Perfection

To achieve perfection takes trial and error.

If others are involved in your task, they may see your experimentation as indecision.

Ignore that gnawing urge to placate them for an easier life, and press on with your goal.

Only then, will you hope to attain something that you can be 85 – 90% satisfied with.

Gutenberg V Berners-Lee

If it wasn’t for Johannes Gutenberg I wouldn’t be writing this post. In fact, if it wasn’t for Tim Berners-Lee, I wouldn’t be writing it either.

So who’s Top Dog? Who’s the Big Kahuna? The Head Honcho?

Let’s have a look shall we?

Johannes Gutenberg invented the first movable wooden type printing press in 1436. (Progressing later to metal type.) Known imaginatively as: The Gutenberg Press.

Before I get a plethora of comments saying: Yeah, but the Chinese invented clay movable type 400 years earlier…

Yes they did. And the clue is in the word- “clay”.

Johannes Gutenberg

Now what’s so special about that? I hear you coo.

Well, it meant that books could be massed produced cheaply. Which lead to mass literacy. Which lead to peasants like my forefathers having the opportunity to better themselves. (Which they never bothered their arses to do.)

The Gutenberg Press is one of the greatest inventions of the modern era. Producing a veritable revolution in the fostering, development and dissemination of the arts, sciences and religion. (Okay, maybe the last one wasn’t such a good idea.)

Books were no longer the sole domain of royalty, church and aristocracy.

The masses had the opportunity to learn. To have their own ideas. And to contribute ideas.

So, if you’re reading this, (and your not a member of the royal family), you probably have Johannes Gutenberg to thank for enabling you to do so.

Gutenberg Press

Next up, Sir Tim Berners-Lee father of the World Wide Web, upon which you are reading this post.

Tim Berners-Lee

As most of you probably know, TB-L invented the first internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing while at CERN in 1989.

And you’ll probably all agree, that the WWW is one of the single greatest inventions ever to be bestowed upon humankind.

A PC

If Gutenberg help spread mass literacy, then Berners-Lee has helped spread mass learning.

No longer are we bound by publishers as to what we can and cannot find out. Whether that be across the road at number 22, or across the world at, er… number 23.

Accessing hitherto inaccessible information. The sharing of information instantly. Communicating with people in real time that would otherwise take hours, days or weeks.

What Gutenberg did in 600 ish years, TB-L has achieved in 20.

It is mind-boggling to comprehend the effect the World Wide Web has had in empowering the everyday man, woman and child in their quest for knowledge.

Obviously, there had to be a few other people in the chain such as, Alan Turing – the father of Computer Science and John Atanasoff, the inventor of the first computer, before TB-L could begin to cognize WWW.

But, I doubt that any of these illustrious men would have achieved what they have, had it not been for Johannes Gutenberg.

Some may say the invention of language and writing are of far greater import than merely having the means in which to transcribe them. What good would a book be without words in which to put them?

Og: What’s that?
Ug: It’s a book.
Og: What’s in it?
Ug: Nothing.
Og: What use is that?
Ug: It’s a sketch book.
Beat.
Og: Hang on a minute, me auld hairy sabre-toothed tiger slayer, what are we doing ‘ere?
Ug: Er… I dunno. Chatting?
Og: Exactly! Chatting.
Og: Now, what if you write our, er… “chats” in your little sketch book?
Ug: Then it wouldn’t be a sketch book. It’d be a “chat” book.
Og: Maybe we could have some kind of “picture” for our words?
Ug: A pictogram?
Og: More of a… symbol really. You know, instead of you drawing a woolly mammoth we could have a “wooooord” for it instead. Coz, let’s face it, you can’t draw for shit. I’ve seen the mess you made of the cave.
Ug: You mean a consistent set of phoneme symbols arranged in an alphabet for the translation and dissemination of information?
Og: Yeah, that as well.

And lo, writing was invented.

I digress.

So… who wins between Gutenberg and Berners-Lee?

Berners-Lee may have driven humankind further, but it was Gutenberg who bought the petrol.

Which leads me to another life-changing invention – the lawnmower.

Me, the thief.

Where do you get your ideas from?

I get asked this all the time in my job.

I usually reply that the ideas come from the information I am supplied with to do the job.

All you have to do is jizz it up a bit in your creative cocktail shaker and see what comes out.

Sometimes it tastes like piss.

Other times it tastes like a Mojito mixed by Mr Hemingway himself.

But there are a few other ingredients that go into the creative cocktail shaker that aren’t in the brief.

These are taken from all the stuff you soak up in your daily life: art; literature; music; ads; news; gossip; film; blogs; tabloids; soaps; comedy, et cetera, et cetera.

What turns your cocktail from being piss into ambrosia is what bits of your own inspiration you put in there.

I came across this quote on the Gutenberg Press II:

I read something similar by Picasso a few years back. But in the spirit of the quote – he probably pinched it from someone else in the first place.

Here are a few bits of graffiti that you may have seen before, but what I like about these are how they integrate their art with the environment, rather than the environment being purely a canvas.

Whilst out for a saunter with my two girls, the eldest, who’s 5, said: Daddy! That looks like a cup!

This is what she was looking at…

Kids get it.

It’s adults who unlearn it.

Inspiration lurks everywhere, if you want to be inspired.

Connectivity

I shall leave you to draw your own conclusions. I have mine.

A tree

A Delta

A brace of kidneys and an aorta

A lot of capillaries