Ricardo, Author at Ricardo Pinto

tablets and the cloud…

Ricardo on 9th June 2011

I’ve been hankering after a tablet computer for many years (I hope not as a result of having been brainwashed by Star Trek!?). Specifically I was wanting Apple to produce one. I have been using their computers since 1984 and supported them through the hard years before Steve Jobs returned – much in the way other people support a football team that keeps losing. Now that they are becoming masters of the galaxy I find myself somewhat embarrassed by my adherence to Apple – as communists perhaps did when Stalin turned their dream into a totalitarian dystopia. However, I have spent all my working life within Apple’s ecosystem, and whatever criticisms can be levelled at them – the lock ins, the strong arm tactics, the hyper-capitalism – I still believe that, ergonomically and technologically, their ecosystem is the best one out there. And so, last month, I finally got myself one of the new iPads.

Of course the device is beautiful, and beautifully designed. It is slick and seductive. What it is not is a replacement for my laptop: the means provided for entering text cannot compete with a keyboard. However, my tablet has already replaced my laptop as my primary way of interacting with the internet. For anyone not needing to enter a lot of text into a computer, it seems to me that a tablet is a superior device. Further, I am convinced that tablets represent the future of non-business computing and, with the integration with the ‘cloud’ that Apple have announced this week, I feel we are moving into a new era where computing will become ever more pervasive, while at the same time becoming ever more subtle and, essentially, invisible.

The form factor of the tablet seems to sit in a ‘sweet spot’. Long tethered to desks by cables, computers had already slipped their bonds. However, laptops, for all their power and luggablity, are very much present; if not by their weight and size, then by their need for at least the desk we make for them on our thighs, which they reward us by trying to cook them! This heat is itself an indication of one of their major limitations – their short battery life.

And though smart phones slip into a pocket and run longer on a single charge, for all their sophistication, they are like peering at the world through a keyhole and, if that world is the web, then we have been forced to operate it by performing something like keyhole surgery.

A tablet is large enough for you to feel that your view of cyberspace is essentially unimpaired and it provides a field of operation that does not feel overly constrained. It is light, thin, small and mine seems to run for days on a single charge though I use it all the time. It also switches off and on, simply and cleanly, like those others of our gadgets (TVs, washing machines etc) that we barely notice are there.

I am old enough to have grown up with all the computery gubbins of commands and controls, of settings and variables, of virtual filing systems; old enough that I have programmed directly in machine code – the direct instruction layer lying just above a processor chip. Though this kind of esoterica may seem to some ‘sophisticated’, to me it has long seemed the very height of crudeness. I have friends who keep telling me that the fatal flaw with Apple computers is that you can’t easily lift the bonnet and tinker with the engine. I am one of those people who really can’t be bothered with the engine. I simply see my computer as a means – not an end: I simply want it to ‘get me there’. Further, I believe that the trend in everyman computing is to gradually dissolve the device until it becomes invisible. What is a computer but a window that you look through? – and as Elizabethan glass, with its countless tiny distorting panes, has given way to plates so large you can’t see the edges; so clear you can almost, like a bird, forget it is there – with the tablet, computers become more nearly extensions of ourselves. Further still, the elimination of the prophylactic that is the keyboard allows you to interact with the device directly with your naked fingers: skin on glass, though that glass is, through gesture, enlivened to a surface that you can twist and pull, pinch and ruck. I imagine that, once haptic feedback is refined and incorporated into the device, we shall be able to feel its skin, to prod and squeeze its callouses, to ruffle its feathers *grin*… If this comes to pass, will it be possible for us to consider such devices as anything less than an organic part of ourselves?

