Blog on Francis Irving

Henry and I have been running Land Talks since the start of last year.

Just under three months ago I wrote a post in which I explain that I agree with most points of view on AI, and that the one that is most right depends on what happens.

A man with a five year old in a push chair interrupted me.

There are a few mobile apps that I’ve wanted for a while, and that are relatively speaking just for me.

Conversations about AI are febrile and have been for a while now.

Lots of dancers, civic society organisations, artists, musicians, clowns are only on Instagram.

One of the projects in my week long hackathon was to make a system to sample my own mind with a random alarm.

I’m starting a meetup / online commnunity to share tips on skillful use of social media.

As a challenge, last week I made five things, one each day.

This post has two sections, one about gas prices and energy savings, the other about Android automation and the Netatmo API. 1.

These days I alternate mobile operating system.

Our brains have 100 trillion connections.

A book review of “Describing Inner Experience?

To my surprise this list is television heavy - I didn’t find any incredible new board games, and I was disappointed in most video games.

A three year old draft blog post I just found.

It was a rushing, a burning, an all-things-are-change, a compulsion.

This is a recipe from Phil the Dhal, a friend who has been experimenting with pressure cooking Indian food.

This year, the public narrative around Facebook has switched - the company feels on the defensive in lots of ways.

A tasty early morning breakfast with friends in town, and time to cycle home.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve: Deactivated my Facebook account.

Culture is important.

He listened.

I avoided statistics at school like a rash - filled myself up with super powered double A-levels in Maths And Mechanics instead.

I’m personally still frustrated with the email services I know about.

The campaign which won last year’s referendum for the UK to leave the European Union immediately dissolved, and in the process kindly open sourced some of its innovative canvassing software VICS - blog post, github repository.

In the late 1890s - the story goes - an ordinary boy in southern India heard an uncle mention the name of this holy mountain.

Last night I watched Charlie Brooker’s news recap of the year.

I went on a 10 day silent Vipassana meditation course in the Goenka school, at Bodhgaya in Bihar province in north India.

He took my hand.

A two year old draft blog post I just found, which is too good not to publish.

They all seem to be called Lakshmi.

I wrote this post two weeks ago before going on a meditation retreat.

Zenrainman’s house is like a tree.

Oh India!

India is unusual in having two shared public “pets”.

The next page I found in the notebook (after the last one) is my own view of the problem of information goods having zero marginal cost, so not functioning within capitalism.

I found another oldish notebook.

Drifting in the sea of political beliefs, left and right don’t seem to have any meaning any more.

Thanks to the excellent Thinking Liverpool [1], a lunchtime talk about the history of libraries caught my eye.

I found some notes I’d written at the start of this notebook, a few months old.

The fabulous Redecentralize Conference was organised by Ira and a bunch of other volunteers.

The topic of how to make our information society safe and fair regularly comes up in conversations.

This mad dash bad mixen fun up down world.

How is she going to vote?

My side project for the last month is to try and collect the Curriculum Vitae of everyone standing for Parliament.

One of the pitched battles in this century’s cyber war is about advert blocking and injecting.

We’re really bad at thinking about innovation.

1.

Let’s keep this post simple.