I’m retiring my Tumblr “in-between” blog experiment and moving anything that makes vague sense to the main blog, having found that I inherently either write tiny bits, for which Twitter is just fine, or longish pieces, which should really end up there with the rest of my ramblings.
Do drop by talmont.com/blog
A quick note about a quick event:
TEDxWarsawWomen : join a select group of TED afficionados for a live stream from the TEDWomen conference in Washington, DC and some excellent live speakers. Seating is limited (it’s not just for women!) and there will be plenty of opportunities to chat to some fascinating people.
Brought to you by the TEDxWarsaw Team http://www.tedxwarsaw.com
More information: http://www.ted.com/tedwomen
When: 8 December, 1200 noon till late.
Where: Stocznia, Bracka 20a; http://stocznia.org.pl/www/
Register here: http://ow.ly/39KD6 It’s free to attend.
Join the TEDxWarsaw group on Facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=100228758636
Jazz is a contradiction. Of course the very nature of the medium carries with it a load of contradictions but I actually mean that in a far more direct sense. Jazz musicians the world over repeat as if in a chorus that radio play of jazz, other than the easy-on-the-ear variety, is hard to come by and that there is a dearth of good quality spaces in which to play.
These sentiments are repeated universally yet jazz continues to evolve as a medium of expression and thrive as a field of exploration for some of the most vividly creative people out there. Herein lies the contradiction, common to a growing number of the arts. While the art itself seems to grow and thrive, individual members of the art are working harder than ever to make the ends meet. (Over at the main blog I will be posting a long missive about this very thing in the field of photography before too long…)
So it was with both excited expectation and a degree of dread that I choofed along to the Remont club in Warsaw, invited by Krzysztof Scieranski. The club was holding a jam session night, in an attempt to revive a long tradition from the 1970’s. It might have been a great success but regardless it might have been the one and only time it would happen…
Polish jazz royalty was in attendance - Michal Urbaniak, Tomasz Stanko, etc. along with the already mentioned Mr Scieranski - and a great evening ensued. We’re all hopeful that management will see the wisdom of opening this up as a regula fixture - especially now that the Clean Air regulations have come into force and the chokingly smoky atmosphere will have been replaced by sir that is actually fit to blow a trumpet in.
We look forward to the next edition.
This was originally posted on FB as a comment following the news that eighteen people had needlessly died in another spectacularly horrible accident on Polish roads.
—-
It’s good to see that people are finally saying what half the country is thinking.
There will come a day when the selfish, aggressive and rude 50% of Polish drivers learn how to drive like civilised people, when Polish roads are fit to drive on and Polish police are effective. That time is a little way off into the future.
Instead of listening to criticism and, geezus, learning from what they see on television every day, many Poles evidently prefer to get the snit on and mumble about the roads being crap and whoever criticises half the country’s driving style being anti-Polish.
Good common sense is something half of us are yet to learn, it seems, too, since our automatic reactions like those today verge on the ridiculous : there will come a time when instead of stopping to mourn, pray and fly flags at half mast the country will expect the guilty to be caught, tried and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. We do mourning very well. How about, instead, learning not to create events which are the cause of mourning?
There will come a time when half the Poles who still haven’t, will learn the value of common courtesy and basic common sense on the road, when half the country’s drivers stop behaving like adolescent boy racers and when the other half stops rolling their eyes and start to expect that kind of deadly behaviour to be the exception and not the norm.
For this to happen a lot of other sociological phenomena need to occur, but there will come a day when “Polish reality” becomes like any other country’s reality, with a few ordinary quirks and garden variety screwballs being the exception instead of rudeness and aggression being the norm. Unfortunately, that goes not just for the roads but that’s a subject for another post…
As for the state of the roads, the excuse that this is a poor country with terrible infrastructure left over from another era is eye-wash.
1. If local councils acquired and spent EU funds wisely - instead of lining their own pockets and those of their cronies - we wouldn’t have such terrible roads; Take a drive through the country and see. It is clear to see where a council has taken the time and energy to invest in infrastructure. Then it’s off the good quality tar seal and back to the potholes.
2. Poland is not a poor country. Count the Audis and the Mercedes, the number of cars on the roads is exploding. Last I checked we were actually pretty well off on many scales and looking better each year and petrol is about the same price as everywhere else so lack of excise tax coming into the state coffers is not the problem. Money is, generally, not the problem. Lack of political will, supported of course by a strong public mandate, that is the problem; that and crookedness, of course.
3. Good drivers slow down when the road they’re driving on is bad. Bad drivers don’t care and don’t think.
4. Then there is the macho idiot attitude. A few days ago I had occasion to listen to one moron describing, with considerable delight, the criminal driving practices of a friend. The friend wasn’t of course a bad driver, in fact he was “a very good driver, he was just full of bravura”. In my book that describes a moron with his name on an accident report just waiting to happen.
