The feed of updates to TOMSCOTT.name
Damaraland, Namibia. The characteristic flat-topped mountains are remnants of lava flows erupted around 132 million years ago. Image by Tom Scott, Creative Commons Attribution License. The mountains of Damaraland stand in lines across the plain, flat-topped, stepped and terraced down their flanks. They are like giant elephant teeth. The soft material went first. What stands is what was left. There…
Most weak product ideas are not weak because a team cannot build them. They are weak because the underlying questions have not been answered clearly. Below are the questions I want to see answered before committing to a new digital product, service, or feature. The first tests whether the proposition makes sense, and should be answered before committing to development. The second tests whether the…
A section of a mouse pancreas stained for insulin: part of the invisible system Type 1 diabetes turns into work. Image from the Solimena lab, Paul Langerhans Institute Dresden. Creative Commons Attribution License. Type 1 diabetes begins with the loss of insulin production, but what disappears is also the invisibility of a system that never used to ask for my attention. Its replacement turns a…
Feral Goats! Loch Cluanie. Photograph by Bill Herndon, via Scotland’s Nature. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. A road sign is a small decision made in advance of a much faster one. At 70 miles an hour, there is little time for interpretation. The sign either helps or it does not. It gives the driver enough information to act when action is needed, without asking for more attention than the situation can spare.…
A Chinese market where street-traders load up their baskets. Brush drawing by Chinese artist, ca. 1850. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark. At a time when so much of the web hides the conditions of making, Aardman’s 50th anniversary exhibition in Bristol is a useful reminder of why craft has rarely felt so important. The appeal is not just Wallace and Gromit nostalgia, or the pleasure of…
A futuristic vision: technology is over-sophisticated, and the masses devote themselves to intellectual pursuits, while the basic needs of society are neglected. Coloured etching by W. Heath, 1828. Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0. The article was once a useful fiction. It let us pretend that the work of science could be gathered into a single object. A question, a method, some data, an argument,…
The future used to arrive as an image. Now it arrives as a system. Maria Rivans for Wellcome Collection. Robert Hughes called his great series on modern art The Shock of the New . It was a title about modernism, but it captured something broader about the twentieth century. For much of the last century, the future arrived through culture. It had a look, a sound, a uniform, a haircut. The new was…
“Old card catalog” by Eric E Castro, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr One of the strange things about large language models is that the answer arrives already composed. It has shape. It has tone. It has paragraphs. It often sounds calm, balanced, and authoritative. It can be useful, but what it conceals is not immediately obvious. The answer arrives without much sense of where it came from, and without any…
Palm-leaf manuscript, Sanskrit Epsilon 1. Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Reading Naomi Alderman’s don’t burn anyone at the stake today (which is excellent, by the way, you should definitely read it) got me thinking about how each major communication technology reshapes not only how societies store and disseminate information, but how they organise power, trust, and…
” Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context - a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.” Eliel Saarinen
Our mum died in the spring of 2023; 18 months on, it still feels very raw. She was an amazing mum and an amazing woman. This is the eulogy my sister and I gave at her funeral. Our Mum; Church Cove, Cornwall Our mother was beautiful in every sense. She had such a big life and touched so many people; it’s hard to know where to begin. She was a wife, a granny, a great granny, a daughter, a big sister…
FOMO is not a strategy A slide from Rachel Coldicutt for a talk she gave at the Scottish AI Summit. Love it!
Bleigiessen sculpture by Thomas Heatherwick. Wellcome Trust, 215 Euston Road. After seven amazing years leading Wellcome Collection’s digital department, I am leaving to join PLOS as their Chief Digital Officer. I’ve loved my time at Wellcome. The team’s creativity, professionalism and warmth have made the last seven years the most rewarding of my career. I will miss working with and being part of…
Banyan tree (Ficus benghalensis) growing on a lakeside. Coloured etching by B. Pouncy, c. 1793, after W. Hodges. Credit: Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0) I am 47 years old. It is Friday the 20th September 2019. I should be at work; I should be looking forward to going out for dinner with friends but I’m in Kingston Hospital’s A&E. My body isn’t working properly, the pH of my blood is falling,…
Abstract From the late 1890s Henry Wellcome, through a succession of agents amassed a large and diverse collection covering all aspects of what it is to be human. Since his death in 1936 those Collections (other than those on permanent loan to the Science Museum) have been under the care of the Wellcome Trust. Since 2010, Wellcome Collection has sought to increase access to our collections…
Shearing layers Shearing layers is a way of thinking about how different parts of a system change at different speeds. The idea comes from architect Frank Duffy and was later developed by Stewart Brand in How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (1994). It was originally used to describe buildings, but it has since been adopted by technology vendors and architects as a useful way of…
Dad 1927 was the year that Ford stopped production of the Model T, the year that for all practical purposes Television was invented, the year that the Spirit of St. Louis crossed the Atlantic to become the first nonstop transatlantic flight and the year that the League of Nations signed a treaty abolishing slavery. 1927 was also the year my Daddy was born. Born into a world that was a radically…
Cover of the first issue of Nature, 4 November 1869. Scientific publishing has in many ways remained largely unchanged since 1665. Scientific discoveries are still published in journal articles where the article is a review, a piece of metadata if you will, of the scientists’ research. This is of course not all bad. For example, I think it is fair to say that this approach has played a part in…
In many ways I’ve been very lucky at the BBC I’ve helped make some cool stuff — well stuff I’m proud of. But since I’ve decided to leave I’ve started to wonder what else I would have like to have made, if I had stayed at the BBC . The BBC makes a lot of programmes about history, but, more significantly, it has been part of, or at least recorded, much of our more recent history. So rather than…
Linking Enterprise Data (2010) Yves Raimond, Tom Scott, Silver Oliver, Patrick Sinclair and Michael Smethurst Abstract The BBC publishes large amounts of content online, as text, audio and video. As the amount of content grows, we need to make it easy for users to locate items of interest and to draw coherent journeys across them. In this chapter, we describe our use of Semantic Web technologies…
European Semantic Web Conference, 2009 Georgi Kobilarov, Tom Scott, Yves Raimond, Silver Oliver, Chris Sizemore, Michael Smethurst, Christian Bizer & Robert Lee Winner of Best In-Use-Track Paper Award. Abstract In this paper, we describe how the BBC is working to integrate data and linking documents across BBC domains by using Semantic Web technology, in particular Linked Data, MusicBrainz and…
Joining bbc.co.uk to the rest of the web For the past 86 years the BBC has plied its trade as a storytelling organisation. In the world of linear broadcasting we’ve even gotten very good at it. Guiding the audience through complex news story lines, explaining the natural world and, interleaved narrative arcs and the plotlines of drama has become our forte. But storytelling in a linear world is…