To my middle, most media-savvy son, the record player is the stuff of legend. Could a needle bouncing through wiggly grooves on a disc of black plastic truly recreate music as faithfully as the bits and bytes that play the part today? On a rainy July Saturday afternoon I stagger from the loft with my … Continue reading You’re in the future now, Konvergenz Boy
As mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I moved offices in Leeds earlier this year from Holbeck Urban Village to Clarence Dock. The stark contrast between the two areas has set me thinking about a city's built environment and how it can make a difference to people's lives. First some context for those who don't know … Continue reading You wouldn’t burn a book, or some reflections on narrative capital
Numbers: they can be beguiling things, especially when they tell a story we really want to hear. The bigger the numbers the better, ideally so mind-bogglingly big that they totally overwhelm our critical faculties. Best of all, take a series of numbers getting ever bigger: a dynamic that makes us feel as if something significant is happening … Continue reading Fact-checking the information exa-ggeration
Last Wednesday's Ignite Leeds gave me a perfect excuse to reprise my talk, How to Get Ahead in Business the Boulton and Watt Way. As ever, I'm grateful to Imran Ali and Craig Smith of O'Reilly for making the event happen, and to the audience at the Rose Bowl for giving me five minutes of … Continue reading Watt versus Murray, some open questions
Last September I posted about the amazing preserved walking dragline excavator at St Aidan's, near Leeds, which I discovered through the Heritage Open Days scheme. If you missed that opening, there's another chance to explore it this weekend, from 2pm to 4pm on Saturday 17 April 2010. More details on the website of the Friends of … Continue reading There now follows a Public Service Announcement from the Department of Giant Walking Robots
Cutting edge artists have always looked to advances in science for new materials and techniques. But where our innovations centre on digital media and information technology, the crossover science of the Victorian era was chemistry. We owe today's rich visual culture to the pioneers who mastered the interactions of chemicals, minerals, ceramics, celluloid and light. … Continue reading Finding Lizzie Le Prince
Thanks to Bettakultcha and Media Squared, here's a video of my Murray, Boulton and Watt presentation at the amazing Temple Works, Holbeck. It's a tale of green sand and subterfuge, of how one of the biggest names of the industrial revolution tried to stop a competitor in his tracks... ... also the slides are on Slideshare … Continue reading Video: How to get ahead in business the Boulton and Watt way
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. And so I'm loving the safari around the world's largest city and capital of the British Empire, afforded by Chris Heathcote's inventive Newspaper Club debut As It Is To-Day. Chris has been feeding Newspaper Club's editing software Arthr on a diet of old London … Continue reading As It Is To-Day
My 20 slides from Bettakultcha at Temple Works, Holbeck... ... on which more later, but meanwhile you can also read the original blogpost: How to get ahead in business the Boulton and Watt way.
Late last year I made a small prototype based on my Ignite London talk, 1794, by printing the 20 slides as Moo cards, with associated pages on this blog. Now there's a new version, using cards, stickers and an A3 sheet for you to play with the story. It's backed up with a new set of … Continue reading 1794 Redux
About this time of year, this blog gets a peak in search hits for Thomas A Watson of "Mr Watson, come here. I want you" fame. Somewhere out there, I imagine, is a teacher who sets the same class assignment every year, and whose students flock obediently to Google in search of information and images. … Continue reading Thomas A Watson: An Apology
Dirty tricks among high-tech businesses? I recently came across the original Machiavellian play book for start-ups, and it's more than 200 years old. Two of my 1794 heroes were the steam pioneer James Watt and Holbeck engineer Matthew Murray. Both made engines for the textile mills of northern England - in effect the processing power to … Continue reading How to get ahead in business the Boulton and Watt way
The Ignite London challenge of telling the story of my 1794 heroes in five minutes and 20 slides set me thinking about other ways to package up a narrative in the most minimal way. In parallel with preparing my talk, I used the slides as the starting point for some printed material. My experimental recipe … Continue reading 1794: Prototyping a small story
If you saw my talks earlier this year at Leeds' GeekUp or Barcamp, you may recall I recommended reading Steven Johnson's "The Invention of Air" which tells the tale of pioneering scientist, theologian and political radical Joseph Priestley. "The Invention of Air" reveals, more than I'd previously appreciated, just how important were Priestley's experiments during his time … Continue reading Steven Johnson presents “The Invention of Air” in Leeds on 3 November
Don't get me wrong, I'm as excited as the next guy. I even bought the t-shirt. But listening to Norman Lewis' thought-provoking talk at TEDxLeeds, I worried that the narrative around the Moon landings is in danger of plunging us into a crater of dusty nostalgia, and doing down some of the amazing things that are … Continue reading We choose the Moon (without the moan)
Matt Edgar writes here 