Paul Churchland ("The Case for Human Computers", Wired 2.12) should probably take a bit more notice of what is published about prostheses. Hearts, hands, hips and hormones are all fairly crappy in comparison to the real things and are only used to alleviate suffering/prolong life, not convert normal to super-normal.Perhaps we will have bits in our brains, but at the moment it's still strictly sirens of titansville.
Mark Selinger
Royal Berkshire Hospital
Selinger@aol.com
Yep! It's a good magazine, no question. But please stop this article-splitting. I've never enjoyed it and even your oh-so-cool middleverts will not convince me otherwise.Also, the suggestion by David Thomson ("The Signal Seer", Wired 2.11) that season shift will hurt the planet's wildlife seems a little odd, since his basis for this argument must be that the birds use our calendar system for planning their yearly migrations. While I'm no expert in this field, I find that a little hard to believe. Of course global warming will no doubt wipe out species as they see their habitats destroyed, but season shifts only affect those that work to tame nature and not coexist with it - a problem humans seem to suffer from most.
Chris Trueman
ctrueman@inflon.informix.com
Can I add my two-bits-worth to the design v. content debate? I buy Wired for the content and would be dissatisfied with design that got in the way, but I don't believe that has occurred on more than one page in the last three issues. (Geek Page, Wired 2.11, page 103, was a bit heavy on the background.) And all the other pages were improved by some quality layout. Well done.A question. Why do articles interleave with each other, with large jumps to the next page of any given piece? Is this easier for the creators, man or machine, or for some benefit to the reader?
David Stevenson
100330.2623@compuserve.com
So, "cyberspace is infinite" ("The Final Frontier", Wired 2.12)? Well, blow my socks off and call me Beryl. And the British are quite parochial and the Americans are all pioneers. Blimey, I think the foundations of my rational universe are shaking.For God's sake, pull yourselves together and don't blow the local pages you've haggled off your mother publication on this kind of one-draft, half-baked blandness.
There's an awful lot to be said about the failure of the UK to move big-time into the new-media arena. You touched on some of the issues in your cover article. The tendency of UK companies to develop into smaller, more agile outfits, the limitations placed on enterprise by the financial structures in place in this country. It kind of galls me, however, when I try to remember the last time I used a UK search engine. Can you?
Well-publicised efforts fall flat on their faces for being parochial, low on content and low on dynamic content. Sure, we can all quote UK-based Web sites that kick virtual butt ... but we've got a wide-open market, hundreds of talented and experienced people doing cool things, but none of the corporates taking any position other than dipping a slight PR-toe into the water to test the temperature. All we need is a few million bucks.
David Walmsley
davidwa@websters.co.uk
Having just read "The Unlikely Cyborg" in December's issue (Wired 2.12), I could not help thinking of Stellarc, the Australian "body performer", and how incomplete your article seemed without a single mention of his work (I presume you know who he is).One might argue that his work does not result from a purely scientific pursuit but is rather an entertainment-geared innovation that follows a tradition of many centuries of human "in extremis" performances. However, IMHO his achievements make him more of a cyborg than anyone else that I can think of/imagine at the moment.
Stavros Fotiadis
sfotiadi@comp.brad.ac.uk
I always thought one of the major repercussions of the Web age would be the irrelevance of physical space. You can operate online from anywhere. So why the fuck are the Ditcherati ("Meet the Ditcherati", Wired 2.12) setting up shop in the arsehole of London? If you can operate from anywhere, at least operate from somewhere nice.Mark Hargraves
cecil@pc.jaring.my
I have just skimmed through the December issue and was dismayed to find at least four occurrences of the word "fuck" (and its derivatives). If Wired purports to be a serious vehicle for Net-/tech-based journalism, then surely there is no need to resort to such needless and gratuitous strong language. Of course, if Wired wants to portray an image of being the magazine for foul-mouthed yobs who are interested in downloading smutty .GIF files from the Web, then go ahead.Paul Vickers
vickers@acm.org
Wow! What has happened at Wired - TWO pages of readers letters (Wired 2.12)? And not only that, instead of being relegated to the back of Wired as has been the case for the past few months now, our sometimes incisive opinions have been moved to the front of the magazine! Does this mean that the reader's input is much more important than we thought? Hmmm?And, by way of an observation regarding the article detailing the thoughts of Tibor Kalman ("Colour Him a Provocateur", Wired 2.12), contrary to popular opinion, this strange idea that "information wants to be free" (although Tibor seems to have spotted the ruse) is totally spurious. It should read: information wants to be freed - a distinct difference! Yep, food and information are both resources and have to be paid for - always.
