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tcpipThe past few days I have been in Enschede, a moderately-sized former industrial town near the border of Germany, staying at the deco-era Hotel Rodenbach, situated next door to the pleasant Volkspark. The final night we splashed out a bit and enjoyed a meal at their rather nice restaurant; most other evenings we spent in their rather sizable Oude Markt area. Overall Enschede is really pleasant town with a good mix of interesting architecture, with a good student community, and a moderate amount of industry. It has managed to rebuild itself quite well following a rather dramatic decline in its traditional manufacturing base in the 1980s, reminding me of some the New Zealand towns of a similar vintage (e.g., Cambridge).
The purpose of this visit to a such a relatively obscure place has been for a philosophy of technology conference at the University of Twente. My own paper, Transparency and Immersion in High Performance Computing basically argued that (a) the command-line interface will always be necessary for speed and capability and especially for HPC and that (b) it also needs to be updated in terms of syntax, structure, and linguistic scope for greater intuition, although I did have a fairly pessimistic conclusion on the chances this would occur. As once remarked: "We think an act according to habit, and the extraordinary resistance offered to even minimal departures from custom is due more to inertia than to any conscious desire to maintain usages which have a clear function" (Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology).
For a conference that was expecting 50 people and ended up with over 200, it was quite stimulating. I made a couple of relatively important contacts, including Don Ihde, whose phenomenology of technology was extremely influential in my own thinking on the subject, and Rosi Braidotti who gave an absolutely firey presentation on the current state of critical theory and post-structuralism. In addition there is at least three other people whom I am hoping to have further collaborations with in the future across the disciplines of Habermas' critical theory and technology, cultural studies, and Internet privacy. Overall, it was a really good event and a credit to the organisers. Nearly all the speakers I heard were very knowledgeable about their respective subject matter and raised important issues on human-technology interactions, and many were from backgrounds that knew the technical details intimately. But as stimulating as it was, it was also a reminder on the discipline: "if you want to be a philosophy graduate, you'd better get a taxi license as well!". Philosophy as a profession is rarely the path to a secure or even moderate income.
The purpose of this visit to a such a relatively obscure place has been for a philosophy of technology conference at the University of Twente. My own paper, Transparency and Immersion in High Performance Computing basically argued that (a) the command-line interface will always be necessary for speed and capability and especially for HPC and that (b) it also needs to be updated in terms of syntax, structure, and linguistic scope for greater intuition, although I did have a fairly pessimistic conclusion on the chances this would occur. As once remarked: "We think an act according to habit, and the extraordinary resistance offered to even minimal departures from custom is due more to inertia than to any conscious desire to maintain usages which have a clear function" (Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology).
For a conference that was expecting 50 people and ended up with over 200, it was quite stimulating. I made a couple of relatively important contacts, including Don Ihde, whose phenomenology of technology was extremely influential in my own thinking on the subject, and Rosi Braidotti who gave an absolutely firey presentation on the current state of critical theory and post-structuralism. In addition there is at least three other people whom I am hoping to have further collaborations with in the future across the disciplines of Habermas' critical theory and technology, cultural studies, and Internet privacy. Overall, it was a really good event and a credit to the organisers. Nearly all the speakers I heard were very knowledgeable about their respective subject matter and raised important issues on human-technology interactions, and many were from backgrounds that knew the technical details intimately. But as stimulating as it was, it was also a reminder on the discipline: "if you want to be a philosophy graduate, you'd better get a taxi license as well!". Philosophy as a profession is rarely the path to a secure or even moderate income.
