September 2010
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“The challenge Nokia faces is not complacency. It’s that the business model for...”
– Horace Didiu- NYT blames “culture of complacency”
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Kindles and bookshelves
This should probably form part of a Five Things post, but Marco’s just written about how cheap the Kindle is:
Amazon is selling a lot of these. And at that price, it’s no wonder: $140 is barely more than many iPad cases.
(It’s £110 in the UK.) Seeing that, I thought it was worth relaying this thought (I think) Chris Heathcote mentioned in passing last week:
A Kindle is cheaper...
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Muybridge, Silvy, Mann: Three Exhibitions
London’s doing quite well with exhibitions of photography at the moment. For just over a week, the NPG’s collection of Camille Silvy works, Tate Modern’s show on Eadweard Muybridge, and Photographer’s Gallery selection from Sally Mann are all open to the public. I’ve visited all of them in the last couple of weeks, and there are some (perhaps surprising) parallels.
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American vocabulary, tested
marco:
I wrote a script to crawl U.S. App Store customer reviews [and] compute the most common words [only in] 5-star reviews
★★★★★: awesome
I may have ranted on this subject. (Terrific. Charming. Lovely.)
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“If I had a goal it was to cover the whole network, from terminus to terminus, an...”
– Tony Judt: In Love with Trains in The New York Review of Books.
(I can’t read the whole article, but I love that quote, and anyway, this’ll make a good bookmark for when I am a subscriber.)
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“It’s right and proper that we commemorate the valour and bravery as well...”
– Ian Kershaw, responding to the question “Do Germans invoke their own Blitz spirit?”, in the BBC News article Did the Blitz really unify Britain?
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Walking in Amsterdam and Copenhagen
I’ve just read a long post about the cycling mindset in New York City by Felix Salmon, thanks to Phiil Gyford and Jason Kottke. It’s worth a read, and I think the thesis is worth considering. There’s an almost throwaway line towards the beginning:
In other cities, especially in places like Copenhagen or Utrecht, bicycles are ubiquitous and everybody knows how to behave on and...
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“I find it unsurprising that the paper concludes that the tube map plays a large...”
– Karen M Martin commenting on Mind The Gap: The ‘Tube Map’ as London’s User Interface on Mr Watson
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“London above ground is a terrifically complex and chaotic entity with few...”
– Janet Vertesi in Mind The Gap: The ‘Tube Map’ as London’s User Interface (PDF). The whole thing is well worth a read. (Hat tip: the Human Transit blog.)
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“For those of us who have grown up in the reassuring embrace of grid-patterned...”
– Alex Hutchinson in “Global Impositioning Systems”, in The Walrus.
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“At that Whitechapel Gallery evening, everyone there over 80 could vividly recall...”
– Lisa Jardine Do our memories get better or worse with age?
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“There are two schools of thought as to why the Germans love board games. The...”
– Martin Wallace of Warfrog, quoted by Tim Harford in his article Why we still love board games.
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“Crucially, both services specialise in transience. Both services started — and...”
– Wibbly-wobbly socially-networky stuff by Tumbled Logic, on Facebook and Twitter. Quoted so I can come back to this later. (Open question: does Facebook actually have an archive? If you know a fragment identifier URI from, say, three years ago, is it retrievable? I know it is on Twitter.)
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High Frequency Maps: A London Perspective
Human Transit has recently published a call for public transport systems to use frequency as a base for mapping, which I noticed from this post on Chicago (via mattb on the daily chump).
As a European and a Londoner, the first thing that strikes me is that, for a major city, Chicago has what seems a very poor transport network. The only line that can claim a wait of less than 7.5 minutes on...
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