November 2009
43 posts
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King's Cross Northern Ticket Hall
Yesterday, the new ticket hall at King’s Cross Underground station opened. The official unveiling had been on Friday, with the Mayor and Minister for London, but it was on Sunday that regular commuters got their own chance to have a look around.
So, first things first: the station works. It’s big - surprisingly big, in fact, given how much of it is in deep tunnels. It’s shiny...
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Tax
nevali:
What if we threw out of all of the existing [personal] taxes, allowances, credits, and bands, and replaced them with a aflat 35% income tax?
I’d be interested to see if anybody’s actually run the numbers and modelled this.
Flat taxes aren’t exactly a new idea, and they’ve been tried, notably in the Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia). They’ve been proposed...
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“King’s Cross already sees more passengers a year than Heathrow”
– Tessa Jowell, Minister for London, quoted in the TfL press release: King’s Cross St. Pancras Tube station doubles in size as state-of-the-art ticket hall opens.
Of course, that’s “opens” as in “photo-op with Boris” as opposed to “opens” as in...
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“The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are...”
– John Maynard Keynes on Wikiquote
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“Once here was one French guy told me, “we are working 35 hours a week whilst...”
– A comment by an anonymous poster on the TechCrunch post European startups need to work as hard as Valley ones – or forget it.
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Not Every Day
This doesn’t happen every day. In fact, I’d be a bit surprised if it’s ever happened before:
Both the Daily Mail and the Guardian have the same headline. It feels wrong, somehow.
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“Why has this trend of melding blog post and magazine article, the “blogazine,”...”
– The Death Of The Blog Post by Paddy Donnelly at Smashing Magazine (via binkythedoormat)
Looking at the sites of four designer/writers who put out customised layouts along with their articles, Donnelly poses this question. I’d suggest the answer is obvious: at a time when long-form blog posts,...
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Important rule changes
noticings:
From tomorrow, each player is limited to three noticings per day. We hope that’ll focus attention on picking the best stuff, not everything you see. Notice wisely.
YEAH.
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The Corruption Of The URL
There’s been a couple of interesting comment piece over the last couple of days on the future of the web: Tim O’Reilly’s The War For The Web and Chris Messina’s The death of the URL, for example. Here’s something I’ve previously ranted about a bit, tangentially related to something Messina mentions, that I wanted to expand on.
Plenty of people have noted that...
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“I did have another job at one point, as a computer programmer, but I kept up...”
– Belle de Jour, in the Times Online in a long interview where she reveals her identity.
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Shared space and its discontents
mostlythis:
Stupid shared space thing in Sloan Square. This is a road, I wandered out of the tube, was obviously fiddling with my iPhone then out of the corner of my eye saw something big and fast, looked up and a car sped past me a foot away, had I of not stopped in my tracks it would of hit me. three more went past equally fast, you would think drivers would go though slowly, but NOPE.
...
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Flight to the Stars
It seems that every few months I think to myself “I should really post about Flight to the Stars”, and once again I’ve seen a link that reminds me to do so. This time, I actually seem to be managing to post.
The book was published by Temple Press Books in London in 1965, and the author has an impressive string of letters after his name¹. It’s subtitled “An Inquiry...
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Most people clearly don't use RAW
zimpenfish:
Or use their cameras. At all.
Since most people have less than 10 GB of photos, chances are you can now save all your memories online for a year for the cost of a triple mocha.
via googleblog.blogspot.com
10GB is a week’s worth with a 450D and RAW+JPG.
He’s not wrong. Here are the sizes of my SLR archives.
123G Photos/EOS 350D/ 168G Photos/EOS 450D/
Heck, even...
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“All I know is that we went from concept to supposed moon landing in 9 years. 40...”
– A comment by MichellDatsun on An Astronaut Explains How We’ll Fall In Love With Space Again.
There’s actually quite a good parallel in exploration history. In the winter of 1911/1912, Amundsen and Scott raced to the South Pole. Amundsen got there first, got back, and Scott died and...
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“Google can ship gaffer tape and destroy business models.”
– Tom Insam, describing the way that Google’s turn-by-turn navigation product puts together parts of their existing infrastructure (Maps, voice recognition, Street View, route planning) and yet can threaten existing players.
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OpenOffice.org Mouse seems real
Yesterday saw the announcement of, and incredulous reaction to, the OpenOffice.org mouse, specifically designed for users of that app.
Many people doubt it’s real, especially as the images of it are renderings, but along with the protestations on the blog, there is other circumstantial proof that, even if it doesn’t end up as a shipping product, there seems to be an actual...
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“if you trace at night the Barbican walkways all the way past the Museum of...”
– Owen Hatherley, in Neon Lights, Shimmering, on the night-time vistas from the London Wall Highwalk.
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More on NY Subway LCD Maps
The always-informative Martin Deutsch pointed out that the LCD strip maps are standard on the new R160B subway stock. It turns out they’ve been entering service since 2007, as covered in the New York Times City Room blog, after a 2005 mockup.
Of course, this being America (land of the PATRIOT act, etc) they have a suspiciously apposite acronym: FIND, Flexible Information and Notice Display....
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Watchbrokenbottleboy:
New York LED Subway signage. This is amazing but if it was introduced in London, someone would probably just scrawl a cock on it. (via Big Spaceship)
I believe (but can’t find a reference on the Internet; I must have read it in a book) that the Design Research Unit experimented with backlit strip maps for the Victoria line stock in the 1960s, but had to abandon it,...
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Foursquare vs Informatics
This week, Foursquare (“Check in. Find your friends. Unlock your city.”) launched in another fifteen European cities, following London last month. Unfortunately, even in that short time, I’ve stopped playing.
As I mentioned in my post on noticings, Foursquare (and the vaguely related game/service, Gowalla) are “focussed on right there, right then”. They’re...
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Enviro 400s
headlessness just posted to Twitter about the Enviro 400s, which are one of the newer types of double decker bus in London. As a result, I thought I’d rescue this old Flickr comment from obscurity (with a couple of edits).
Enviro 400 E17 at Goose Green on Route 37 (via Matthew Black)
There’s lots of little things about them I can’t get on with, though. There’s the...
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People on Flickr, gender and politics
It’s now a couple of weeks since Flickr launched their People in Photos feature, which allows users to add people to photos. Of course, you’ve always been able to add unstructured metadata to do this, but now it’s both easier (there’s a trademark slick UI) and structured (the person’s photos are linked to their account and visible in their profile).
Unlike Facebook...
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Permanant changes to London for 2012 Olympics →
PDF, via bustops.
It claims that “13,300 new hotel rooms will be available throughout London by 2012”, yet it lists the Savoy Hotel, which is a bit cheeky, as that’s been there for a hundred years (although, admittedly, it is closed at the moment).
Some of the business buildings listed (oddly, under “leisure” seem a little optomistic. It also promises that Tate...
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WatchChannel 4 News reports on the new Oxford Circus diagonal crossing (previously, previously), as well as the more general “naked roads” / “shared space” concepts.
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“At one point in the middle, she read a book on paper (because it wasn’t...”
– marco: In defense of ebook readers