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If only there weren’t so many words.

I have this working theory that there are only about eight genuinely different ideas in the world. Just as – if memory serves – there are basically eight jokes, thus:

1. Malfortune befalling self
2. Malfortune befalling other
3. Unrequited love
4. Misunderstanding
5. etc

…you get the idea. I seem to think there are also, in essence, eight stories, and that they’re uncannily similar to the jokes (discuss, 20 marks). But hey, I’m a physicist, I don’t know about this sort of thing. Just roll with it, and we’ll move on.

So, right, my theory is: there are vastly fewer ideas in the world than anyone expects, and all that happens is we find new ways of expressing them. See, it’s all about language. We’re continuously inventing new descriptions, for most of which there are, of course, already perfectly workable forms. Several of them. Lots of them.

So when, for example, I find myself sitting in a conference session about project management (because I’m chairing it, say), and one of the panelists starts talking about project planning in a way I simply didn’t follow, my assumption isn’t that I don’t understand the concept. No, it’s that I don’t understand the language. The individual words make sense, but the particular conjunction is new, alien, and plain weird. Until I can map this new terminology into some familiar linguistic framework, I’m lost. What’s interesting is that those mappings sometimes throw up new insights.

In this case, one of the things that was going on is that I think there are two different sorts of planning and even budgeting – which I’m going to call ‘strategic’ and ‘tactical’, in a deliberate nod to the military uses of those terms.

Tactical weapons are things like tanks, strike aircraft, and missiles: things that you use routinely to blow shit up. Strategic weapons, on the other hand, come in two forms: firstly, stuff that turns hunks of steel into tactical weapons, like heavy-lift cargo aircraft which can move armoured vehicles from, say, storage in Arizona to the Gulf. Calling this use ‘strategic’ always struck me as a rare example of the military not inventing additional jargon where it would actually be appropriate, because the other use of ‘strategic’ is somewhat different: weapons that you plan explicitly never to use.

We’re talking ‘ruddy great nuclear missiles,’ of course. Which in this context are things that position your entire organisation, clarify and direct its purpose, but are never intended for use.

Hence: strategic vs. tactical projects.

A tactical project is one that’s actually going to work, where you’re involved in the nitty-gritty of writing and running a budget that’s useful day-to-day. A strategic project involves a whole lot more arm-waving, where simply floating the concept says much about your organisation and aspirations.

You run into problems when a strategic project gets deployed directly – the Millennium Dome springs to mind as an excellent example. One could also portray the ongoing thrashing-around of TV as a result of commissioners becoming increasingly obsessed with the strategic aspects of programme ideas (‘what does this show say about my channel?’) at the expense of the tactical (‘you can’t seriously make this, can you?’). In this model, salesmanship is fundamentally a strategic skill, while engineering is broadly tactical. Spot the problem there.

There are people – and I think the above-mentioned panelist was one – who are good at implementing strategic projects; that is, of turning the strategic into the tactical. Or, perhaps, they’re good at coating a tactical project in enough strategic gloss to make it fundable.

However, I fear that I myself am resolutely tactical. There’s too much working-class Yorkshireman in me, and I care less about the flouncy stuff than I do about what happens next Tuesday. Even when there’s a strong strategic component to my projects, I find it hard to enthuse – for example, I feel faintly embarrassed describing SciCast as ‘an attempt to revolutionise children’s media,’ even though [cough] it more-or-less is.

So, I’m finding this terminology surprisingly useful. One of the organisations with which I’m working, for example, is almost entirely strategic in outlook and approach… which is difficult, because we’re actually doing a project, and they’re not always thinking in the sorts of ways I want and need them to. But at least now I have a way of understanding where they’re coming from, and why they behave as they do.

Anyway, there’s doubtless other/more accepted/better terminology for this concept, and I’d love to hear it. Certainly, it’s not a new idea. That would undermine my entire argument, no?

In between reading up on the Prandtl-Glauert singularity (the cause of the condensation cone you occasionally see around aircraft, usually attributed to them ‘going supersonic,’ though in fact that’s neither necessary nor sufficient)… I’ve been playing with activeCollab, a (very) new lightweight, open-source project management web app in the manner of BaseCamp.

Very much in the manner of BaseCamp, actually. At this stage, it’s more-or-less a clone, albeit one lacking some key features, notably RSS generation. On the other hand, it’s a really, really really slick piece of work, and so far it’s proving to be extremely well thought-through. Better, the developer seems extremely focussed on driving it in the direction of being light, simple, well-engineered, and extensible, rather than trying to be all things to all people.

It’s no wonder that it’s caught on rather quickly – heck, installation has been added to my webhost’s control panel already – and I’m interested to see where it goes from here. It’s not ‘better’ than BaseCamp yet, but that I’m having a hard time choosing between them bodes well.

One of the great mysteries of life is how it comes to pass that, despite one incorporating two substantial fillets of haddock (one fresh, one peat-smoked) yet only one modest-sized boiled egg into a fish pie, seemingly every forkful of the resulting delicacy involves boiled egg, with the fish nowhere to be found.

Theories?

The Grand Slam bomb was a 22,000 lb monster, built to be about the largest thing the astonishing Avro Lancaster could possibly carry. By design, it would impact at supersonic speed, penetrate 40 feet into the ground, and only then explode, the intention being that the shockwave transmitted through the (incompressible, give or take) ground would cause more considerable structural damage over a larger radius than would simply blowing up a ruddy great bomb.

