- 10 cheap and cheerful city breaks – Some ideas for next years November trip…
- Schneier on WikiLeaks – “Just as the music and movie industries are going to have to change their business models for the Internet era, governments are going to have to change their secrecy models. I don’t know what those new models will be, but they will be different.”
- Publishers take note: the iPad is altering the very concept of a ‘book’ – The future of publishing?
- eclipse of 2010 – Great images of the recent eclipse.
Tag: Links
- This case must not obscure what WikiLeaks has told us – Another good piece about WikiLeaks. The news about Assange is starting to obscure the real news.
- Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net. It’s your choice. – “What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent; corrupt; or recklessly militaristic. And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.”
- It’s not an arsenic-based life form – Apparently ET is not visiting any time soon but it’s still pretty cool.
- Julian Assange, defending our democracies (despite their owners’ wishes) – Nice piece about WikiLeaks and why, despite what some politicians will tell you, it’s a good thing.
- The religious excuse for barbarity – “No, we don’t respect your desire to needlessly torment animals because some hallucinating desert nomads did it centuries ago. We don’t respect it at all. You can cry that we are “persecuting” you if we stop you committing acts of cruelty if you want.”
- Penn & Teller – Penn (of Penn and Teller fame) protests the new TSA rules.
- Nov. 10, 1999: Metric Math Mistake Muffed Mars Meteorology Mission – Sometimes the simplest of mistakes have the most dramatic consequences.
- Linotype: The Film – The revolution in printing before DTP… soon in documentary form.
- Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity draws marchers from across America – Good to see that there is some sense in American politics!
- Some physics to live by… – “Whether we like it or not, human life is subject to the universal laws of physics.”
- Deliberately uninformed, relentlessly so [a rant] – “Many people in the United States purchase one or fewer books every year. Many of those people have seen every single episode of American Idol. There is clearly a correlation here.” Wholeheartedly agree with this post. Not knowing stuff is fine. Being proud of not knowing stuff? Not so much.
- Twitter Can Predict the Stock Market – “Mao compared the national mood to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. She found that one emotion, calmness, lined up surprisingly well with the rises and falls of the stock market — but three or four days in advance.”
- Ideas are Nothing – Execution is Everything – “How often have you been approached by somebody who has a great idea for an iPhone app, and they will tell you the idea if you just do the programming, and then you will both share in the profits? As an aside, I wonder if this happens to book authors as well.”
- ‘Fractal’ mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot dies aged 85 – Ah, I remember all that time playing with Fractint on my 386SX… And I still don’t really understand the maths.
- Aerial views of New York – Neat pictures of Manhattan (and bits of New Jersey).
- Wallace and Gromit to appear on Christmas stamps – For once: Christmas stamps that I approve of.
- My First Week with the iPhone – I always assumed that a touch device like the iPhone would be pretty much useless for blind users. It’s good to be wrong.
- Protest The Pope – My images from todays “Protest the Pope” march and rally in London.
- Introducing: Yummy 2.5 – New version of Yummy, my iOS Delicious.com client, is now available on the App Store. Now includes iPad support, works better on iOS4 and has experimental pinboard.in support.