Despite its faults sometimes the internet is just wonderful

You can criticise the Internet so easily. There is so much dross floating in its waters it is a wonder anyone can swim through to things they actually want. Many of its auspices are so inescapably transient. we can waste swathes of time playing pointless games, reading a series of irrelevant articles or being endless;y distracted by social media.

And yet.

Yet, it is a wonderfully democratic place where anyone can search out that which interests them. it offers entertainments and transient pleasures certainly. we can question the provenance of some of the things we see and read on the net too. Despite this however it is a wonderful gateway to worlds that before could have been beyond the reach of so many.

Sadly in these straitened times libraries are being closed. A narrow view if ever there was one, saving money but failing to underpin education or inspire imagination in the long-term. Not here in the e-space though. In the intellectual ether of the on line word there are many gems and joys.

None shine greater than the repositories of access to knowledge and entrainment that are represented by free on line access journals and e-books.

We will all have our tastes, but for me, one of the great things is free access to classics that people may never otherwise read.

Thus I leave you with this link from the Gutenberg project. Who knows where it Will lead you, but I hope it is on true literary odyssey.

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3160/pg3160.html

The passing of a living icon

Neil Armstrong was seemingly a shy but determined chap who was in the right place at the right time to become one of the most remembered men in history. His modesty & poise should be as well remembered as his singular achievement (after all nobody else can be the 'first' human on the moon!). It was an odd sensation his passing. Responses ranged fro the banal -'Neil Armstrong -meh' that I saw on Twitter (one supposes the author's own achievements must be staggering to invoke this response) to page upon page of tribute and quote in certain areas of the news.

The odd thing is this. Nearly all of us never met Mr Armstrong. We never knew him and yet we felt we did. He was a part of the fabric of our lives. He stood on the lunar surface before I was born and the last moon mission as completed whilst I was still in swaddling clothes and yet I feel an affinity for them. They see to mark the zenith of an era of optimism and hubris tic positivity traceable back to the 50's but fuelled mostly by the 60's era of belief in the possibility of the fulfilment of dreams.

So let us not mourn the loss of the man but instead celebrate the life of the icon and all that it represents - to dream the impossible dreams and to achieve them.

The internet troll awoken from its self-comforting slumber

On a lunch break recently I happened across a radio debate on the subject of Internet 'trolling'. A couple of British celebrities had elected to leave Twitter due to the abuse they routinely found aimed at their accounts by those of a trollish persuasion. A maddeningly saddening fact when one considers that social media and the Internet represent a well-spring of knowledge coupled with a real chance to share and build a sense of community (all be it a faux community).

I cannot for the life of me understand these people's motivations. If someone is not your cup of tea then don't follow them' they can get on with their lives and you can get on with yours without your lives ever having to intersect.

However, I digress, back to the radio debate in question. Somehow the producers of the show had managed to winkle a self-avowed troller out of his lair and have him interact live on air. One suspects that had this been a TV show where he had to face people in an intimate studio setting rather than on the end of a phone he would have declined. What can one say? Said troll was virtually linguistically incompetent. He was bereft of any reason for his actions and completely unable to defend them against the salvos of rationality that were probably peppering his conscience for the first time.

The awakened troll was a sad indictment of 21st Century culture and its ability to allow those with a callous and often bigoted heart have free rein with anonymity as their shield. And yet. Yet we would still all want to cling to the liberty of individualism and the right to free expression I am sure. A problem with a duality at its core.

All one can say with certainty is that if this troll was truly representative of the intellectual capacity of others then the generalist user of the net, the bloggers the tweeters, the surfers and more have absolutely nothing to fear.

As has often been said let us not go into a battle of withs with such people, it is unfair to take on an unarmed opponent.

Mars Rover Curiosity has been safely landed on Mars. By any measure this is an astonishing feat of engineering and a triumph of scientific imagination. I have had nothing to do with this personally and yet it makes me astonishingly happy. The very thought that humanity has the breadth of imagination and skill to pull off something so monumentally challenging and to use the modern parlance 'awesome' is inspiring. It is a triumph of 'scientific imagineering' (a term I hereby coin and expect to get next to no general usage for evermore!).