LinkMachineGo

[books] Space to think — the Observer interviews William Gibson … ‘I’m reminded of something Gibson once said: ‘I didn’t imagine that art girls in the Midwest would be flashing their tits in cyberspace… but I’m glad that they’re doing it.’ Does he retain that optimism? ‘You could say, in some ways technology and entertainment culture does not look that good from outside. I mean, if you looked at the internet objectively, sometimes you would think it was just a tsunami of filth, something you would not want anywhere near your children.’ It is though, he believes, an intimately human form of culture. ‘I think that one of the things that sets us most thoroughly apart is the ability to preserve our individual memory. The information of the cave paintings becomes Borges’s library, Borges’s library becomes a laptop computer.’ The internet is the shared memory of the species.’

[couture] Notice in the men’s toilets in Chanel’s office: ‘Pissing everywhere isn’t very Chanel.’ [via Sore Eyes]

[tv] The Real Doctor House — I’m relieved to find out that that the real House doesn’t have a borderline personality disorder. .. ‘Unfortunately, many of the patients Bolte sees are victims of iatrogenic, or doctor-caused, illness. Simply put, they have been misdiagnosed, overmedicated to the point of sickness, or given treatment inappropriate to their conditions. On occasion, this has led to shouting matches with more conventional docs, like the dermatologist colleague who burst into Bolte’s office one day and harangued him-in front of another patient-for telling the mom of an acne-ridden teen to stop feeding her child so much junk food. There’s no evidence that diet has anything to do with acne, the dermatologist shouted. Bolte begged to differ and cited the literature. “The pharmaceutical industry has trained even doctors to believe that there’s a pharmaceutical answer to everything,” he says, shrugging.’ [via Ask Metafilter]

[funny] Let’s face it, we’ve all got frustrated in exams…

using calculus to discover the identity of batman

[spam] Damn Spam — The New Yorker on Internet Spam [via qwghlm]…

‘After selecting six hundred West Coast addresses, Thuerk realized that he would never have time to call each one of them, or even to send out hundreds of individual messages. Then another idea occurred to him: what if he simply used the network to dispatch a single e-mail to all of them? “We invite you to come see the 2020 and hear about the DECSystem-20 family,” the message read. As historic lines go, it didn’t have quite the ring of “One small step for a man,” yet Gary Thuerk’s impact cannot be disputed. When he pushed the send button, he became the father of spam. The reaction was immediate and almost completely hostile. “This was a flagrant violation of the Arpanet,” one recipient wrote. Another noted that “advertising of particular products” should be strongly discouraged on the network. The system administrator promised to respond at once, and Thuerk was harshly reprimanded. Nevertheless, his company sold more than twenty of the computer systems, for a million dollars apiece.’

[blogs] The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks … ‘Making fun of bad punctuation since 2005.’ [via The Daily Chump]

[comics] I Am Punisher (Black) — Chris’s Invincible Super Blog looks at the one of the odder moments during Frank Castle’s adventures in the Nineties … ‘Thus, wanted by the law, hunted by the Kingpin, and being, y’know, black, the Punisher decides it’s time for a little road trip, and hits the open road for a trip to Chicago in order to take the most appropriate course of action. He starts hanging out with Luke Cage…’

[tv] Medical Reviews of House — a real doctor dissects House … ‘Even though an infection may not have been at the heart of the problem, the patient still had a dangerously low white blood cell count and needed to be in isolation – isolation which was broken by Dr. House storming into the room in his “Eureka!” moment.’ [via Yoz]

[science] The Social Norm Of Leaving The Toilet Seat Down: A Game Theoretic Analysis … ‘In this paper, we internalize the cost of yelling and model the conflict as a non-cooperative game between two species, males and females.We find that the social norm of leaving the toilet seat down is inefficient. However, to our dismay, we also find that the social norm of always leaving the toilet seat down after use is not only a Nash equilibrium in pure strategies but is also trembling-hand perfect. So, we can complain all we like, but this norm is not likely to go away. All hope is not lost though…’ [via Sore Eyes]

[fun] The 50 must-watch Web Video Clips — compiled by the Daily Telegraph of all places.

[comics] For Sale on eBay: Jimmy Olsen Adventures by Jack Kirby – Volumes 1 & 2.

[comics] 200 Bad Comics …

[comics] Doonesbury: ‘Nah.Some things are just unknowable…’

Some things are just unknowable...

