January 2011
39 posts
How banks are like nuclear reactors →
Thought provoking article on how safety measures in complex systems often have unintended side effects.
The Last Viridian Note →
Bruce Sterling’s advice on what objects to allow in your life, and what to do with the rest. Skip to “What is sustainability?” if you’re feeling the tldr twitch. Good advice.
Bloody and bruised: the journalist caught in Egypt... →
Intense reporting from a journalist who was slung in the back of a police van with 40 Egyptians. He escaped because one of the other men was the son of one of the countries most prominent dissidents, who somehow managed to track them down and break them out with the help of his ex-wife.
George Osborne promised to match labour party... →
Can’t have been too out of control then. I also like the commitment to continue investing in public services.
“Web developers have tried to compensate for this problem by creating IPv6...”
– FoxNews.com - The Internet Is Nearly Out of IP Addresses
Almost everything in this article is wrong.
Johann Hari: If you were a rich man - GQ Comment -... →
Managing Nerds →
The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast,... →
A wired article from 2009 that explains how Demand Media et al work. A year and a half later, they are ruining search.
“There’s technically nothing wrong with what these articles say, but you...”
– google and taste (22 Jan., 2011, at Interconnected)
Matt Webb effectively summarises why google’s search results are throwing up more dross these days than you’d expect them to.
Wikipedia CLI →
onethingwell:
You can query Wikipedia from the command line using dig. For example, dig +short txt monkey.wp.dg.cx
Awesome.
“In the debate Gove reacted angrily when Burnham quoted an article by his wife,...”
– m.guardian.co.uk
Burnham trolls Gove with a sick burn. The #parliament banter is weak.
Bad Science: Blue Monday? That's just too... →
Blue Monday is not a thing.
“Take a wooden spoon to your sizzling animal pus, breaking it up in the pan. Give...”
– Warren Ellis ยป Experiments In Food: Red Sausage Fusilli
Warren Ellis is writing recipes now.
3 tags
Watch“Progressive Hunter”: Gunman Cites Listening to Glenn Beck and Others as Inspiration for Armed Plot Against ACLU & Tides
This isn’t the first crazy person to go on a shooting spree as a result of right-wing demagogs. Byron Williams was so wound up by Glenn Beck, he drove to SF to kill people at the ACLU and Tides Foundation.
Johann Hari: For sale - Cameron's green... →
The government is privatising Englands forests.
2010 in heavy metal music - Wikipedia, the free... →
Includes a complete list of last year’s metal album releases, which I’m now churning through on spotify. <3 Wikipedia. This makes up for Jimmy’s gurn.
The Dow Piano - CNNMoney.com →
Audio rendition of last year’s Dow Index performance.
New Artists in 2010
The following is supposedly a list of top 10 artists I listened to for the first time last year:
Refused (65)
Saul Williams (47)
The More I See (45)
O.S.I. (33)
Suicide Bid (30)
Dweezil Zappa (29)
Shihad (28)
Orphaned Land (27)
Armageddon (26)
King Prawn (24)
Hmm. I’ve definitely been listening to OSI for quite a while, and many of the others at the bottom I listened to their...
Separated at Birth
Nigel Slater and Merlin Mann. In no particular order.
Is RSS Really Dead? →
John Battelle wrote a short piece on RSS earlier this month which is also worth a read. His thesis is that it’s “professionalizing” as a tool for those who need or want to handle lots of information.
RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried →
I love RSS. While this article is a little knee-jerky it’s a feature of the web more people should know about and use.
