Hey, what's that?

http://www.heywhatsthat.com/

Right now this is a very flaky beta, but it's still a great application. What it does is, takes a location you specify (click on Google maps, or lat and long, or whatever) and works out what you can see from there. However, I think they've missed a serious trick here. Focus seems to be on creating a system which will calculate and display the views from mountaintops - but what this reminds me of most are the coastline sketches you find in pilot books for yachtsmen (and women, no sexism intended). These sort of sketches are really seriously useful if you're down at sea level looking out at unfamiliar coastline... sadly, though, when I tried to get the view from just off Holy Island (the Lindisfarne one), it - well, it struggled. Sea level kinda blows its little mind right now, I guess.

Watch Skyscrapers having a tug of war, and other shininess

Just doing a bit of housekeeping here, posting a few links I sent to myself ages ago but felt too sh1t to sit down and post (been going through a bit of a rough patch lately).

First up is a video from National Geographic, about designing small homes that feel big. Interesting. Inevitably, it's about a house in Tokyo; there are some nice ideas about out perception of space in there, though.

 

Next up: watch skyscrapers duke it out in a tug of war! Virtually, obviously. One of a series of really cool-looking procedural animations by the obviously nom-de-plume'd Brandom Morse.

ABMU the next

ARGH! I just wrote a pretty epic Boring Medical Update which X has lost. Dagnammit. %$&%*$! %*$&%*^^^^^!
I seethe.
So, the short version now, as I am thoroughly pissed off. A lot has happened since October. The anal fissure that seemed to be on the mend persisted, and persisted, and persisted, until EASTER. At that time my colitis was so bad I spent the Easter weekend in bed (at my girlfriend's parents - great impression, huh). So, a change of medication was called for, and I've been on methotrexate, which makes me feel nauseous two days every week, and requires some considerable time off work for getting the necessary blood tests done (every week) and going to get The Jab. Even better, the anal fissure RETURNED after about a month. Even better than that, the skin around what the hospital staff rather charmingly persist in referring to as my 'tail end' has become very swollen and sore. Since there is no sign of an abscess or fistulae, my current theory is that this might be to do with the methotrexate, which can apparently be detected in patients' rectal mucosa (whatever the heck that is), and is also a skin irritant. So I'm thinking, either due to the fissure or my own deliberate attempts to keep my botty relaxed (trying to keep good blood circulation), there might be a small amount of discharge which is getting onto the bumskin and making it go bananas.
The main alternative theory is that it's an infection of some sort, which would suggest infliximab treatment can't start until it's fixed.
Tomorrow I go into hospital for my first infusion of Infliximab, which may or may not work, but sounds rather scary anyway. Right now, though, I feel like I've hit a bit of a low point. Frankly, the bottom soreness eclipses both the anal fissure and the colitis (which is actually Crohn's Disease, according to the latest colonoscopy). I don't know how I will manage when I go back to work on Tuesday, because I just feel so low and feeble. To top it off, I've been back from holidays for a couple of days, the weather is miserable, and half my windows are obscured by scaffolding, making the flat a very dingy and dispiriting place, especially for someone whose sore bottom really means they should just stay at home.
All in all, pretty miserable.

Milkcrate Digest

http://milkcratedigest.com/
Isn't it a relief to know that important, dedicated people are keeping a watchful eye on those things that really matter?

I wonder where they are...

Meanwhile, here is a picture of a sofa. Or an armchair. Or maybe just a chair. Okay, it's a chair.



The brainchild of Miss Lila Jang. I think it's great. Just the thing for a small flat which needs an armchair but which would secretly like a sofa.

Weird fact of the day

Britain's hairiest man is bald on his heid.

The Slow Movement goes, um, planetary

http://www.slowplanet.com/


It started with Slow Food; now those who would make a plea for a slower, more meditative pace of life are going global with their new beta site Slow Planet. The site has four main subdivisions, of which Slow Food is not one; instead, there is Slow Travel, Slow Sport, Slow Work, and (obviously the one I'm most interested in) Slow Design.

I understand the others - but Slow Sport? What? I don't think it really fits. Rushed travel, rushed work, rushed design - I understand why these can be argued against... but rushing around playing sport? Why not? If you prefer yoga, then by all means. But why favour one over the other?

Anyway.

This is from the core77 blog entry on the topic:

They've got some interesting things to say about design, notably a framework of six principles for slow design from their friends at the SlowLab:

1. Reveal: Slow design reveals spaces and experiences in everyday life that are often missed or forgotten, including the materials and processes that can easily be overlooked in an artifacts existence or creation.