According to the Wikipedia article, the immensely strong casing was cast as a single piece, with the explosive being poured in hot. It subsequently took a month for the charge to cool and set. Accordingly, only 41 were dropped, on targets like bridges and submarine pens.

One used to be on display as the gate guardian of RAF Scampton, home of 617 Squadron. In the late 1950s initial attempts to move the thing by crane were confounded when it turned out to be heavier than expected.

It was live.

I’m cutting the multimedia extravaganza that was the British Interactive Group’s annual Best Demo Competition. This year we filmed it, with two cameras, and I’ve just done a vision-mixing pass so the pictures work more-or-less as well as they’re going to.

Next, then, I have to sort the audio. Which is a bit tricky, because I had only one working shotgun mic (mostly too far from the performers), with the other camera deliberately using its built-in mic in an attempt to capture some audience atmosphere.

If I double-track both sources, the result isn’t too bad. Thank you Final Cut for making it easy to run multiple audio tracks, and to slip tracks into sync. But of course, the levels of the performers vary greatly (not helped by auto gain control, ugh ugh ugh). So… prior to dropping down to bog-standard stereo, I need to mix what’s now a four-track project.

With a mouse.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why people have these things.

Harrumph.

Given that I was wondering about where The Foundation would stand in the somewhat desolate new children’s TV landscape, I should probably have worked this out – they’ve been bought by RDF. This is probably extremely good news for Ged and Vanessa, the owners, who must have been staring into their crystal balls wondering just where to take their shows.

It’s also a mostly-predictable development, given that RDF’s new director of family entertainment is none other than Nigel Pickard. See, children’s TV in the UK has been run, for more than a decade now, by the echoes of the old TVS children’s department, a collection of people named by somebody (possibly me) ‘The Maidstone Mafia.’

Ged, Vanessa and Nigel are all leading lights of that group, and all power to them – they’re ‘the good guys,’ with their heads screwed on right.

Meanwhile… where does this leave the independent children’s sector? RDF is now immense, Media Merchants is part of the similarly-vast HIT, and… who’s left?

I’m just going to stop linking to this site. Sometime. Maybe when they stop taking gloriously oblique photos. Bah!

(blimey, I’m being a curmudgeon today. Too much coffee?)

Ben is in Afghanistan, blogging for the Guardian, and sending his trademark utterly magnificent pictures to Flickr. This presumably in between running ultramarathons, doing things with Movable Type that require dataset rotations in more dimensions than even string theory postulates, and – most likely – writing touchingly elegant literature on the side.

For heaven’s sake, man, stop auditioning for the rôle of Leonardo in Renaissance 2.0. You got the part, already. No need to rub it in.

This is nearly – oh, so nearly – my new favourite screensaver. I’ve been using an old thing called Technichron for years. It displays a map of the Earth, using those magnificent composite cloudless day/night images JPL produced some time ago (and for which I’m at least partly responsible for the original UK import, via Stanfords, but that’s another story). Overlaid on the map is a moving mask demarcating day/twilight/night. It’s peculiarly beautiful, and has been a feature of I think three PowerBooks of mine.

Sadly, the code is no longer being maintained. I think it officially failed under OS X 10.3, but it seems to work fine here on 10.4.whatever. But: it’s not going to run on an Intel Mac, so at some stage I shall have to give it up.

Enter: Fenetres Volantes, which is simple, elegant, and beautiful. When sleep kicks in, it flies your windows around gently, setting them fluttering around above a plane, with oh-so-fashionable reflections and the like. It’s very, very pretty – particularly when you wake the machine up again, and all the windows come flying back into formation, once more eager for your interaction. I love it…

…with one caveat: it’s doing all sorts of cunning 3D stuff to produce the effects, and that means it’s running primarily on your Mac’s graphics card. Which, in the case of my PowerBook, runs quite hot. Which means the fan kicks in after a few minutes.

Much as I love it, I’m not mad keen on a screensaver that makes my Mac burn way more juice than normal.

Phooey. It’s really pretty. Harrumph.

(found via the quirky-but-starting-to-be-essential-reading osx.iusethis.com)

Drat. That’s crept up on me.

In the UK, television has always been London-centric, barring perhaps a brief moment when Logie Baird was mucking around in Hastings. Somehow, I’ve managed to have a dozen-year career in the industry – specialising in science productions, no less – with only one job that’s been London-based. This has never been ‘normal,’ nor ‘expected,’ but it has ‘worked.’ Which has been something of a surprise, frankly.

However, the writing’s been on the wall for a while, and looking around at what’s going on… hmm. Looks like I’ll have to take London a whole lot more seriously. For TV work, at any rate.

Am I going to up and move to The Big Smoke? Well, no, not in a hurry. I’m going to have to do the rounds of the London companies far more seriously than I have before, though maybe I can get away with going to the World Congress of Science Producers in Manchester this autumn, if I can find something to tide me over until then. Alternatively, I still have something like four web media projects at various stages of musing/funding/under-wayness; if enough of them happen to come off, I’ll probably stick with that for a while.

Lessons to learn, for me:

1. Jonathan, get more serious about actually making money, you idiot.

Advice for the dear deluded reader who wishes to work in television:

1. Be in London.
2. Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, perhaps Bristol – being keen to work in these places will probably help. But expect, plan, and base yourself to be working in London.
3. Note that the above is a change from my previously-published advice.