The final element required to sink the computer interface beneath the surface of the sensual world is to liberate the medusae, that are our data, from the cages of our desktop computers and laptops, up into the ‘cloud’ – letting them swim freely in cyberspace (the problems inherent in the server farms that will support that freedom are another issue). This transformation is going to free us from the tedious rituals of backing up (or the anxiety of not backing up), and of synchronisation. Our data, safe (at least from loss; security from being viewed or used by others is yet another issue), and that we can beckon to us from any device we’re near, will, it seems to me, become an almost unconscious extension of our minds…

buying it

Ricardo on 31st May 2011

Americanisms have been entering Britain for quite some time. It is natural for oldtimers like me to bemoan the language being pulled out from under us. However, I am well aware that it is inevitable that language should change constantly – and I am certainly not interested in being any kind of linguistic (proverbial) Canute. Further, I am also aware that it is an error to see American English as diverging from British English: the truth is, of course, that both diverged from a common ancestor – and that, no doubt, half the differences we British speakers notice in American usage come from our Transatlantic cousins having retained the original word; whereas it is we who have come up with the innovation.

Colonial separation unzipped our language in Britain from that in North America; and the bringing together of our two cultures, that has resulted from the ever increasing closeness of technologically enhanced cultural exchange, is zipping it up again. Of course, it is America that, with its much larger population and far more influential cultural output, is winning the battle for what constitutes the evolving common speech. That’s perfectly natural. The very success of the spread of English throughout the world has meant that its original speakers are now very much in the minority.

All of this is just fine. I may find the increasing use of “awesome” all around me as being somewhat off putting – because, to my ear, it really does sound VERY American (it seems to me the verbal equivalent of everyone wearing Stetsons!) – but I accept that I am the one who is going to have to adapt.

(Not that it is likely that I will ever use “awesome” in my writing – neither, any longer, can I use the meaning of that word that I grew up with. In a similar way, people older than me complain about the loss of the word “gay” – that, in truth, by becoming used for “homosexual”, has left a gap in the spectrum of words we use to describe the various shades of ‘being happy’.)

However, there is one Americanism that grates as much on my ear as “awesome” and that is a particular use of the verb “to buy” – to mean something akin to “to believe” – and this I would like to take an exception to.

Use of “do you buy it?” has become increasingly prevalent. So much so that it is now even common to hear it being used by BBC news presenters – and this without most people seemingly being aware of it?! I feel that this indicates a profound and insidious change in the way we perceive transactions of understanding. Does it not, after all, suggest that all such transactions have been reduced to some form of commerce? Along with addressing passengers on trains as ‘customers’, it seems to indicate that everything is now being bought and sold; that everyone is a trader of some kind. I wonder if it can be an accident that the adoption of this term seems (certainly this is my impression) to have come into general use quite recently? Could this indeed have anything to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the adoption of market capitalism in China? I do think an argument could be made that socialism filled a role previously occupied by religion: both are traditions that – at their best – have stood in opposition to raw capitalism and against the ‘law of the jungle’. When socialism writ large collapsed, Francis Fukuyama famously pronounced the “End of History”; that Western liberal democracy had proved itself to be the end point of human political evolution, and the final form of human government.

I fear that when we ask each other: “do you buy it?”, we may be collaborating with this reductionist and morally impoverished view. Personally, I think I will continue to ask: “do you believe it?”.

Neil Gaiman’s Dr Who

Ricardo on 20th May 2011

I probably watch Dr Who for the reason most people my age do – nostalgia. Bizarrely, Dr Who is one of my first memories of coming to the UK. I still viscerally remember (I WAS six) watching Patrick Troughton combatting the Cybermen and the Yetis – it somewhat set the tone for my impression of Britain *wide grin*. However, mostly, I find the experience less than inspiring. Gaiman’s episode is a rare exception.

What I most like is the way that he picks up on several key aspects of Dr Who that I have always found the most interesting. One is the Tardis itself. I’ve never understood why it is treated like a flying livingroom with the sole point of interest being what lies outside its front door, oh and the oft repeated – and, admittedly, the still amusing wonder of some poor schmuck who stumbles into the Tardis and discovers it to be “bigger on the inside than the outside”.

