• Open Finder folder in Terminal – Ooh, neat. Almost worth upgrading to Lion for this alone. (Warning: not in the least bit true for most people.)
• Losing the HP Way – “In today’s world of MBA-managed companies, R&D is perceived as not being a good use of money.” And HP used to be a great engineering company. Sad.

• Social Media Propaganda Posters – “Be brief! The enemy might be listening in!”
• Norway attacks: Oslo hit by bomb explosion and youths shot at camp – Shocking. Both because it’s Norway and because it’s a city that I’ve spent a lot of time in.

Today the Daily Mail is complaining about a joke that was broadcast on the News Quiz in October last year. (Is it still considered news six months after the event?)

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend reading the article, so, to summarise:

1. Broadcasting a joke that implies, but doesn’t use, a swear word is bad
2. But printing the same joke in a newspaper is okay
3. Broadcasting scantily clad women dancing is bad
4. But printing pictures of the same is okay
5. Putting quotes around a word to indicate disdain is good writing
6. A single complaint represents The Silent Majority
7. Mob rule would be a good thing
8. Potentially causing offence is grounds for severe sanctions
9. (But see bullets two and four for exceptions)
10. Knee-jerk liberals — whatever they are — are a wide-spread problem
11. Knee-jerk tabloids are okay
12. Personal responsibility is good
13. (Unless we have to exercise it ourselves)
14. Your opinion is wrong
15. Mine is right
16. Banning stuff that we don’t like represents freedom
17. Stating things as fact makes them true
18. Black is white
19. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia

I may have veered off target a little at the end but I think that’s pretty close to the core of the article. Did I miss anything?

• Yahoo! Finds! Buyer! For! Doomed! Delicious! – Hopefully good news for Delicious.com.

• Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now! – Despite multiple failures there has been no significant release of radiation.
• Japan Earthquake: before and after – Amazing and shocking.
• Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors – I did think that the coverage suggesting a nuclear disaster was unlikely. This explains why my intuition was (probably) right.

This week I’ve released updates to all three of my iPhone and iPad apps.

Yummy and Yummy Browser, my Delicious.com client, see the release of a big update: version 2.6.0. It includes a completely new bookmark viewing and editing screen, a new bookmark list view, updates to help syncing reliability and lots of smaller tweaks and updates. It’s the biggest gap between any two major releases but I think is a good one.

• Christchurch earthquake – Shocking stuff, made all the more real by the great images.
• Why Last Week’s Solar Storm Was a Dud – “If the plasma’s magnetic field is parallel to the Earth’s, the incoming charged particles are effectively blocked from entering Earth’s magnetosphere. An identical flare with a perpendicular magnetic field would have triggered a much stronger storm.”

• Apple’s Three Laws of Developers – The hidden link from sci-fi books to the App Store. Only funny because it’s true…
• Biting the source that feeds you – “Keller, a journalist of unimpeachable accomplishment and stature, just had to trash a guy whose organization has struck the most powerful blow against official secrecy in a generation, somebody who may yet be jailed for what he did, an eccentric but unquestionably transformational media player.”

• 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.

• Pope adviser calls UK a Third World Country, deploys racism, then says atheists are aggressive – “The Vatican said the cardinal had not intended ‘any kind of slight’, and was referring to the UK’s multicultural society.” Well that’s okay, then. (Not.)
• Why parents can’t do maths today – Article on how they teach arithmetic in British schools. I think the interesting thing is that approaches to both long division and multiplication are now more heuristics than algorithms.