2. Expand: Slow design considers the real and potential 'expressions' of artifacts and environments beyond their perceived functionality, physical attributes and lifespans.

3. Reflect: Slowly-designed artifacts and environments induce contemplation
and 'reflective consumption.'


4. Engage: Slow design processes are 'open source' and collaborative, relying on sharing, co-operation and transparency of information so that designs may continue to evolve into the future.
5. Participate: Slow design encourages users to become active participants in the design process, embracing ideas of conviviality and exchange to foster social accountability and enhance communities.

6. Evolve: Slow design recognizes that richer experiences can emerge from the dynamic maturation of artifacts and environments over time. Looking beyond the needs and circumstances of the present day, slow design processes and outcomes become agents of positive change.

Humphrey Lyttelton dies

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7368356.stm
Oh so sad.

The phrase 'a national treasure' is overused, but Radio 4 is the most common accompaniment to my life and I can't think of any voice I welcomed more than his. 'I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue' was/is quintessential Radio 4, and has been a fixture on my radio for as long as I can remember, right back to sitting listening with my family over dinner as a child. To be in the audience was one of my lifelong ambitions. As any Radio 4 aficionado will tell you, no comedy show was ever more lustily cheered, or more fondly remembered - and at the centre of it all, the unchanging institution, was Humph.

It was a long time before I discovered that Humph was more celebrated as a legendary jazz trumpeter than as a merely brilliant comedy presenter, but when I did I was blown away. What a guy.

He will be missed.

What do you want? I don't know

Question: What do you want?

Answer: I don't know.

David Barringer muses on the essential grinding necessity of desire which underpins capitalism. It's a very interesting article in Voice, the AIGA Journal of Design. I don't agree with his last paragraph about a mature economy having transcended the need, though; after all, the Japanese economy has the worst case of novophilia of pretty much anywhere in the world, and that's what drives design there. And besides, I live on a crowded island and I'm not seeing any sign of moderation. I don't think this is geographical, or even linked to anything as concrete as material resources.


Nonetheless, I totally agree with him on one point: we don't know what we want.

Failing that, maybe we need some lessons in how to want.

garfield minus garfield

http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com/
This has been doing the rounds recently - somebody tell me if it's already been posted by someone.

"Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb"



Genius.

A rant on computers and cadence.

WhatIwantedtotalkaboutis

computers

and               their

profoundlyinhumanspeedofuse-it'snotthattheygoinhumanlyfastnecessarily-weexpectourtaskstobecompletedinstantly

but

whathappenswith  all     the             software           I've

everknownisthattheimmediatetasksyou'replacingonthecomputerareonlyonepartofthedemands
placedonthemachinessystems;theantivirussystemthepowermanagementsystemandfranklygodknowswhat
all

conspire to

createtheseburstsofnearinstantperformancecoupledwithstrangelullswhichhavenorelationtowhatI
Imightbedoingorthinking...andasaresultIfeelalternatelyrushedthenfrustratedinaclassic"hurryupandwait"
situation.Thisbleedsoverintomylifegenerally,andIfindmyselffeelingtheinternalpressurewhichseemstobe
referredtoas'paceoflife'-thisinternalpressure(maybethewordI'mlookingforis'stress')spikessuddenlyassoonasacomputerisswitchedon.

(I'm just listening to this program on Radio 4, about pace of life; ironically, I'm simultaneously writing a blog entry. 

It reminded me, though, to write the above, which is something I've been wanting to write about for a while now; the effect heavy computer use has on my perception of pace of life. Which, incidentally, is a very clumsy phrase for the feeling of internal pressure which I, personally, feel when I think of 'pace of life' - a perpetual driving force, an unease I feel when I'm sitting still. 'Pace of life' doesn't quite cut it, somehow; it feels a sufficiently important concept to have its own word. I bet there's a word for it in German, or French.)

Does anyone else feel this? I'd like to make a plea to OS programmers - investigate 'cadence' and please make an effort to make the actions your programs' users experience work at a more human speed. Let's face it, compared to computers we are pretty slow beings, and it seems to me that a truly elegant design would space out the things that people see with activities which the program undertakes, but the user doesn't see - and thus create a computer which works with a steady rhythm and cadence. This may just be my age talking, of course - I've notice even people only a few years younger than me seem to use their computers so much more quickly than I do. On the other hand, they do seem to miss when they try clicking icons, so maybe I just make them feel nervous. Does anyone else feel this, though? This high-stress feeling which coincides with the high-pitch, high-frequency whine of a computer fan? This lack of a human-sized cadence?