It has always struck me that the Tardis is of supreme fascination and, potentially, a world unto itself. Earlier episodes have explored this – going way back, I seem to remember the Tardis having a medieval belfry – so it’s not as if Gaiman has invented this, but boy did he run with it. The notion that the reason we’ve seen so many control rooms is because they’re effectively ‘software constructs’ tickled me with delight – and Gaiman riffed on this theme – with the Dr himself commenting that, sure, he’d changed the “desktop”, and the Tardis, in human form, declaring that she’d “archived” not only the versions of the control rooms the Dr knew about, but some that hadn’t yet come into being, at least from his point of view – a nice temporal play (and one among many). There is a lot more like this. Jettisoning rooms to increase speed, for example, continues the metaphor of Tardis as computable space. Once this central metaphor is declared, I don’t imagine it’s going to be easy to dispense with it. This exploration of the possibilities of such a conceit is what I feel all speculative writers should be about – stretching the limits of their inventions.

I could comment on various other aspects of this episode that I found masterly, but I am going to only comment on one more – I need to get back to my own work!! This is the conceit of putting the Tardis inside not only a human, but a woman at that (brilliantly acted, by the way, by Suranne Jones). This allows Gaiman to pluck a peach from the hoary tree of Dr Who, where he explores the relationship the Dr has with his Tardis on a human level. Effortlessly, it explains to us why the Dr is the eternal batchelor (perhaps torpedoing the River Song relationship?) – he isn’t! He is, like so many cerebrally motivated men, married to his work. Further, the interplay between Tardis as woman and the Dr explores wonderfully the relationship between man and machine – and even shows the machine as being the initiator and driving force in the relationship *grin*

The thing that struck me watching the episode, was that there had been all this nebulous blether about the ‘life force’ in the Tardis – certainly an interesting departure from earlier portrayals of the Tardis as soulless machine (at least from what I know, Mr and Mrs Whovian… I’m not pretending to be an expert!), but it was left to Gaiman to actually turn that life force into a human, and that, one in the middle of a love story. What a brilliant conceit all of this is – and yet another metaphor that I imagine future writers are going to be unable to ignore… (at least, I wouldn’t)

Finally, I can’t finish without mentioning the exhilarating chase in the tardis the Dr cobbles together from parts. Boffin as rough riding hero. That crazy careering flight with only a raw forcefield as an outer skin – what an utter delight!

So, Neil Gaiman has proved, to me at least, why his work is so well considered – and I thank him for entirely blowing me away with one of the few episodes of Dr Who that has wowed me since I was six years old.

on a broad front

Ricardo on 17th May 2011

I have been advancing on a broad front. The Stone Dance acted like a dam to any other ideas. I suppose that my jumping into such a wide range of projects is a reaction to that constraint. I’m sure I shall calm down soon *grin*

Towards the end of last year I wrote Matryoshka, a sci-fi/fantasy novella that I gave out to a few people to read. Reactions were mixed and I accepted advice that it was better to set it aside to mature.

I then turned to completing the research (there will, of course, always be more *wry grin*) and structure for my historical novel. I then put this aside until the coming autumn – when I intend to actually start writing it. Life here in spring and summer is slightly too distracting – because family and friends come visiting me – to tackle something as demanding as this historical novel. When I get into the world of the ancient Near East – I want to be able to live in it in peace.

Last year I did quite a lot of work on a different historical novel – wrote some of it – but decided it wasn’t good enough. It is this that I have transformed into the more ambitious work I am now proposing to write.

After that I wrote and helped storyboard a second graphic novel with Adrian Smith that is based on Milton’s Paradise Lost. I’m quite excited about this one – however, it’s not going to happen anytime soon because Adrian is working on these (this one and the previous one, working title Malta) in his ‘spare time’, and they are for him a “labour of love”. What he’s done so far is stunning.

Concurrently with this I worked out the story and plot of a sci-fi novel that I might try and write quickly before I start writing the historical book. I can sense eyebrows rising out there at the words “write quickly”, but it might be possible since it is quite traditional in structure and rather straightforward. We shall see.

I then brought Matryoshka out of storage and have been rewriting this and was excited with how well it was going. This in turn I have had to put aside as I have been working on a pitch for a sci-fi TV series with Alan Campbell. This is unlikely to come off – however we’ve developed a great background and written compelling story arcs for a number of series (*grin* nothing wrong with ambition!) and have come up with lots of episodes and who knows.