[macs] Running the BBC’s iPlayer on a Mac using Parallels … ‘After finding out the BBC’s iPlayer only worked on Windows XP I wondered if you could run it on a Mac using Parallels or perhaps under Windows Vista (which iPlayer also doesn’t support) using VMware or some other virtualization product…’

[drink] The Five Stages of Drunkenness … ‘Stage #1 — Smart: This is when you suddenly become an expert on every subject. You know all and greatly wish to express this knowledge to anyone who will listen. At this stage you are also always right. And of course the person you are talking with is very wrong…’ [via qwghlm]

[film] $78 million of red ink? — eye-opening analysis of the costs and losses incurred by the film Sahara … ‘The documents, obtained by The Times, provide a rare behind-the-curtain peek at the thousands of expenditures that drain the budget of a major motion picture. The line items cover such things as “local bribes” within the Kingdom of Morocco and the salaries and “star perks” paid to Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz. Movie budgets are one of the last remaining secrets in the entertainment business, typically known to only high-level executives, senior producers and accountants…’ [via Metafilter]

[comics] 2000AD still the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic! — Brief Review of Recent 2000AD’s from Chris Weston … ‘It’s a portrait of a man who has led a life devoid of emotion slowly discovering his humanity… a man who is awakening to the fact that his whole life may have been spent in the wrong cause… but has this knowledge come too late? Melancholy and menace hover above this strip like carrion… it really feels like The Tale of Judge Joseph Dredd has entered its final act.’ [via blackbeltjones]

[lifehacks] Top 10 Clipboard Tricks — some useful tips from Lifehacker … ‘One of the greatest features the point and click interface brought to personal computers is the clipboard – that invisible, temporary shelf you use more times per day than Google. If you think the clipboard is only about Ctrl+C, you’re missing out…’

[web] Blackle — try some energy saving Google searches … ‘In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine.’ [via Blackbeltjones]

[comics] Simpsons create Episode for all you Comic Geeks — More on the Episode of the Simpsons with Alan Moore. ‘…the episode, “Husbands and Knives,” will air on October 7 and will feature not only [Alan] Moore, but two other big comic book names: Art Spiegelman (Maus, Maus II, In the Shadow of No Towers) and Daniel Clowes (Eightball, Ghost World, David Boring). The three men figure into a subplot centered on Comic Book Guy, who finds himself in direct competition with a new comic book shop called “Coolsville Comics & Toys,” run by a fella named Milo (Jack Black).’ [via Blah Blah Flowers]

[crime] Crime Scenes with Shapes — pretend you’re Gil Grissom with Microsoft Visio. ‘…many new shapes for creating Visio drawings to depict crime, accident, or incident scenes for courtroom presentations.’

[funny] Bible Spoiler … [via Reddit]

There Are Some Places… [more…]

[blogs] Secret Blog of a TV Controller (aged 33 and 3/4) — funny fake blog of a TV Exec … ‘Thommo is stomping about issuing disgruntled threats to everyone left, right and centre; Fincham is curled up in his office weeping. Human Resources people are barging – unannounced – into offices and throwing office stationery around; even the kind Indian gent in the papershop in White City has a fucking scowl on his face whenever I pop by.’

[comics] Old Interview with Alan Moore, Pat Mills, Steve Moore, Alan Parkhouse and Angus Allan — from the Society of Strip Illustration Newsletter in May 1981. Alan Moore: ‘My greatest personal hope is that someone will revive Marvelman and I’ll get to write it. KIMOTA!!’

[tv] Want to save Teletext? Don’t press the red button — The Guardian on the Slow Decline of Teletext … ‘Ceefax has been clinging onto life since 2001, repeatedly flatlining and then sitting up in bed shouting “No, I’m feeling better!” However, this time the decline does seem terminal, as indicated by the decreasing frequency of page updates. During last week’s Wimbledon, for instance, score updates were lagging nearly a set behind the live action…’

[comics] For Sale on eBay: Batman: Hush Volume 2 by Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee.

[bbc] BBC iPlayer launch: The first 14 days — some predictions about what might happen after the BBC’s long-awaited iPlayer is released … ‘The Daily Express front page “Now Poles Steal Our TV” reports on how ‘hackers’ in Poland have managed to bypass the BBC’s GeoIP system and have downloaded and installed the iPlayer software on a computer in Gdansk.’

[web] Wikiclock … ‘This is the Wiki Clock — a clock that runs on Wiki technology! Please update this page with the correct current time (UTC).’

[politics] Margaret Thatcher and Ice Cream: ‘Fans of the Mister Softee style have Margaret Thatcher [..] to thank. She was one of the team of chemists at J Lyons who first developed soft frozen ice cream.’ [via boundr]

[london] An A to Z of the Evening Standard …

A is for Attack, B is for Bastards, C is for Chaos, D is for Death, E is for Evil, F is for Funeral, G is for Go, H is for Horror, I is for Iraq, J is for John Prescott, K is for Killer, L is for Legend, M is for Murder, N is for Nightmare, O is for Olympics, P is for Pictures, Q is for Quit, R is for Raid, S is for Sex, T is for Terror, U is for U.S., V is for Victim, W is for War, X is for X-Rated, Y is for Younger, Z… there seems to be no Z in the Evening Standard Alphabet!

