I think this is a very accurate description of how being a participant on a TV show feels.- Plasticbag.org
A tally of my spam inbox shows that I get about 677KB of it a day. That would take about 4 minutes to download if I was on a 2.8 modem – which I’m not, admittedly. It’s still 100 or so messages to ignore. Thank goodness for Spamassassin.
Woz announces he’s working on a GPS handheld to help you find lost things. GPS is going to be the next kick-you-in-the-face consumer technology, oh yes, you mark my words. Oh yes.
It always pays to keep a record. A guy who turned up at a hospital claiming to suffer from amnesia may be identified, thanks to an apparent previous career as a French porn star. – Romanesko’s Obscure Store
One for Yoz: Tea And Chocolate Beneficial For Heart Health, Studies Suggest – ScienceDaily
A Solar-powered, heavily distributed, networked Afghanistan sounds a bit too good to be true. How much faith should we have in ideals? Enough to test them ourselves, or enough to test them on others?
Today’s reading: Ammon Hennacy and David D. Friedman. At least I’ll know the truth’s between them somewhere.
The Queen as ship’s counsellor. – Drudge
The Digital Path: Smart Contracts and the Third World – like Zooko, I guess I’m looking for incremental hacks while dreaming of re-installations. – Zooko
Back. Christmas in Chelmsford, New Year in Prague, back in London. Quinn flew back to California today to warn them of my forthcoming arrival. Now I’m Quinnless; so what’s the good in that?
Clambering over the heavy folds of morning to bring you:
Boo-ya! At last, a critique of Web design I can get my teeth into. Also, a new determinating term: stylist. – A List Apart
Call me cranky, but contrast Nigo’s t-shirts and posters to the painstakingly worked-out, user-need-driven work of one of the creators featured in British Rail Design , say Jock Kinneir himself. Is this an unfair comparison, a sterling example of apples v. oranges? Absolutely. Because only one of the two works in the field of design.
The other is best described as a stylist.
Read the copyright fine print; win a car. – Boing Boing
Flash stylists for civil liberties! – Tom Paine
How to win at Rock, Stone, Scissors and therefore have cheaper sex in a Japanese whorehouse. – AccordionGuy
Two things about this XBox modders’ story (via Slashdot). First, that Microsoft asked him to take down the BIOS image *twelve hours* after it went up (that’ll be Google-as-limit-on-free-speech). Second: he’s got an MP3 up of the phone request.
Ever since I worked at the Guardian and we uploaded the Aitken/Ritz faxes, I’ve always wanted articles to include as footnotes the supporting evidence: MP3s of phone calls, the notes, the e-mails, the books read, the employees interviewed. Journalists say it’s hard to do because of legal implications and the difficulty of preserving anonymity. That’s often true, but not always. What is always true is that this paraphernalia is often halting, confused, and a bit amateurish. Few journalists can bare to listen to their interview tapes themselves, let alone hand them over to the public. One part of a journalists’ job is to polish and re-edit this mess until you have a coherent, lively, readable tale.
But the truth isn’t lively, readable or professional. And it’s coherent in a way that we can’t anticipate. I think the faster we learn to discriminate between storytelling and the universe, the better.
On which note, Seth has a piece on the stories we tell ourselves of crypto and usability.
Post NTK reshuffle:
Welp, so much for the EC taking care of human rights: Europe succumbs to UK pressure on data retention – ZDNet
The editorials in the Hamas Weekly are fantastically lurid. The Daily Mail has nothing on this Ode To Anthrax, as translated by the pro-Israeli MEMRI:
“I swear that your story is peculiar. The Americans see you as an imminent attack that is about to shake the lady with the proboscises that suck the blood of the peoples? All [the rulers of Arab and Islamic countries] tell [the U.S.] ? every time she farts, ? “Allah bless you” ? Nevertheless, you have found your way to only eight American breasts so far?”
Alexander Rose of the Long Now Foundation spoke at Xerox Parc last night. Rose is quietly-spoken and seemed a little shy in front of the curmudgeonly, Waldorf-and-Statler crowd at Xerox. He won them over, of course. He ran through some of the features of the 10,000 year clock, but concentrated on the Rosetta Disk project. The disks contain examples of a 1000 languages, micro-encoded onto nickel plate and embedded into a sphere, one half tungsten, the other a domed magnifying glass.
A selection of the most popular languages are arranged in a spiral lines around the edge. Each spiral contains the first words of Genesis (the only text the Long Now could find which is translated into enough languages). Each letter grows smaller as the text spirals into the center. The last letter of the spiral is the same size as the rest of the thousand language texts encoded in the center of the disk.
We’ve reached the point of civilisation where we’re creating Mysterious Alien Artifacts™.
Good Morning, East Ham:
When doing scientific research into the onset of seasons, don’t forget leap years. Science Daily
Writing a braille driver for Linux: Linux Weekly News
We were lucky – Dave Mielke wrote a new driver within only two days and it was working right out of the box.
It might have been easier for Dave Mielke, if he actually had the hardware in front of him. But as Dave Mielke lives in Canada and we in Denmark (Europe) and he had no device, he had to do it in blind – so to speak. Well, Dave Mielke is actually 100% blind, so the C program really was written in the blind.
Morning rounds:
A Tokyo woman dies in a strange country after travelling to find the money buried by a character in Fargo. I find stories like this just unbearably poignant. –obscure store
Actually, that dirty old man is more likely to be a teenage girl. Flutterby
Autism watch: Autistic Preschoolers Have Larger-Than-Normal Brains, Can’t Distinguish Emotions From Facial Photographs – Science Daily
“Additional studies that we are conducting measuring brain chemistry suggest that the brain cellular composition is altered in the autistic children. This is potentially a very important finding, although we are still trying to better understand the functional significance of these abnormalities,” Dager said.
Enron begs California for electricity. *HA*-ha. – Flutterby again
Audiences fascinate me. I went to see Robert Anton Wilson speak last night, and the mix – while pretty heavily tilted towards the LSD end of the culture pool – was fascinating. A smattering of sweet, awe-struck teenagers (“H-h-how did you even begin to th-th-think of Schrodinger’s Cat?”), a fistful of RAW contemporaries raucous at the back, serious twenty-somethings querying well-worn conspiracy trivia, a man who repeatedly asks in gentle voice about the nature of hyperspace, and a surprising number of couples, including us. Wilson himself spoke for three hours. He rarely flagged, never held back with the zinging Swiftian end-jokes, even as he relished retelling anecdotes for no doubt the billionth time. He made us all Discordian Popes, except Quinn, who has always refused the title, no matter how many times she’s been elected to it. He recommended Terry Southern. He told me whether Father Christmas exists or not.