Skip to main contentTag: Politics
- 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.”
- The origins of abc – “We will begin where civilisation began, meander through the Middle Ages, race through the Renaissance, and in doing so discover where our alphabet originated, how and why it evolved, and why, for example, an A looks, well, like an A.”
- Icelander’s Campaign Is a Joke, Until He’s Elected – This is brilliant. “A polar bear display for the zoo. Free towels at public swimming pools. A “drug-free Parliament by 2020.” Iceland’s Best Party, founded in December by a comedian, Jon Gnarr, to satirize his country’s political system, ran a campaign that was one big joke. Or was it?”
- No sense of humour at all – “Personally, I’d love to see the Pope in a debate on abortion, where he would actually have to address difficult questions and defend his own ideas. Best idea yet would be a debate on various controversial topics, like birth control, abortion, the role of women in the church, and homosexuality…with the Pope on one side, and Stephen Fry on the other. It could be perfectly respectful, and it would be hilarious.”
- Audio slideshow: Hubble’s first 20 years – Amazing. Beautiful.
- Do liberals read only liberal blogs? – The dangers of the “long tail…” I deliberately go read Daily Mail headlines on a regular basis just to check that I’m sane. The moment I start to agree, please shoot me.
- Google Android Personal Thoughts – “Uniformity is not a word you’ll find in Android’s dictionary. How about the fact that the application icons aren’t the same size. Uh, why? Since there’s no transparent padding around the icons … there’s no uniformity in the touch areas when you go to tap on an icon.” These things probably don’t seem important to Google but the attention to detail is what makes the iPhone (usually) a pleasure to use. I’ve not used an Android handset but these things would bug me pretty quickly.
- Japanese Photographer Bends Electricity to His Will – Beautiful.
- The Cost of Care – Nice graphic showing the relationship between the cost of healthcare and life-expectancy.
- exactly – “What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?” Looks like we’re not going to find out because of a few hold-outs…
- A Typeface for the Underground – Design and typography on the London Underground. Fascinating stuff.
- Britain to Levy a One-Time Tax on Banker Bonuses – “To a large extent the levy underpins a quite broad understanding here — even among those generally sympathetic to the industry — that bank profits this year were largely subsidized by the government due to historically low interest rates.” The best discussion I’ve seen of today’s pre-Budget speech is, bizarrely, in a US paper.
- News Corp to Offer Plaid Stamps! – “Giving Murdoch the benefit of the doubt, then, I’m guessing he simply doesn’t mean what he said. Perhaps he just wanted to sow a little confusion, get some publicity and maybe a concession or two from Google.”
- The night the Berlin Wall fell – “For me it was that rare occasion when a story was unqualified good news. After years watching the way communism was practised, I felt no need to mourn its collapse. Whatever came next had to be better.” Twenty years since the fall of the Berlin wall.
- OMG Ponies!!! (Aka Humanity: Epic Fail) – “The real world has failed us. It has concentrated on local simplicity, leading to global complexity. It’s easy to organise a meeting if everyone is in the same time zone – but once you get different continents involved, invariably people get confused. It’s easy to get writing to work uniformly left to right or uniformly right to left – but if you’ve got a mixture, it becomes really hard to keep track of. The diversity which makes humanity such an interesting species is the curse of computing.”