Playstation 3 as media centre (bit long, sorry)

Rating:	★★★
Category:	Computers & Electronics
Product Type:	Video Game Systems
Manufacturer:	Sony

A couple of weeks ago (just before the Blu-ray/HD DVD format war was proclaimed to be over), I bought a PS3.

Actually, no, we need to go back a bit further.

Just after Christmas, I splurged on a flatscreen TV. It's not enormous, but it's sufficiently nice that suddenly it showed up all the flaws in my TV signal (of which more in some other rant), and I started to feel the need to buy a DVD player, or something - something that would do this staggeringly expensive bit of kit justice. I looked into building a Home Theater PC (HTPC) - a computer which would run as PVR, DVD player, and home media server - and would have built one, too, but for the fact that someone suggested I look at a Playstation 3 instead. And in my research, it really looked like it ticked all the boxes. The boxes look like this:

Box 1: Play DVDs.
Box 2: Play DivX and Xvid movies which I have, ahem, acquired.
Box 3: Be DLNA compliant so I could use it as a server for my Pinnacle Soundbridge, which is my only way of getting music to my 1974 Tandberg amp. (note to hi-fi buffs - it's an early transistor one, not one of the legendary valve ones)
Box 4: Act as a PVR.
Box 5: Also, it would be nice to be able to get media off it in some way so I could watch movies on my laptop in bed.

I should say at this point, for God's sake please do not tell me what I should have bought. I work in a very geeky office. I have already had that conversation about a zillion times. I have what I have, okay? Move on.

That caveat aside, a PC can obviously do all this stuff and more besides... but it's a hassle to build one, and I struggled to find a box thin enough to fit under my TV (and the ones I did seemed to have their own foibles when it came to putting stuff inside them).

So much for the shopping list - does the PS3 tick all the boxes? Well, no. It hews closely to that venerable motto of the Sony Corporation : "Great hardware, shame about the software".

First off, I did not buy the PS3 to play games on it, so right now I do not own any games. This review is not about the gaming, which I'm sure is wonderful. I bought it as a media centre, and in this respect the PS3 has a number of stupid little flaws which really hobble it. First off, and most importantly in terms of my aforementioned boxes, it is DNLA compliant - but as a client, not a server. So it won't talk to my Soundbridge. So the laptop is still doing duty as the repository of all my meedja, which was kind of what I wanted to avoid. For the same reason, the laptop cannot see whatever media is stored on the PS3's hard drive. So strike Box 5.

There's another box which we can't tick quite yet - the PS3 will Real Soon Now have an extra box which can be attached to it which will turn it into a PVR... but the PlayTV box is still slated to be released 'early 2008'.

So, in terms of network capability it has to be regarded as a bit of a flop. As far as I can tell, the logic behind this lack of functionality lies in a couple of hardware foibles which makes the PS3 unattractive to those with large home networks - in particular, the small amount of RAM in the box (256MB) means that, as a multitasking media server, streaming video to several places at once in someone's mansion somewhere, the PS3 ain't gonna cut it.

Of course, since it's just little ol' me here and I can't watch movies in bed and play games in the lounge at the same time, it'd probably be just fine, but let it pass.

Okay, so it won't serve stuff up to other machines, but it'll play everything, right? Right?

No. Nearly, oh so nearly, but... no. Again, Sony' software engineers have excelled themselves. The PS3 will play DivX stuff unless it is DivX 3.1.1... and even then it is weirdly fussy about aspect ratios. For example, I have all 6 star wars movies that appear to be encoded identically, except for their sizes. 2 out of 6 won't play. In general I estimate that around a third of my entire movie collection will need to be re-encoded.
[EDIT: Firmware 2.20, which was released this week (26/3/08) does seem to have helped, a bit - but I still have a big swathe of movies that won't play.]

Finally, there's one other area where Sony's software engineers have snatched defeat form the jaws of victory, and that is with the front-end software of the PS3, the so-called Cross Media Bar or XMB. This is very pretty, and seems sensibly laid out - but let's say, for the sake of argument, that you attach a USB hard drive to the machine. First off, unless you have all your stuff in the PS3-approved folder structure (that is to say, music in a folder called MUSIC, movies in a folder called MOVIES, and photos in a folder called something which doesn't appear to work) then the standard viewing setup won't see anything at all. What's REALLY irritating is that even if you do rearrange your media to accommodate this little foible, then the PS3 will only look in one level of subfolders. So for example, each album in my classical music collection is kept in a separate folder, and they are all kept in a 'classical' folder inside my music collection. The PS3, bless it's freakish little semiconducting heart, will look as far as 'music\classical\' and no further. So anything in a subfolder of 'classical' - which is pretty much everything - is invisible.