The problem lies with the people who use the roads. Half of us are aggressive, impatient, unthinking fools not fit to be in charge of a moving vehicle. The other half do not demand enough that the government should spend care and resources on improving the infrastructure and bring full criminal prosecution against those causing the worst driving statistics in Europe. Thirty thousand people have died on Polish roads since we joined the EU in 2004. That’s over half of the number of Americans who died in the Vietnam war. It’s a massacre out there and the general attitude of the government seems to be one of impotence, plus preoccupation with party in-fighting.
Here is a suggestion: how about instead of putting black ribbons on flags (an automatic gesture of sympathy but one that is as empty and meaningless as it is devoid of any practical influence on making things better) we put black ribbons on our car aerials, as a reminder of the deadly behaviour out there.
Maybe if half the country hangs black ribbons on their cars, the other half will slow down enough to wonder why. That would be a good start.
—-
Information just to hand from the European Road Assessment Programme:
(Note : it’s worse than I thought…)
http://www.eurorap.org/news_item?search=y&ID=250 and
Black signifies where the risk of getting killed or seriously maimed is highest. Red means slightly less deadly, and so on… Green means “very low risk”, but you really have to look hard to find any green on this map. As for the immediate comments i expect of “the roads are terrible and dangerous” let’s just remember that there have not been any recorded incidents of a length of asphalt jumping up and killing someone, so it really is a case of “roads don’t kill people, people kill people.”
This post has been moved from my blog seeing as it’s more a quick comment than a ‘proper’ post
Who would have thought that a high-technology conference would be a venue for sideshow entertainment?
At the generally well organised and to-the-point “Biznes To Rozmowy” one-day conference in Warsaw, this author was struck by a misplaced piece of sponsor’s advertising which would not have been out of place a century and a half ago. Except this Mechanical Turk was a twenty-something CG female on a plasma screen, accompanied by a chatty female voice coming from a couple of speakers, placed at head height.
At first sight this was very impressive - an AI character having a conversation with normal people in real time. Wow. That’s the stuff great conference demos are made of. One could have a flirty conversation with the girl while enjoying the impressive technology. As it quickly transpired, however, there was rather more behind the stand, or the curtain. Plainly, a real girl controlled the CG character’s actions while chatting to the passers by. The whole thing, instead of being impressive, immediately became shabby and cheap.
The ‘virtual’ girl was a truly post-modern exercise in fakery: a real person employed to pretend that she is a virtual person trying to engage passers by in a pretend chat which was in fact a real conversation. Just like The Wizard of Oz, except for originality of thought and elegance of execution.
A perfect disembodiment ensued. The screen girl could perform a few pre-programmed movements, one assumes selected at the touch of the real girl’s commanding finger, and a ‘conversation’ would take place. All kudos to the actress who had been given the, one expects ultimately tedious, task of chatting up strangers while controlling the on-screen avatar.
No doubt this side-show had been thought up by some highly - paid corporate branding wiz, with the intention of being as arresting as it would be effective. We can just hear it: “You know, a virtual girl chats you up and you’re impressed with the quality of the graphics and then she talks to you and it’s like a real girl and then you find out it’s this cool company behind it…” In breathless self-satisfaction they no-doubt convinced the money men to approve the project. On reflection they probably didn’t have to, since the technology was essentially off the shelf and the actress probably took less then Equity wage with just her voice being used…
So, a quick piece of analysis. A high-technology conference, run by a leading telecoms provider in a capital city generally known as, if not a hotbed of innovation then certainly the dwelling place of people generally hip to technology. Sir Tim Berners-Lee talks about the future of the internet, speakers many and various discuss the ins and out of Things To Come and we get hit with a pretend Mechanical Turk. I would suggest that an actual Mechanical Turk would actually have been far more engaging given the single layer of pretense involved (man pretending to be machine) and the inherent nostalgia, near to the hearts of most geeks and technology users.
Instead we got an example of what a huge corporation thinks innovation should mean and the result was as clueless and disappointing as it was indicative of the need for those huge corporations to employ outside creativity consultants, and very urgently.
—- COMMENTS —-
2010/10/07 at 5:01 pm
Ivona sounds wonderful. Unfortunately this was plainly a real person “backstage” with a camera trained on the passer by.
2010/10/07 at 4:33 pm
Ralph, is it possible that the Avatar Girl who talked to you had a gentle female voice? If so, I can make a bet that it was IVONA and her synthesized voice from IVO Software. Just check ivona.com to solve the puzzle. By the way, many users of klango.net, the biggest online social network for the blind computer users worldwide, are saying that IVONA is one of the best voices they have heard so far. Wishing you to meet Only Genuine Inspiring Women. All the best. Waldemar
Checking out Tumblr as a mini bloggin platform… In contrast to micro blogging or just ordinary blogging. I hope that makes sense.
