May 2009
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“Touching and physical contact is very dangerous territory”
– Noreen Hajinlian, the principal of George G. White School, a junior high school in Hillsdale, N.J., who banned hugging two years ago. From For Teenagers, Hello Means ‘How About a Hug?’ in the New York Times (via).
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“Google has conducted internal tests, according to people familiar with them, in...”
– Microsoft Aims Search Guns at Google With Bing, but that quote indicates why it’s likely not to succeed. As Jack Schofield says in the Guardian, it’s about taking on Yahoo! for the number two slot.
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“[The Royal Bank of Scotland] had its origins in a failed speculation, a...”
– John Lanchester, in a London Review Of Books article called It’s Finished, on British banks.
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“During the last ten years the amount of street music has so greatly increased...”
– From “Passages From The Life of a Philosopher”, by Charles Babbage. (You should see the chapter introduction, too.)
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“Polaroid + Apple are holding up approval on Polaroid-like photo apps. So Instant...”
– The developers of Camerabag on Twitter. Hey, Polaroid, here’s an idea: if you want to make money of your “intellectual property”, how about letting people take pictures that look like Polaroids by using INSTANT FILM that you put in an INSTANT CAMERA? I reckon you could sell them...
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15%
Picture the scene. The government has been in power for over a decade, and it’s closer to an fresh election than the previous one. The prime minister is unpopular, with schemes being introduced that nobody seems to want or need. A European election gives the population a chance to register a protest vote, and they do so with relish, giving a minor party 15% of the vote.
However, this...
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Internet Will Eat Itself
I’ve just noticed how much overlap there sometimes is between Tumblr’s recent popular page and ffffound. (upcoming popular seems more like LiveJournal. Who knew so many 18 year olds needed to post photos of fashion and whining about their exams?)
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moviescore:
Moby (yep, Moby) Theme The Matrix...
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“Fun’s boring from the outside.”
– Iain M. Banks, speaking at Aye Write! 2008 about why he hasn’t written a “Hampstead novel” set in the Culture, featuring ordinary people going around their ordinary (albeit, to us, wonderfully pampered) lives, instead going to the edges in search of explosions.
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Twitterfon, iPhone and Updates
From the Twitterfon home page:
What’s New in Version 1.5:
Ad support
Beyond the fact that phrasing “Ad support” as a feature bullet point is odd, this brings up something (else) that’s new about the iPhone OS: unlike a desktop operating system, it’s pretty much impossible to disable updates.
On the Mac, you can choose to stick with an OS revision (heck, for major...
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“Anyone know how to find the hastag on a small apple wireless keyboard !!”
– Jonathan Ross, on Twitter. If I had ever been the sort of person who would set up a British Mac-focussed weblog, it would have been called Option 3, because the first question I’d get from switchers on a UK Mac keyboard was “where’s the hash key?” (Admittedly, this is quite...
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“It’s not that I have anything particular against Guildford – it’s...”
– Matthew Boulton, who moved to EA in Vancouver, quoted in a Guardian story: UK’s games industry demands action to stop brain drain
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Twitter, Flickr, APIs and Permissions
benw:
From working on Fire Eagle, I’m an advocate for granular control. Pick sensible defaults, and allow users disable optional parts if they desire. It seems even more important in the case of Twitter, where the impact of abuse is higher.
Take Flickr: If an application asks for read/write access to my photos, that includes private photos and deletion rights. I can’t disable that. I can’t just...
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Teapotting
blech: thinks there needs to be a new term for drinking cups of tea back to back. "Chaindrinking" doesn't have the right ring to it.
antimega: @blech teapotting
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Posters
One of these is a good poster. One is not. (If the good one contains Marker Felt, something terribly wrong has happened with the other one.)
(ps. please make sure you check the achingly self-aware tags.)
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Underground
langer:
In Boston the subways are like some awkward, post-surgical graft on the city that never quite took. Travelers assume an entirely different posture once boarded: conversation halts, and every passenger—even when in the company of friends—assumes a state of isolation. It’s as if city life in Boston is something abruptly modal, and that to be on a subway car is to be experiencing a...
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Star Trek: A Review Of Sorts
This Friday saw the release of J.J. Abrams relaunch of the Star Trek movie franchise, to good reviews and better box office. Metacritic rates it as 83, with Universal Acclaim, while it took $80m at the US box office and nearly £6m in the UK. However, I have to buck the trend; I came out of the cinema yesterday evening having more or less enjoyed the film, but still critical of many flaws in it.
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The West End, Dispersal Powers, and FOIA
A few months ago, Chris Heathcote posted about the dispersal zone across much of London’s West End:
It’s actually notifying you that you’re now subject to an anti-social behaviour order, and the Police (and the not-really-Police Community Support Officers) have special powers to remove you from this area if they feel like it.
At the end, he asks:
Has anyone got a comprehensive map showing...
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“electronic music is not tied to a romanticism of youth in the way that rock is -...”
– Mark Fisher, in an aside on Avant-conservatism at k-punk.
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In Praise Of: Drapers Gardens
[Contextual note: I started writing this three or four years ago, possibly for Smoke Magazine, but also maybe for the web. In the meantime, Drapers Gardens has gone from being condemned, to being demolished, and now the replacement building is structurally complete and being fitted out for opening within a year, so you’ll have to make do with photos on the web. Still, it feels as if...
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