There is a way round this - pressing the green triangle button and selecting the 'view all' option means you can browse the entire folder structure - but really, this is very poor interface design.

Anyway, that's enough of a rant. It works great as a DVD player, though. And I kind of like it, for reasons which are not really clear to me - I mean, the interface is only moderately good, and aesthetically the external design is weirdly unresolved. So I won't be sending it back. But I'm pretty disappointed. I can only live in hope that Sony's software engineers will remedy some of these failings in future firmware updates.

There is still one radical alternative. Sony actually provide official support for those who wish to install Linux on the PS3 and use it as a computer. I could, if all else fails, install Ubuntu or Yellow Dog Linux, and use the PS3 as a media server that way... but I have one question which I have not yet found the answer to, and that is this: Linux and the PS3's native operating system need separate partitions of the internal hard drive. If I put movies etc. on one partition, can the other OS see it? If I put all my stuff on the PS3 side, will a Linux media server be able to find it? I don't know. In any case, turning to Linux to avoid fiddly little OS foibles seems like going from the frying pan into the industrial furnace.

So, I'm putting my faith in Sony's software engineers. Oh dear.

UPDATE 26/5/10: I went out and bought a network storage box int he end - rather a fancy 2-disc RAID thing. And the PS3 is linked via cable to the router. And in general, I keep my movies on the PS3... but nowadays, I never see any video lag.

However, the Playstation has developed an annoying cooling fan noise something like a very quiet hoover. It appears the cooling fan has several set operating speeds, including one which is obviously labelled 'PANIC'. And it runs in that mode most of the time, now. I've even taken the thing apart and replaced the thermal grease on the chips - something I will probably repeat when I find the time, as well as trying to ram a better heat exchanger inside somehow. It's annoying and somewhat distracting. It's quite a common problem, apparently - something below the total Yellow Light of Death failure which many PS3 owners complain of - none-fatal, but annoying.

Land of the Headless

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Science Fiction & Fantasy
Author:	Adam Roberts

Imagine turning over the paper in your Pub Philosophy exam, and seeing the following question:

1. A fundamentalist government may well use severe punishments such as beheading. However, future medical progress may make such punishments less terminal. Discuss.

'Land of the Headless' is Adam Robert's answer. It's also a nice novel following a rather foolish, impetuous man who has his head cut off and then has to deal with becoming part of an underclass in a rather stilted fundamentalist society, but who eventually finds love, escapes, and lives happily ever after. As ever with Mr Roberts, you kind of get the feeling that the plot is almost incidental; but what it lacks in drive, it makes up for in sheer wonder. The characters are typical Roberts creations - stupid, stiff-necked, misunderstood creatures whose paths through life is complicated by their own mistakes, they are all the more human for their so-obvious failings... and that delicious central premise, that beheading is no longer a final judgement but leaves behind a rather embarrassing human residue, is a nice satirical comment on the current rise of fundamentalism in our Age of Technology. I enjoyed it enormously.

All in all, Land of the Headless is not the B-movie gorefest it's title might suggest (sorry Tara), but what they call a 'high-concept' novel - presumably because the plot has been kicked out to leave more room to explore ideas. Another novel which I've been wading through recently also claimed to be 'challenging literary concepts', but Hal Duncan's Vellum is at the other end of the scale. Frankly, I wish I'd paid more attention to that phase about literary concepts when I'd read the blurb on the back, as it might have set some alarm bells ringing. Hal wants his story to transcend time (And maybe space, too); his protagonists are archetypes, replaying the same story in different worlds at different times. Done well - as a series of short stories, perhaps, in a Michael Moorcock style - this could have been an interesting concept. As it is, however, it makes for a choppy read. The scene/story changes happen so quickly it's tiring; flipping between ancient Sumer/twenty first century Bible Belt/the trenches of the Somme/deserted beach hut on the brink of the Apocalypse every paragraph gets dull quickly, and most of the backdrops felt like cliches. That's not to say there aren't some nice set-pieces; but they're not enough. What's worse, the plot doesn't make a great deal of sense - presumably it will be explained in the sequel, but really, I won't be bothering. It was hard enough slogging through the first volume.

