Dr. Future 2.22.11 Ted Nelson Listen
This week in the future is raging with controversial characters from the past and the future. Today is the anniversary of the birth of Dolly, the first cloned mammal in 1995, who sparked a new debate about the ethics of humans playing GOD with their scientific pursuits. Yet the gifts of the research abound, with discoveries such as new skin for burn victims, driverless cars, robocops and mechanical hummingbirds. With a nod to current events of the day such as Obama’s budget for “Exascale” computing, and the Social computing shoot out in the Google VS Facebook saga, we turn to our excellent guest, inventor Ted Nelson.
For BG, a few lines from Wikipaedia:
Ted Nelson is currently working on a new information structure, ZigZag,[6] which is described on the Xanadu project website. ZigZag is Ted Nelson’s trademark on a data model he has designed for computer interaction, both for users and between programs. The design is centered around an information structure called a zzstructure and its interactive visualizations. Nelson’s stated goal is on one hand a platform for theProject Xanadu hypertext and on the other a complete computing system built on new conventions. Instead of the conventional textual formats and tree structures, zzstructure is a multidimensional extension of a spreadsheet whose cells can contain various kinds of data.