So, that’s what I will be doing today. Once the pitch is complete, I will return to Matryoshka and nail that! Then we shall see.

wiki books

Ricardo on 16th May 2011

With my purchase of an iPad I have finally made the move to actually reading ebooks – about time! since I have (for theoretical reasons) long been a proponent of electronic reading. However, in hunting down an obscure book (a history of Byzantium written in 1892 in the ePub format), I discovered that it was full of typos and layout errors (probably because it was scanned using OCR). My first reaction was to correct these (a reflex for someone who spends his life working with digital texts) and, in truth, I may well have been tempted to do so had the ebook reader I was using allowed me easily to edit the text. Assuming such editing facilities – and I can’t imagine that, if they don’t already exist, they will take long in coming – and if I were motivated to correct the whole text, my next and natural step would be to return the corrected book to the internet so that other people might be able to read my ‘cleaner’ version… (as I do CD tags)

And this set me thinking. Even though my intention might be to correct typos only, I could well make corrections in error – that is, I could change the text. And what if I were more ambitious and deliberately set out to improve the text? This after all is what is being done all the time in various wikis. Surely it would only take a short step to consider a book as just another digital text that could benefit from improvement. Before you know it you would have countless versions of each book drifting around the internet.

Now, as an author, this somewhat alarms me (I have considered ongoing corrections of my own texts, but that’s another story) because I put a lot of effort into bringing my books to a state that I am satisfied with and I have all kinds of intentions behind what I write that might not be immediately obvious to a reader. What a reader might imagine to be an error, for example, might in fact be something deliberate that only comes into play somewhere deeper into the text. I don’t think it would be hard to knock up a list of what could go wrong with a wiki approach to books – and that’s without even considering deliberate defacement. My question is: how would it be possible to make certain this does not happen?

I would suggest to you that it could become much harder keeping a text ‘authentic’ than it might at first appear. You might argue, for example, that the versions of a text produced by a publisher will remain ‘quality assured’. There are assumptions made here about security – and we all know that the moment something becomes digitally traded on the internet it immediately becomes vulnerable to all kinds of ‘interventions’, both accidental and deliberate. It seems probable to me that texts may be even more vulnerable than other digital objects – in that if a word changes, who is going to notice? Unlike a program, it’s not going to suddenly stop working.

Beyond this, as the recent example of the recall of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom shows, errors can even creep in during the publishing process. Although this article doesn’t appear to say it, my understanding was that these errors occurred because an earlier version of the text was printed – and that this was discovered entirely fortuitously by Franzen leafing through a published book and noticing something in it he knew he had corrected. (I think this is likely to be a cause of nightmares to authors – it certainly is to me.)

So, it seems to me that though the untethering of books from their fixed papery form frees them in all kinds of beneficial ways, it also carries this risk: that texts are going to become more tractable and that perhaps we are going to lose the notion of a definitive version of a text.

Before the advent of printing, books copied by hand were prone to countless errors and accidental changes. Before writing, the content of books was passed from one mind to another orally. I wonder if what we are witnessing is a return to that far more fluid form of ‘storytelling’…?

hiding in the shoal…

Ricardo on 10th May 2011

I have a friend who is most concerned about what he perceives to be his growing vulnerability to having his online activity spied on. He feels that increasingly his privacy is being compromised. His proposed solution is either to drop out or else to beef up his security somehow. I said to him that to put up a wall around you is, ironically, to draw the attention of the very forces you fear – for a wall is a lure for ‘them’ – and who believes that any wall could withstand their assault or siege?

It seems to me that, in the sea that is the Internet, the best strategy for remaining safe is simply to swim in the shoal. One lost among a multitude. In the constant flash of our movement lies our best protection against the predatory gaze…

(of course, there are those among us who choose to be more prominent, to blog for example, but that’s another issue… *grin*)

what price victory?

