Long Term Memory, Inspiration and Wow Factor
For years, the web has been my long term memory; imdb, wikipedia, the history of mathematics at the School of Mathematics
and Statistics at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and so forth.
For years, when I’m writing, I like to have inspiration, usually background music, mostly instrumental, or if lyrical, then in a foreign language like Latin or Fon.
I might have a movie playing without the sound to provide visual stimulation, like Harry Potter, 2001 or Totoro.
There’s also random ideas, free association, Rorshach inspirations, irrational trains of thought that nevertheless get somewhere interesting, like a Samuel Delany novel when you’re fourteen.
So now there’s this! Liveplasma.com!
Basically, it lets you specify a movie or a musical group/artist and then provides you with a graphical display of all the other items in its database that can be linked to your choice, with more distant items being less related.
I picked “The Poseidon Adventure” out of the blue and this is what it gave me. Notice the way the nodes are positioned.
You can drag the title pane out of the way, or you can click on the surface to recenter it, sort of like dragging in Google Maps, click on a related item and see where it floats, relationship-wise, in plasmaspace.
You can click on Legend and other items on the title pane for an explanation of the various things. On this Pentium ][ at the public library, it’s irritatingly slow, but no worse than Google Maps.
I’ve seen a similar (3d?) designs touted for internet search engines where the link and the relevance are indicated by distance, colour and node-style and you can change the focal point of the search by selecting another node, similar to this.
For me, this isn’t just a cool toy, although it certainly is that, but only among other things. You may notice that when you look at my Poseidon Adventure page, off to the left, behind the title pane is “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”. Part of the back of my mind is hamster-wheeling like hell trying to figure out the path from Upside Down Ocean Liner to Boy Wizard in Trouble Again. Inspiration, association, apparent randomicity (or is it?), spontaneous generation of grey matter, all the good stuff.
Don’t diminish me, it’s holding off the Alzheimer’s.
Play with the site yourself, try it with musicians, have some fun.
And hey, all praise Saint Timothy Berners Lee while we’re here.
Amen. Awomen.