Yes!
» Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
Filed under: Book reviews
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Peterme on the benefits of inclusive design
» Peteme.com: Movies in Context
Filed under: Society and culture
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Ice/Eskimos
On the Google weblog there is a little widget for finding out what Google’s AdSense program would place by the way of relevent advertising on your site.
The BBC doesn’t carry advertising, but if to supplement the licence-income it makes, it decided to take the 50c click-thru bounty from Google’s adwords, then it would have a pleasant surprise.
Google thinks the most relevant ads for the BBC’s website are for BBC merchandising…
Filed under: Blog watch
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All BBC News indexes now RSS’d
This just in this morning from the BBC News Online tech crew:
“Yesterday afternoon [we] pulled the big red lever to make the CPS start publishing RSS versions of all the NewsOnline indexes on the website.Examples:
Front Page
http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss091.xmlCambridgeshire
http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/england/cambridgeshire/rss091.xmlArts
http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/entertainment/arts/rss091.xmlNews 24
http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/programmes/bbc_news_24/rss091.xmlÂ…and for all of you going away to Glastonbury next weekend, Summer Music Festivals 2003
http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/in_depth/entertainment/2003/summer_music_festivals/rss091.xml
in the UK EditionAnd similarly in the World Edition,
Europe
http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/europe/rss091.xmlAnd Business
http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/business/rss091.xmlEtc.
The more ambitious of you out there should be able to work out the URL’s of any index you want.“
I love those guys.
Filed under: Interface innovations
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Neat and clean
Brad DeLong, on his charting the evolution of American corporations:
...neat, clean theories… are only partial and incomplete because they do great violence to historical reality and ignore complexity, contingency, just dumb luck, and sheer chance.
He could be talking about designing user interfaces.
» Notes: Intro to History of American Corporate Control
Filed under: Society and culture
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Writing on place.
Ecotone is a wiki for collaborative writing about place>
“The Ecotone wiki is intended as a portal for those who are interested in learning and writing about place. It came about as a meeting spot for a number of webloggers who write extensively about place in their own blogs and were wishing to work more collaboratively, as well as raise awareness to this genre of weblogs.”
Fascinating also to find the term ecotone means “A transitional zone between two communities containing the characteristic species of each.”
» Ecotone wiki: Writing about place
[via Boynton]
Filed under: Architectural and urban design
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Hugh Pearman on Zaha Hadid in Cincinnati
“Of course there is no Hadid to be found yet in Britain apart from the woman herself and her colleagues in a converted school in Clerkenwell. She won the competition for the Cardiff Bay opera house years ago, only to be stymied by the forces of English conservatism and Welsh parochialism, a deadly combination.”
» Gabion.com: “Zaha Hadid brings subtlety to Cincinnati. Not something it’s used to.”
Filed under: Architectural and urban design
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Digital Self-Fashioning
King’s Lead Hat is my I-Ching:
“The weapon’s ready (ready Freddy) the guns purr - The satellite distorts his voice to a slurHe gives orders (finger pie) which no-one hears – The king’s hat fits
over their earsHe takes his mannequin (tram line) cold turpentine - He tries to dial out 999999999 He dials reception (moving finger): he's all alone - He's just a figment on the telephone!</i></blockquote>At least perhaps it was.
I’d always thought it was: “He’s just a figment of the telephone”; which popped into my head when I read this piece on “digital self-fashioning”.
Ah well.
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Gorilla in a bow-tie
James Spahr can see the formally- attired digital simian lurking and plotting in all things silicon.
Filed under: Misc.
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A long, long time ago, far, far away
- A New Hope. Ash are born, and this is written in Creative Computing magazine:
“The programmer-student acquires a modeus operanti for problem-solving. He plans and weighs his actions, making allowance for unforseen events, and balances the initial programming cost with subsequent debugging effort. He evolves to be a more perceptive, better balanced individual with a deeper understanding of the machine as well as himself”
Hmm.
» Computing Power to the People – A Conservative Ten-Year Projection (man-machine interaction, realism in the classroom) by Tien Chi Chen, Creative Computing, 1977
[via boingboing]
Filed under: Misc.
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Hard-Drive of the Long Now
“We should be able to sink storage piles in the ground. When you move house, you should go down into the basement and stick a giant spike into the earth, hook it up to your network, and the planet acts as a giant hard drive.”
Also found this morning, more seventies space-art from Don Dixon, including, coincidentally “Data Mountain – allegory on civilization’s efforts to store data, from clay tablets to futuristic crystals”
» Don Dixon Portfolio Images 051-100 (1968-1979) / 085- Data Mountain
Filed under: Misc.
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Comica
Got my tickets last night for Comica at the ICA on Sunday 29th June.
Fantastic to see the array of “funny books” in the ICA bookstore next to learned tomes on high art and philosophy.
The arresting, iconic Guy Fawkes mask of Prisoner 5, Larkhall resettlement camp should stop a few folk in their tracks…
Good on the ICA for putting the festival together. Only last year we were discussing lobbying them to put something like this on. Hope it draws a good crowd, and good discourse.
Filed under: Comic Books
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Progress retort
From John Gray’s “Al Qaeda and what it means to be modern”:
“For Saint-Simon and Comte, technology meant railways and canals. For Lenin it meant electricity. For neo-liberals it means the Internet. The message is the same. Technology – the practical application of scientific knowledge – produces a convergence in values. This is the central modern myth, which the Positivists propagated and everyone today accepts as fact.”
I’m about a third of my way through. It’s compact [120-odd pages?] and it’s a cracking read so far.
For someone who works in technology, and has perhaps would be characterised as vaguely-progressive-but-healthy-sceptical liberal view of it’s beneficial effects; it’s a very challenging but valuable viewpoint to be exposed to.
Filed under: Society and culture
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I sing the body chargedcoupledevice-ic
Mike Lee make us all look like the ugly puny humans we are, daily. Go and visit him at once.
Filed under: Visual and graphic design
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Not quite “The Former Audience”
With all the hoo-haa about the New York Times, the part that blogs played in the upheaval there, the constant bickering about blogs by pro/am journos etc; it’s fantastic to see that not all parts of the media are being forced to wise up to their ‘former audience’.
The caption below proceeds each weekly showing of “The Daily Show” on CNN Europe; accompanied by a thunderous James-Earl-Jones-type reading the text in voice-over:
It’s so patronising it makes me giggle very time. Often I wonder whether Jon Stewart and his crew of merry pranksters didn’t insist on it in their distribution contract. It’s half-disclaimer, half-comedy-warm-up.
Perhaps other scandalised big media should follow suit…
Filed under: Society and culture
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Orbital
How many of you, like me, had shelves full of books full of images of suburban life being enjoyed on the edge of plexiglass toroid in geostationery orbit?
You can relive the optimism of you childhood when you thought the future would be “spandex jackets, one for everyone” at NASA’s “Space Colony Art from the 1970s” page!
Filed under: Society and culture
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Two quotes on progress…
Sir Arthur C. Clarke, on the ‘digital-divide’:
“When printing was invented, somebody said this is very interesting but what good is it when nobody can read?”
And yet-to-be-knighted Steve Jobs on tablet PC’s and the non-demise of the keyboard:
” There are no plans to make a tablet. It turns out people want keyboards. When Apple first started out, People couldn’t type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.”
» BBC News: Arthur C Clarke sees e-mail for all
» Interview with Steve Jobs
Filed under: Uncategorized
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