Ray J. Howes
100733.3463@compuserve.com
Whilst I enjoyed Greg Rowland's article in your December issue ("Star Trek, My Saviour", Wired 2.12), it has one small error that can't be allowed to go uncorrected. Although the great man Stephen Hawking (surely a better epithet than "lucky bleeder") did indeed play cards with Data and Einstein, the fourth player portrayed was actually Sir Isaac Newton (played by British stage actor John Neville) and most definitely not Galileo (who, surely, would have at least needed an Italian accent).Richard Wenstone
wenstone@cix.compulink.co.uk
Am I the only one who thinks Internet commercialisation is a damn good thing ("It's the Relationship, Stupid!", Wired 2.12)? The reason why the Net works as the ideal market is because choice, the main plank of the free-marketeers, is implemented at a low enough level to enfranchise everyone who uses it. People didn't see your ad by accident, they chose to be there. When the organisations who are currently cluttering the Web with brochureware realise no one is visiting their sites, they will have to start providing a resource which people will choose to visit. Or in other words, information will be free, and there'll be shitloads of it.Jim Curry
shamen@ukonline.co.uk
While the story about Corbis ("In His Image", Wired 2.11) was accurate and informative overall, there was one incorrect statement about the prices Microsoft pays for images licensed through Corbis. Microsoft pays market rates, the same as any other Corbis customer.Doug Rowan
President and CEO, Corbis
dougr@corbis.com
James Faure Walker writes ("High Culture Meets Mall Culture", Wired 2.12) of the difficulties he had in organising a computer art show at Croydon Clocktower. We commissioned Faure Walker to organise the exhibition, and we too had some difficulties. In the end we cancelled the show he proposed. Not because (as he suggests) we are running a would-be suburban theme park and anything too deep is lost on us. But because it became clear the show he was proposing would have needed about four times the gallery space we have and cost about ten times our budget. Tiresome as it may seem, we are running a public gallery with public money and we have to make sure we get and give the most for it.So we commissioned a different exhibition, organised by the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology. Cyburban Fantasies (September to December 1996) features amazing interactive works like Sera Furneaux's Kissing Booth, where visitors record their own kisses, and Paul Sermon's Telematic Dreaming, which allows visitors on sofas in separate rooms to interact however they want on screens they can both see. These pieces have people crying with laughter, strangers talking to each other and more: we've even had to stop couples shagging inside one of the artworks. It's truly interactive, it's fun, it's thought-provoking and it engages many people who wouldn't spend five seconds looking at more conventional 2D images, digitised or not.
But for those who, like Faure Walker, find still images more attractive, we also have an exhibition of 2D computer art (Digital Print Award Show 1996, September to December 1996). In fact, one of the works currently on show is by Faure Walker, and was (as far as we know) delivered rather than frog-marched to the Clocktower with the full permission of the artist. His original exhibition would have contained more of his own work - perhaps that's why he's still sniping at Cyburbia.
Karen Mann and Sally MacDonald
Croydon Clocktower
smacdonald@croydon.gov.uk
Although David Brin's article "The Transparent Society" (Wired 2.12) was very interesting, I felt that it put over a very paranoid and one-sided view.The main reason he gives against restricting the data recorded from cameras to the eyes of the police seems to be that the police will therefore be able to monitor us, whereas he feels that it would be much better for us all to monitor each other. Brin seems to neglect the fact that if everybody had access to these cameras, then the police could still do all the monitoring of suspicious characters that he seems so afraid of. However, in this scenario we not only have the police spying on us, we have everybody else as well. Including criminals and large corporations.
How many of us are happy with the idea of our names being on several unknown mailing lists, let alone the whole history of what we get up to every day? In both situations the police would still be able to access this kind of information, but at least they are a publicly accountable body whose prime concern is the well-being of us citizens, unlike large corporations who are private, and primarily concerned with making money. Okay, none of us would really like to be snooped on, but I'd prefer that it was the police looking at me, rather than the police AND every Tom, Dick and Harry who felt curious.
Tim Aidley
timaidley@mail.enterprise.net
Negroponte's article "Laptop Envy" (Wired 2.12) was mostly good except ... when I were a lad, I worked 14 hours cutting punch cards out of steel plate and spent five weeks loading them into my laptop by steam train, only to find some tosser had already perfected the "does not compute" body odour - 150 of us lived in a rolled up newspaper in the middle of the motorway, and were thankful.... Does still having all your fingers count as a "constant digital presence"?Bob McClean
bob@msexch.logicom.co.uk
Maybe I can shed some light on the reason why Reuters, of all organisations, is so eager to tell us why we (and particularaly the busy managers among us) are suffering from information overload ("King Ludd", Wired 2.12). Surely those gatherers, manipulators and regurgitators of news want us to see as much as possible.And they want to make our lives that bit easier by viewing that information on their "simple, easy-to-use" and pricey Business Brief-ing service, don't they? It's similar to the recent "news story" about office workers only having seven minutes for lunch - put out by Boots, purveyors of fine sandwiches to the working classes. One always has to be careful about who's disseminating that information - and why.
Jilly Welch
Business journalist
(Modem still in box)