Genius for Dummies
March 30, 2008
Walking past the local bookshop I spied a large window display promoting the latest range of “…for dummies” books. The array of familiar black and yellow covers shouted at me through the glass that, no matter how stupid I was, I could become anything I wanted. No really, almost anything.
The whole tableau could have been a carefully constructed set within a satirical movie, except that it wasn’t. These titles were for real. Let’s see, there was Multiple Sclerosis for Dummies (I kid you not). Was this a book about how to acquire the disease or merely understand it? I particularly got a laugh out of Sex for Dummies (the entire history of my youth), Managing For Dummies (this finally explains the abilities of many senior executives I’ve encountered in my career) and Islam for Dummies (I said nothing, nothing I tell you!)
Sadly, there was also Photoshop CS2 for Dummies. Now you’d have to be a real dummy to buy that (I immediately imagined a junior employee hastily removing all copies of HD-DVD for Dummies). Perhaps there’s a pile of Web 1.0 for Dummies sitting in some warehouse, waiting to be pulped. Come to think of it, is there a Web 2.0 for Dummies awaiting a similar fate? One can only hope.
But the title which really stopped me in my tracks was: Life Coaching for Dummies. Life Coaching! I pictured a little tear-out certificate, at the back of the book, which you could frame and put up on the wall of your shiny new practice. To really impress the clients.
Where could it legally or ethically stop? Brain Surgery for Dummies? Gynaecology for Dummies? Skydiving for Dummies? Commercial Piloting for Dummies? Personally, I thought the Life Coaching one had already crossed the line somehow but, then again, who am I to judge?
Of course, all of this is merely one small part of the Great Information Delusion. This is the currently accepted belief that all we need is to get our hands on any of the – now readily available – information and we can do anything we want. No sweat, no suffering, no self-doubt, no lifetime of exhaustive and exhausting success/failure/success cycles. Just Do It. What’s that Web 2.0 phrase which always makes me feel like vomiting? Oh yes, ‘user empowerment’.
Is there an Orchestral Symphony Composition for Dummies already in the pipeline? Probably.

The Hubble Space telescope has just released this “christmas card” image of the nearby (a mere 32 million light-years away) spiral galaxy Messier 74, first discovered by the French astronomer, Pierre Méchain, in 1780. Full details
This site is amazing. I wrote some time ago about a wall paster of the tree of life which could be downloaded as a pdf.
If you love the work of Salvador Dali as much as I do, you’ll enjoy this nice interactive overview of his vast body of work.
I’ve just finished reading Spook Country, the latest book by William Gibson - the ‘father of cyberpunk’. To be frank, this book reminded me why I don’t read much fiction any more.
One of the most interesting and significant robotics projects I’ve ever seen is iCub. In a nutshell, iCub (or ‘RobotCub’) is a completely open-source robot baby. It will be used as a platform for many research teams around the world to develop software control modules and experiments to study robot cognition. The iCub project is now entering it’s third year of existence or, if you prefer the anthropomorphic version, iCub is soon going to be three years old. The iCub project is funded by the European Commission and involves around 11 EU partners and 5 international partners (from Japan and America).
I hadn’t paid a visit to Hirose Fukushima Robotics Lab website for a while, so I checked in. Lot’s of new stuff, with details on snake robots, walking robots, wheeled robots, colony robots, etc. The best bit is the
Yoky Matsuoka is someone to watch. She’s a mechanical engineer, neuroscientist, bioengineer, robotics expert and computer scientist - all rolled into one! And, she’s just been awarded a $500,000 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s ‘genius grant’ for her extraordinary research into ‘neurobotics’.
Sometimes we take for granted (or even completely ignore) the truly amazing scientific undertakings going on while we worry about what to wear this Friday. As a reminder, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has just released this 