Ricardo on 2nd May 2011

So Osama Bin Laden is, apparently, dead – but at what cost to America, the West and the rest of the world? I can’t help feeling that we, and the US in particular, mishandled the whole 9/11 catastrophe. At the beginning of a new millennium, attacked, all we could do was to resort to an eye for an eye. Worse, we used it as cover to attack an Iraq that clearly had nothing to do with the attack on the Twin Towers. A bunch of extremist lunatics attack the greatest power on Earth and, ten years later, that power has almost bankrupted itself pursuing wars of revenge… and I’m not just talking money here, for it seems to me that moral capital has been squandered…

orthogonality revisited…

Ricardo on 27th April 2011

I have come to realize that a seeking after ‘orthogonality’ is a warning sign that I am slipping into the comfort of relying on a dominant trait in my personality. Having read Iain McGilchrist’s book The Master and His Emissary I have become somewhat convinced that this dominant trait is actually an over-reliance on the left hemisphere of my brain. As such this becomes not only about me, but about a very large number of people out there…

When I first addressed the issue of orthogonality I was fully possessed by the ‘naturalness’ of my desire for orthogonality, and by it satisfying a feeling of ‘rightness’ (somewhat ironic *grin*). At that time I did not identify orthogonality with the general control freakery that is also a part of my personality. McGilchrist’s book has clarified this for me. So that I now believe that it is likely that the desire for orthogonality and control freakery are two aspects of the functioning of the left hemisphere. Though both seem to be natural emergent behaviours of the left hemisphere, orthogonality – at least as I describe it in its more ‘luminous’ and smiling aspect in my previous post – forms part of the fluid process (described in McGilchrist’s book) of:

right hemisphere generation of an idea; analysis and editing in the left hemisphere; a final passing back to the right hemisphere for idea and analysis to be integrated into a single, vibrant conception.

I imagine that many people will recognize that this is the process that they follow when they are creative in a way that feels ‘healthy’ to them. Certainly, I find this interpretation of the creative process resonant.

What I have termed ‘control freakery’ is what happens when that fluid process stalls, because the left hemisphere insists on obsessing over its analysis and refuses to pass the fruits of this on to the right. That this is happening becomes obvious whenever you feel that your idea, once in vibrant flight, has come down to earth only to have its wings snipped off and be dissected until it feels stale and dead. (The image in my mind is the fabulous Brothers Quay animation This Unnameable Little Broom).

Well before this happens, it seems to me that the feeling that you are seeking orthogonality, or are generally focusing on ‘orthogonal issues’ – right angles, parallel lines, squareness – all of these abstracting to neatness, clinical perfection, issues of ‘right’ alignment – that you can be pretty certain that your left hemisphere is in the ascendent and, if you’re like me, you might want to loosen things up a bit, to stop the machinery clamping down and so to release your idea to fly free into clearer skies.

clenching…

Ricardo on 18th March 2011

Something that I have observed in my body is how I react to stress by ‘clenching’ – not just in the obvious places such as the stomach – but in different parts of my body according to what it is that is getting to me. This can be a very subtle ‘tightening’ and can occur when I hear something about myself I don’t like, or about someone or something else. Or someone singing whose voice I don’t like, or a song I don’t like, or saying something that produces some kind of unhappy resonance. Or doubt, or fear, or worry. And, sometimes, I become aware that this little tight spot is being held; that I am constantly holding it – the way one might try and hold a handful of sand trying not to let it escape. And it occurs to me just how much energy it must take to be holding on to so many little ‘fistfuls’ of stress. Further it occurs to me that each little clenching draws towards it the flesh around it, pulling on it like tiny blackholes distorting space. And I wonder if these clenchings taken together over time lead to a bowing of the body, a cramping up, a twisting. And I know from yoga – a practice a main benefit of which might be a stretching free of such knots – that misalignment in the body, in posture, leads inevitably to more of the same. It’s as if we were a frame of rods held together by a system of elastic bands that are optimally in dynamic balance, but that, if one elastic band begins tightening, it will pull the whole frame out of shape; folding in on itself, limiting its natural movement, until the whole thing collapses into a paralyzed ball…

So it seems to me that it might be wise for us to cultivate an awareness of such clenchings, for becoming aware of one, we can gently ‘let it go’ and this is better done before it has become a knot. After all is it likely that such knots do not have a parallel in our minds…?