Happy birthday Lego!

http://cache.lego.com/2057/anniversary.htm


Best toy ever! I don't think I asked for any toy other than more Lego between the ages of six and twelve. Okay, thirteen.

Downing street petition - Restrict use of 'Engineer' title

 http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Engineer-Status/

Sign! Get everyone in your office to sign, too. Everyone should sign, dammit! Everyone in the world!

It's a long time since anyone mistook me for a car mechanic, but that's probably just because I look too sickly.

Nanohazard Symbol Competition

http://www.etcgroup.org/gallery2/v/nanohazard/
Because it's important, people!

Or at least, fun.

Whatever little competition this is seems to be run by some sort of ecological group... but whoever they are, I don't think much of their graphic design nouse. Their selected finalists are, frankly, rubbish. With the possible exception of the buckyball, although it looks kind of fiddly for putting on small stuff, and is also not very scary.

In a fit of extended, finger-twitching boredom, I trawled through the entire archive (coz that's the sort of sad person I am), and thought these were much better: too bad you can't vote for them any more...





(this one in particular looks to me like something it would be unwise to gargle with)

(yeah, maybe a little too friendly, I dunno).

via Bruce Sterling.

d3o hats

FINALLY available in the UK! Yay!

http://www.snowfusion.co.uk/sc/367/Ribcaps.htm

Somewhere there's a rather alarming video of someone swinging a baseball bat at someone's leg encased in this freaky stuff, d3o. Failing that, though, here's a link to a news story about it:

http://www.skiclub.co.uk/skiclub/news/story.asp?intStoryID=5015

Anyone fancy buying me a hat for Christmas?

(btw, sorry a out the NY Times links in the previous post. I was able to see them for a bit and only after I posted the link did they blank out and do their usual 'subscription only' thing. I forgot.)

Two Cats Mad or just Two Cats Ill?

For months now I've been banging on about a disease which makes you more amenable to cats, and people have been looking at me strangely. Now at last, some proof it really exists.


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/magazine/09_10_catcoat.html?ref=magazine

It's a parasite rather than a disease, and its called Toxoplasma gondii, and it makes you more likely to be eaten by cats. The last line of the article does make it sound like a send-up, but I think he measn, like big ones. Lions and Tigers and other Kenya-based animals (although not giraffes or zebras).


From an (actually much more interesting) article in the NY Times:The Year in Ideas

Moom in concert - Friede auf Erden

Start:	Dec 1, '07 7:30p
End:	Dec 21, '07

It's that time of year again. No snippets to whet your appetite this time round (sorry) - hopefully we might have a snippet or two of us singing when we've done the concert. This term it's Schoenberg, Britten, Poulenc, and some Swiss dude who has a christian name for a surname. They're all kind of tricky, but they're also all very rewarding. "Friede auf Erden" is an archaic German phrase meaning 'Peace on Earth' - unfortunately the first batch of tickets I printed out had a minor typo on them (I missed off the final 'n'), which apparently meant they translated as 'Peace on dirt' instead. Hey ho.

St Pancras

I had a few minutes before my train left (from Kings Cross), so I persuaded Summer Girl to let me scoot around the new refurbished St Pancras station. I only had a few minutes, so I didn't get time to really do it properly, but I just wanted to get some snaps of the refurbishment, which has been hailed as a great success.

Watching the X-factor last night

...for the first time, and (apart from reminding me to buy a Pet Shop Boys album, just for those damn catchy tunes), I couldn't help but be struck by how much Rhydian looks like Arnold Rimmer. Maybe it was just the ridiculous uniform they made the poor boy wear.

ABMU (2)

    (stands for Another Boring Medical Update)

It's been a while since I posted anything, mostly because I've been a bit poorly for the last few weeks. Five weeks, in fact. It started with a fairly normal, if rather severe, colitis attack - stomach cramps, diahrroea, feeling completely washed out. After a fairly prolonged period of liquid poo, I felt so washed out that I decided to take some iron tablets - something which is normally pretty good at perking me up.
However.

Iron supplements do have a tendency to make you constipated - not such a problem, you might think, and even a bit of a relief. This time, though, I found myself in considerable discomfort, which got worse and worse. After a couple of days, I was having to sit quietly for five minutes after going to the loo. After five days, I was in continuous pain from my rear end, and going to the loo was utter torture. A visit to see Kindly Consultant was quickly arranged, and that same day I was able to get a considered medical opinion on my problem, which was that I had an anal fissure.

