Jonathan Zittrain’s recent book, The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It, has spurred a lot of discussion both online and offline, with blog posts lauding his insights or criticising his over-apocalyptic imagination.

The book itself makes fascinating reading for those who have watched the network grow from its roots in the research community into today’s global channel for communications, commerce and cultural expression.

And the distinction that Zittrain makes between computers and devices that are open for hacking, exploration and creative use and those which are locked down and limited is one that we can clearly see.

An iPhone and an Asus Eee PC are very different objects, and I can’t imagine anyone scrawling ‘this machine kills fascists’ on their iPhone in homage to Woody Guthrie, while my son has just done this to his Asus.

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• Slashdot | Round Robin Scheduling Not Power-Efficient - Interesting paper, and an example of how the definition of ‘efficiency’ changes as new factors are taken into account
• Computing for the Future of the Planet - Andy Hopper’s research group at the Computer Lab in Cambridge
• Smart electricity grid - nIce idea for managing power consumption

• Institute of Contemporary Arts : Talks : War in the 21st Century - Will try to be there…
• Still Debating With Plato - I'm a constructivist, always have been,,
• Cinema Treasures | Cannon Newcastle upon Tyne - for reference
• Charlie's Diary: Brand Dilution - Why it's time to leave Virgin Media and their ISP
• Clare Townhill: Valley of the Dolls - commenting on the robots event at the ICA
• Changes in Commuting and Working - National Business News - Portfolio.com - Fascinating piece. Thanks to Clare Townhill for spotting it
• BBC NEWS | Entertainment | BBC new media boss to stand down - Ashley's off
• How to Fix Venture Capital - Harvard Business Online's Umair Haque - Interesting message for my web 2.0 entrepreneurial friends…
• Wordpress Magazine Theme Released » Darren Hoyt Dot Com - Nice wp theme
• Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » Phorm?s Harms Extend Beyond Privacy - excellent dissection of Phorm, who clearly can do no good!
• Butterflies and Wheels Article by Frederick Crews - Excellent essay about rationalism
• Mr Bojangles: The Big Quiz: I have a dream - Forty years since the assassination of Marin Luther King, this post from Tom Ilube makes chlling but essential reading.
• COVERITLIVE.COM - Home - May be worth exploring - tagging so I remember to look later
• Options WordPress Theme: What WordPress themes should be like - very nice theme… may have to use it for one of my projects
• These Crazy Musicians Still Think They Should Get Paid For Recorded Music - And Mike Arrington disagrees. As you'd expect
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Meanwhile, back at the plantation - Nick Carr following through on Billy Bragg's comments on Bebo's cashin
• Spamming my calendar. at TCS Innovations - My post to the TCS Innovations blog
• Google Visualization API Gadget Gallery - Google Visualization API - Google Code - That's it for Office… Google Docs Spreadsheet gadgets… ubercool
• BBC NEWS | Technology | The offline cost of an online life - My latest BBC column, on energy use

Without the Higgs field there would be no mass and no matter, because mass is what distorts space-time and creates the effects we interpret as the ‘force’ of gravity.  Without the Higgs field there would none of this world, none of us, nothing to be conscious or conscious of.

One way of imagining what the Higgs field does it that it makes space-time exert a drag on objects, like walking through water.  It’s a tiny effect, which is one reason why gravity is so weak compared to electromagnetism or the strong and weak nuclear forces, but it adds up.  With enough particles you can build atoms and planets and stars and galaxies. A whole observable universe, even.

And Twitter is doing something similar in the virtual world.

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Like every other product of the advanced manufacturing capabilities of a long-industrialised society the computers that surround us – and, for the pacemaker wearers among us, that we have taken into our bodies – carry an environmental cost.

Silicon may be cheap, but turning it into processors requires vast amounts of energy, clean water and many potentially toxic chemicals.

Some of the raw materials used elsewhere, like the coltan in our mobile phones, are extracted at great human and environmental cost.

Displays and casings may contain heavy metals and damaging chemicals, while the disposal of old computers is becoming a significant issue.

And the billions of processors, hard drives, screens and network devices that we increasingly rely upon consume more and more electrical energy, much of it wastefully generated from non-renewable sources that release carbon into the atmosphere.

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Tim Berners-Lee has talked on the BBC news site about the way things could go in future, and I managed 4 mins on BBC Radio 5 Live talking about why the Web matters…

I used to be a professional computer programmer, writing in the C language on the Unix operating system back in the 1980’s when half a megabyte of memory was enough to support a sixteen-user system.

These days I’m only really up to hacking other people’s code to meet my needs, although I do occasionally find myself messing around with languages like PHP and JavaScript and I’m tempted to learn Python.

But I’m still enough of a coder to share the excitement that has been rippling through the IT security community recently after the publication of a paper from Mark Dowd, X-Force Researcher at IBM Internet Security Systems.

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This is my desk at the moment - haven’t quite migrated off the old Vaio desktop onto the new iMac, and apart from picking up the wrong mouse from time to time I’m managing the keyboard switching ok.

Should really have put the Asus EEE PC in there too, I suppose…

And I came across a discussion thread on the Growl google group that included this fabulous aside from Brian Ganninger

Meta: Each discussion should be unto itself, bringing baggage in only leads to additional problems. We are in a neutral medium that doesn’t provide implicit contexts - your emotions, your tenses or speaking patterns, your anything else - and lends itself to exactly what is in front of the viewer.

Which is, of course, true. And is also what we want our social networks to make untrue.

Oh - and here’s my Seesmic video to show just how tired I am!

Much as I adore my MacBook I have no desire to form a life-long union with it or attempt to interface in any way that doesn’t involve keys, trackpad and my fingers.

Others seem to feel differently about the matter, like David Levy, who reckons that by the middle of the century our relationships with the machines that currently service our social lives will have grown significantly, and that intelligent robots will be sexual partners too.

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