. First, the music started pausing, unpausing, jumping a …

The baby and the bathwater [post 46/100]

Another reader-suggested topic today… Here’s the question as it came in: “how is the art of ad making getting disrupted by the ‘skip this ad’ on YouTube – i.e. what message can you get across in 5 seconds to make people watch 30s?” I know I come down on advertising rather often and rather hard. But while it’s true that …

Conversing with ghosts [post 45/100]

Maybe I’m a little old-fashioned sometimes. A friend who’s got teenage daughters tells me that these days it’s considered ok (by some) to carry on a conversation while fiddling with one’s mobile. This still is definitely not ok in my circles, and no matter how much I apologise I always feel terrible when something comes up that I feel I …

Bring on the noise [post 44/100]

How many questions a day is the average human prepared to answer? When I was in school, days when we were asked loads of questions were scary – they were exam days, or worse, pop quiz days. Most questions were asked person to person, and were related to events that were shared between those people or the wider community. Maybe …

An idol by any other name… [post 43/100]

The rationalists have been gaining ground rapidly over the past couple of decades. Atheism is, increasingly, equated with intellectualism*. At the same time (and probably not unrelated) we are surrounded by and immersed in technology more than ever, and more every day. We are urged and encouraged to believe in the progress of science and technology as the route to …

FOR SALE: Me. Good condition. Convenience ONO. [post 42/100]

[This article was written for Prophecy and is cross-posted here with permission.] We are addicted to technology. Literally. Cognitive scientists have found the same kind of dopamine response in smartphone users checking Facebook as in gamblers pulling the handle on a slot machine, or junkies getting high. And we know it. We now have resorts where you can pay to …

False adversaries and other obstacles [post 40/100]

“The problem is, everybody’s trying to be viewer-centric. And that’s just not going to work.” Last night at a MIPTV, someone said this to me. I managed (I think) to disguise my shock and hear him out. He’s not a bad guy, and he certainly doesn’t think that audiences are unimportant. But this statement comes from what I have discovered …

You can’t always get what you want [post 39/100]

Since I’m at MIPTV this week, I’ve got media on my mind. Thus, the next couple of posts are going to be focussed on the television world… I’m pretty sure most of the people reading this watch movies or TV series online, right? You’ve probably got Amazon/LoveFilm/Netflix/something else and you stream the content. They’re really catching on, these OTT services. …