What had happened was this: my arsehole had endured such a lengthy period of diarrhoea that it had softened somewhat, and the sudden introduction of small, hard things through its little maw was too much. It tore. It was probably only a tiny cut, but blimey it hurt. And it has hurt, ever since. Not only is the area incredibly sensitive, but any scab that forms has to undergo a battery of sh1te twice (three, four, five times) a day, making it very very slow to heal.

I was given some muscle relaxant cream (which goes by the rather charming name of Anoheal) to counteract the natural impluse to clench and cut off the blood flow around the offending area, thus hindering the healing process. In addition, I've found regular hot baths (regular like, every night) and sleeping with the electric blanket on (warmth increases blood flow, improves healing) have helped enormously - as has a big foam ring-shaped cushion, which sits on my office chair at work.

I'm definitely on the mend now - last weekend I discovered I could cross my legs again! Ah, the bliss of simple pleasures. But it will be a few weeks still before I can move freely, and in the meantime I am a very sedentary bunny indeed.

For the record, at the moment I am taking: mercaptopurine, Budenofalk, Alendronic acid. That may all change in a couple of weeks, though - I'll be going into hospital for a sigmoidoscopy, and if the results show a lot of inflammation (hmmm, d'you think that's likely? Maybe?), then the chances are I'll be put onto Infliximab - even stronger magic than 6MP, although the odds aren't great - something around 60% of patients respond to treatment. Hey ho.

Caption me: Sketchy

A couple of interesting links about colour and presentation

Thee have been sitting in my inbox for ages, so it's high time they were posted.

The first, livelgrey.com, is the work of a certain Igor Asselbergs, who as well as working as an illustrator and CEO of a company making digital colour design tools (whatever the heck they are), lectures and writes about colour. It's not that frequently updated, but what he says about the use of colour in design is interesting.

The other one is a bit more fun: infosthetics looks at how information is presented, and the aesthetics at work. 'S good.

It also has, I notice, a post about gapminder, which has to be one of the most fascinated and brilliantly presented look at international economic and social trends ever.

NaNoWriMo revisited: Pan and Titan revisited

I've been thinking about NaNoWriMo again.

I was planning to focus on the story of the first colony on Titan, that I alluded to in Government Joe Must Die - the disastrous settlement which collapsed and resulted in the Howl which haunts the Saturn system in GJMD, and which gave rise to Government Joe itself. But I decided that there probably wasn't enough material there to let me reach the magic 50k word count. So I've been thinking about the other real character from my first NaNo novel: the Bantolith.

The Bantolith in GJMD doesn't talk. He manipulates people like automata, and anyone within the boundaries of his domain can never be sure if their actions are the result of free will or the Bantolith's machinations - so subtle are the AI's directives that it's impossible to tell the two apart. But why does it operate so obliquely? How did it come to be so silent, so unknown?

I'm thinking that the two stories - the birth of Government Joe and the creation of the Bantolith - are maybe not so far apart. Perhaps they were both created by similar events - failing colonies which demanded drastic action. And while Government Joe was created by a terrible act of treachery, the Bantolith's silence might have been some sort of self-sacrifice - a last-ditch attempt to save an ailing colony by assuming near-direct control of the people within it.

So what we have then is an interesting contrast. Two failing colonies, a few decades apart: one damned by the treachery of an out-and-out baddie, the other saved by an unselfish act of deliberate self-mutilation.

When you've tried the best (call for list)

In this life, I have certain fundamental beliefs which I hold to be fundamentally true. They are:

Everyone is born equal and deserves to be treated equally.
Habitat, despite being a furniture shop, sells the best dressings gowns in the world.

Just occasionally, you come across a product offering which is so good that you'd never want to try anything else. I have two: the aforementioned dressing gowns (big fluffly clouds of towelling, just perfect for curling up with a cuppa on the sofa - wonderful) and Body Shop's Men's Shaving Cream (not so much for any skin benefits it offers, but because the razor always rinses perfectly). I firmly believe that these are the best dressing gowns and shaving creams in the world. Everything else, I could be tempted to try different suppliers - I'm not picky about what sort of bread I buy, or what brand of car I drive (I'm currently driving a bus pass). But dressing gowns and shaving cream... nah.

My question is: do you have things which you'd never, ever buy from anyone else? Products which will leave terrible holes in your life when they finally cease production? Caviar, cars, socks, hairnets, waffles, whatever...

Amazing transforming fashion (I mean it. Really. Amazing.)

I did have a couple of interesting blogs lined up today on the subject of colour and information presentation, but they'll have to wait, because core77 flags up this amazing video of the work of Hussein Chalayan. Aren't they just incredible? I've never seen anything like this. Such elegant use of smart fabrics - a field which has been promising so much for so long and yet (so far) delivered so little.