[blogs] Dave Gorman’s Blog … ‘I’ve given in to the way of the blog.’

[radio] Speechification … ‘A blog of Radio 4. Not about Radio 4 but of it. We point to the bits we like, the bits you might have missed, the bits that someone might have sneakily recorded.’

[funny] A Google Map Plotting the many Gaffes of Prince Phillip … ‘You are a woman, aren’t you? – The Prince seeks clarification from a Kenyan lady in tribal dress back in 1984.’

[interesting] 33 Names of Things You Never Knew had Names … ‘Jarns, Nittles, Grawlix and Quimp – Various squiggles used to denote cussing in comic books.’ [via Torrez]

[movies] The Veidt Method — viral marketing campaign for the Watchmen movie … ‘Latest News: President and C.E.O. Adrian Veidt interviewed in latest edition of Nova Express – on newsstands now!’ [via plasticbag.org]

[drink] What’s inside Red Bull … ‘Taurine – Also known as 2-aminoethanesulfonic acid, taurine was originally isolated from bull bile in 1827.’ [via Blah Blah Flowers]

[comics] xkcd: Dear God, I’d like to file a bug report …

[science] Perpetual truths — Bad Science on Perpetual Motion … ‘I should therefore like to posit the first law of bullshit dynamics, which I suspect this invention may well obey, as follows: “there is no imaginable proposition so absurd that you cannot find at least one person, somewhere in the world, with a PhD or professional post, who is happy to endorse it.”’

[comics] John Byrne in a Nutshell — analysis of a brief John Byrne comment on Grant Morrison’s introduction to Kirby’s New Gods Omnibus … ‘Morrison wrote the introduction not because he did time in the trenches doing alternately decent and forgettable Kirby homages like you, but because he is the obvious heir to Kirby’s weird, boundless creativity. He actually took the old man up on the challenge to fill the world with your own crazy-ass shit.’

[blogs] Lowdham Book Festival Lecture Notes — Mike of Troubled Diva’s guide to Blog-to-Books… ‘There is something which has recently come to be seen (in certain quarters) as the Holy Grail to which every personal blogger must aspire. Two little words, which have an almost mystical hold over certain sections of the blogosphere… …and I’m going to say them now… BOOK DEAL!‘

[films] Hello, come in, do have a nibble — Interesting interview with Dennis Hopper … ‘He certainly isn’t in the mood to discuss any of the half a dozen films he is due to appear in this year, a roster which is due to include a performance in Speed 3, even though I have plenty of questions about that. Surely his character Howard Payne died in a decapitation incident in the last reel of Speed 1? “It’s a river of shit,” he tells me pleasantly but firmly, “from which I have tried to extract some gold.”‘

[uÊopÇpÄ±sdn] dÄ±1ÉŸ — .sÊ‡É¹nÉ¥ pÉÇÉ¥ ÊŽÉ¯ .uÊop ÇpÄ±sdn Ê‡xÇÊ‡ dÄ±1ÉŸ oÊ‡ 1ooÊ‡ qÇÊ :)

[crime] Hans Reiser: Once a Linux Visionary, Now Accused of Murder — Wired Article on Hans Reiser and the disappearance of his Wife … ‘For the past two decades, he has struggled to create a different method of organizing data. His approach, known as ReiserFS, is a file system unlike any other. Rather than assign data a fixed location on a hard drive, it uses algorithms to frequently reposition information, including the code that makes up the file system itself. It elegantly maximizes storage space, but it can also complicate data recovery when a computer crashes. If the algorithms are corrupted, the file system will be unable to locate its own position. All the data it organizes disappears into an indistinguishable mass of 0s and 1s. The contents of that hard drive will be irretrievably lost. In Reiser’s case, a critical piece of data – the location of Nina Reiser – has gone missing…’

[iphone] Wait in Line like Everyone Else, you Traitorous Bastard — Fake Steve Jobs on Steve Wozniak … ‘He lifts my brand name and calls his book iWoz. Then he comes sniffing around looking for a free iPhone. Forget it, Captain Segway. Look. You did some nice work — back in the seventies. To put it another way, the last time you did any real work, Styx was still selling out arenas. Bokay?’