The divided brain…

Ricardo on 5th March 2011

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World is not a self-help book, nor is it one of those books of cod-philosophy that promise amazing (though ultimately ill-founded) insights into the modern condition. It is instead a carefully argued thesis meticulously supported by references to research, as well as by appeals to personal experience.

Its core premise is that we possess a single consciousness, but two wills: one each in the right and left hemispheres of our brains. McGilchrist posits that these hemispheres are profoundly asymmetric – not only physically (they have measurably different widths and lengths, for example), but functionally.

The right hemisphere perceives the world as a whole, is deeply attuned to the particular, the individual, the immediate; and has no problem with ambiguity and paradox, with complexity and unknowability. The left hemisphere, by contrast, is obsessed with abstraction, with wheedling out underlying geometries, with generalities; what it perceives it dissects and analyses. It focuses on what it knows and seeks certainty and single, definitive answers. Critically, the left hemisphere’s field of operation is essentially what the right hemisphere passes to it. McGilchrist suggests that an optimally functioning human brain should gather impressions from the world with its right hemisphere, pass these to the left for analysis and then, crucially, integrate these analyses into its holistic picture.

The first half of the book builds up what appears to be an impressive body of evidence to support this view – evidence not only from neurological studies and practice, but also from art and philosophy. In the second half of the book McGilchrist then applies this theory to Western history in an attempt to explain many of its developments; a venture that he admits is extremely ambitious.

Roughly speaking, he claims that in the West we have, as a consequence of a move into abstraction that began with the ancient Greeks, coupled with our increasingly materialist perspectives, gradually moved into a way of being that favours the left hemisphere – that, finding itself in the man-made world resulting from its manipulations and over which it feels it has complete mastery, it is no longer prepared to relinquish control back to the right hemisphere. This “betrayal”, McGilchrist suggests, is increasingly dangerous for us – for the left hemisphere view is necessarily narrow: the greatest whole it can conceive of is that that it can assemble from the pieces into which it breaks everything down. Thus we cease to see living things, our planet, the universe, as anything more than a machine that is a sum of its parts: a vision of living things as misguided as Dr Frankenstein’s.

McGilchrist’s arguments seemed to me convincing enough, though necessarily I had to take most of the supporting evidence on trust – as in most such books, how can we hope to be able to check it out for ourselves.

However – and this is why I am writing this endorsement – I found that much in the book gels with my own experience. Like many (most? all?) people, I have two sides: one that is intuitive, connected to nature, free flowing; the other analytical, obsessed with orthogonality, analysis, precision and getting to the right answer. These war in me all the time, but never more so than in my work. In the Stone Dance, for example, I would often get lost in ‘research’, exploring every avenue, pursuing every problem until, frequently, I would squeeze every last drop of blood from the visions that had inspired me to write at all. (This ‘deadening’ is, according to McGilchrist, a sure sign that the left hemisphere is hard at work.) But then that other part of me would swoop down and snatch up these dead fragments and absorb them into a vision more vibrant than before.

Thus a constant problem with my creative process is that I feel I have spent altogether too much of my time slicing away at ‘corpses’ and perishingly little in exhilarating ‘flight’. In the struggle to maximize the latter and minimize the former, I have often veered towards attempting ‘flight’ on its own, without any of the preparatory surgery of research and analysis (Icarus not bothering to glue the feathers to his wings?), only to find that it all becomes so airy that it dissipates away to nothing. Imagine my excitement when this process is explained to me; its necessity, its naturalness; to become confident that what is required is to seek a balance between the two.

This book, then, seems to me to provide a description of something that I live with every day and, unless I am weird and crazy, then it seems to me likely this is a description of how your brain works too.

Author: Ricardo

buying it

Neil Gaiman’s Dr Who

on a broad front

wiki books

hiding in the shoal…

what price victory?

orthogonality revisited…

clenching…

The divided brain…

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the ubiquity of new ideas

the limits of the human artspace

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