Admittedly, it'll still be a while before these are ready for the high street... but by the look of it, not that long. I've never before seen anything that hinted at the possibility, so to me these look just incredible.

The Customer is Always Right (or, A Comedy of Errors)

I have a confession to make.

At the beginning of the summer, I had cause to book some train tickets for a weekend trip to London. I booked them well in advance, via the website of the train company involved - the estimable but increasingly inaccurately named Great North Eastern Railway. The confirmation page poppeed up, complete with the reference number which I had to take to the station to collect my tickets. I duly printed this out, and thought no more about it - until the day I was due to travel. The timetable was a little tight, so I was going to the station straight from work - but that morning, I got to work and realized I had left the piece of paper (with the reference number) at home. With no time to go back and retrieve it, I worried briefly - but then I realized: all I had to do was log on to the GNER website, call up my account details, and the transaction would be recorded there. I logged on, found my account details, and inspected my list of recent transactions.

It was empty.

Huh?

"Okay," I thought to myself (and bear in mind, this was about three weeks after I'd booked the tickets), "maybe I didn't use the GNER website; maybe I used the trainline website." (For non-UK residents, thetrainline.com is a website devoted to selling train tickets. Hence the name.) So I called up the trainline website, and checked. But no! No recent orders there, either! My order had disappeared!

So I got onto their helpdesk, and received this advice: order more tickets, then apply for a refund on your old ones.

That was it, and in about as many words, too. No 'sorry we can't help', or 'you poor thing, what a terrible position'. In fact, it was more like 'we think you're probably trying it on, so buy some tickets you cheapskate and we'll consider whether to give you your money in our own damned time.' On the face of it, this advice, while irritating, stupid and rude, was not utterly foolish; but what got me steamed up was two particularly personal aspects. First, these tickets are not cheap, and if the refund did not arrive promptly, I was going to go over my overdraft limit and get charged by my bank for the privilege. Second, I had originally booked first class tickets (really, the only way to travel), and first class tickets bought 'on the day' are ruinously expensive, so I would be travelling cattle-class instead. Argh.

Anyway, I had a nice weekend in London, and wrote a rude letter to GNER's customer service explaining the situation and grousing about the abruptness of their support staff.

And waited.

Six weeks later (knowing that by now I was going to get overdraft charges two months in a row, and by a margin which a GNER refund would have cured), I wrote another letter, angrier and (um, much) more sarcastic than the last. I printed out the customer support emails I'd received, and was about to attach them to the latter as proof of abruptness, when I realized I'd actually emailed the support staff the thetrainline.com, not GNER. Oops. So now I was complaining about the rudeness of someone else's support staff.

And then several things happened at once. First, I got a nice letter of apology from GNER, saying they were sorry I'd been dealt with abruptly, and of course they were refunding my tickets, and here were some vouchers to spend on more train tickets. (The value of the vouchers didn't quite cover the overdraft charges, but hey ho).

The other thing that happened was that my girlfriend - who'd been living with me at the time, and doing all her internet stuff on my laptop - checked her email for the first time in several months, and discovered an email from GNER saying 'your tickets have been ordered and are ready to pick up from the station.' I'd accidentally ordered them on her login, and they'd been quietly sitting in her account waiting to be used.

So I'd been complaining to GNER and demanding an apology for a mistake I'd made, and topped it off with griping about someone else's support staff.

Bugger.

Wee planets - a photoset on Flickr

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gadl/sets/72157594279945875/
Also from core77, but even better than the paean to foil, is this. Also includes tips on making your own images. ARen't they gorgeous?

15 awesome uses for aluminum foil - DIY Life

http://www.diylife.com/2007/09/11/15-awesome-uses-for-aluminum-foil/
(via core77, which has a particularly good front three pages right now)

In praise of foil! Yay for aluminum foil. If you can read the comments and keep your temper while all around you are repeating themselves (then you're an Internet Zen Master, my son, as Rudyard Kipling never wrote)... like I said, if you can read the comments without losing it, there are some interesting insights there too. Use a bit of aluminium foil to rejuvenate a stripped thread in a hole in a piece of wood? Who'da guessed?

L'hydroptere

It's not the best photo, but you can see the central hull lifted out of the water.

While I was on holiday, sailing the west coast of France, we stopped one day in a sheltered cove for lunch. As luck would have it, anchored in the same bay was this contrivance - which has its own page on Wikipedia. It's a sailing hydrofoil - a rare beast indeed!