[science] Yes, the universe looks like a fix. But that doesn’t mean that a god fixed it … ‘The impression of design is illusory: our universe has simply hit the jackpot in a gigantic cosmic lottery. The multiverse theory certainly cuts the ground from beneath intelligent design, but it falls short of a complete explanation of existence. For a start, there has to be a physical mechanism to make all those universes and allocate bylaws to them. This process demands its own laws, or meta-laws. Where do they come from?’

[iphone] 29 June 2007: The Day the World Changed — Fake Steve Jobs rallies the troops … ‘To those of you who serve under me at Apple, I say this: Yes, I have berated you, and insulted you, and exasperated you. Yes, I’ve fired your friends for no reason, and made you work harder than you ever thought you could work. Yes, I’ve taken you away from your spouses, your children, your transgendered domestic partners. In some cases your devotion to me has cost you your marriages. You’ve sacrificed a great deal for this. But has it not been worth it? For the rest of your life, you’ll be able to say that you were working at Apple when the iPhone was introduced. You were here on the day when the course of human history was changed forever. Plus, you’ll get a free 4-gigabyte iPhone, at $500 value. Not bad, right?’

[politics] Ten Years of Waiting come to an End in 57 minutes at the Palace … ‘Telling staff to call him Gordon, he acknowledged that it had been an emotional day for them saying goodbye to a great leader and a great family. He thanked them for the welcome and said it had been an interesting day for him. “It’s not every day you meet the Queen at 1.30pm, become the prime minister at 2pm, speak to the president at 3pm, and get told by Sarah to put the kids to bed at 7pm,” he told them.’

[politics] Go to Australia or use your own Judgment … ‘As prime minister, with ultimate responsibility for Britain’s nuclear deterrent, Mr Brown has to write a letter, in his own hand, giving instructions detailing what the UK’s response should be in the event of a pre-emptive nuclear attack. The letter will be opened only by the commander of a British Trident submarine, who would have to assume that the prime minister was no longer in a position to take “live” command of the situation. The options are said to include the orders: “Put yourself under the command of the US, if it is still there”; “go to Australia”; “retaliate”; “or use your own judgment”. Each new prime minister writes the letter as soon as he or she takes office…’

[books] Henry Raddick’s Amazon Reviews — spoof book reviews on Amazon. Raddick reviews God, Why Did Dad Lose His Job?: … ‘A truly wonderful guide which has enabled me to explain my recent sacking for vandalising company property to my children in terms of a minor act of redemption. First rate.’

[virtual] YouTube: Second Life for Real … [more…]

[music] ‘Oh good, it’s raining again’ — Charlie Brooker does Glastonbury … ‘Once you’re in, the sheer scale of it is initially overwhelming. Imagine forcing the cast of Emmerdale to hurriedly construct Las Vegas at gunpoint in the rain. Then do it again. And once more for luck. That’s Glastonbury: a cross between a medieval refugee camp and a recently detonated circus. Roads of sloppy mud and drunken civilians shivering in tents; this is what London would look like if I’d been in charge for 100 years. Not because I’m some kind of laid-back dreamer, but because I couldn’t organise a piss-up in a pissery. It’d take me six decades to assemble the most rudimentary infrastructure. There’d be no museums in my London. Maybe a bin or two, at a push.’

[comics] 2001: An Adapted Odyssey — Metafilter discuss Kirby’s adaptation of 2001 … ‘This is really neat and all, but I misread the original post and was really hoping to see 2001: A Space Odyssey as it was adapted by Jack Chick, because that would have been, you know, really really fucked up.’

[wikipedia] Wikington Crescent … How to Play: ‘To start a game of Wikington Crescent, first click on the Random article link. From the article given, you then click on one of the article links to the next article. The object of the game is to reach the article on Mornington Crescent tube station, whilst clicking on as few articles as possible. The fewer the links used, the better the game. An example is that the article for Matterhorn can lead you to Mornington Crescent tube station within four links.’ [via plep]

[quotes] Grouphug.us: ‘In third grade, I cheated on my history exam. In fourth grade, I stole my uncle Max’s toupee and I glued it on my face when I was Moses in my Hebrew School play. In fifth grade, I knocked my sister Edie down the stairs and I blamed it on the dog…When my mom sent me to the summer camp for fat kids and then they served lunch I went nuts and I pigged out and they kicked me out…But the worst thing I ever done — I mixed a pot of fake puke at home and then I went to this movie theater, hid the puke in my jacket, climbed up to the balcony and then, then, I made a noise like this: hua-hua-hua-huaaaaaaa — and then I dumped it over the side, all over the people in the audience. And then, this was horrible, all the people started getting sick and throwing up all over each other. I never felt so bad in my entire life.’

[LMG]

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