More photos of the holiday here.

A Soviet Poster A Day

http://sovietposter.blogspot.com/
I have a weakness for Soviet design, of almost all varieties, and this site of Alexander Zakharov's is awesome. The space posters are great, but the early constructivist stuff - like this work of genius - are my favourite.

A medical update

Realized today that I haven't really been keeping up the medical half of this journal recently, so y'all are due an update. In fact, the last post was in the middle of May, a hefty few months ago... so, let's see, what's happened since then?

Not much, really. I've been a bit hit-and-miss with the alendronic acid, but that seems okay. My colitis, however, does seem to be slowly gaining on me. After a very successful start with the 6MP, my blood tests over the last six months or so show a gradual increase in ESR (more inflammation, basically), to the point where Generic GP sent me a letter about it. As a result, GP consulted with Kindly Consultant, and I'm taking some very baby 'gastro-resistant' steroids for a bit. So we'll see what happens.

For myself, I just feel... well, pretty tired, basically. Very tired. I'm starting to get some stomach cramps again, too, and my poo is very runny and gaseous. For a while, it burned, too, like I'd spent the last year eating nothing but curry! So the prospects don't look so great right now. However, I take comfort from the fact that my stressful summer of weddings, etc., is now over, and I can relax a bit. It's cheering, too, to know  I'm being watched pretty closely by my NHS guardian angels.

Philosophic Friday

Here's a theory:

Technology is ultimately driven by anti-social tendencies.

I don't mean criminal tendencies - I just mean our reluctance to communicate with other human beings. Now, at a fundamental level, this is self-evidently true, because the inevitable alternative to using technology is to use more manpower (I use the term in a gender non-specific way, obviously). Ever since some guys sitting around a dusty river delta on the southern Mediterranean decided that what the skyline really needed was some really big triangles on it, the way to make things happen is either (a) use lots of people, or (b) invent some clever gizmo that means you need fewer people to do the job. If we were a species who genuinely and wholeheartedly revelled in each others' company, then why bother with technology? Every job would be a big party.


This tendency has become ever more obvious as time goes on. The Walkman, of couse, was perhaps the first technology which made the trend explicit, but it was going on for a long time before that. The invention of writing neatly circumvents all that tedious business of sitting around listening to old geezers sounding off about stuff (what overly-respectful anthropologists call the 'oral tradition'). Transport, in general, is devoted to getting you from where you are (where the people are dull) to where you want to go (where the people sound more interesting). Later on, the trend accelerates: the first web cam was invented because a bunch of geeks couldn't keep a coffee pot full - not in and of itself a technically demanding task, but one which required rather more communication than they were willing to partake in.


Now some might argue that certain technologies have enabled us to communicate over long distances - something which must surely be inherently social. I disagree. I would suggest that these technologies actually allow you to talk to people you already know but who are not within shouting distance, thus saving you from the terrible prospect of having to communicate and get along with strangers who happen to be within earshot. Thus you are mercifully spared the prospect of having to make new friends by being able to communicate with your few old ones wherever they may be. What's more, most of the so-called 'enabling technologies' that we're talking about here are ones which enable you to find and talk to people who share a similar view of life to yourself. That's great for making friends quickly; but it also requires considerably less social skill to talk to someone who basically agrees with you, than someone who doesn't. Someone once said, 'each generation is its own secret society'. Communication technologies seem to have the universal effect of exaggerating the barriers which set each group apart as different, simply by allowing us to indulge our anti-social tendency to ignore those with whom we might have differences.


I'm not saying technology is a universally bad thing. I just think we should be honest about our motivations.

Solar Decathlon hits Washington

Start:	Oct 12, '07
End:	Oct 20, '07

This looks really interesting - in October, the biannual Solar Decathlon competition hits Washington. From across the country - in fact, from across the world - teams of students will be converging on the city to erect houses - houses they have designed, and which run on entirely self-generated electricity. The 'solar' in the title implies that it's all electricity from the sun, but at least one of the entries in 2005 had a hydrogen fuel cell, so I dunno. Anyway, it looks utterly fascinating, and I wish it was coming to a city near me.

My li'l sister got married

My little sister got married at the weekend. Sorry Kev, but this is by far the best photo I have!

Resource: NASA measures up

I should say, this is one for the really hard-core geek - or design professional. I've long struggled to find a good resource with some figures for basic anthropometric data - average heights of people, grip strengths, etc. I finally stumbled on this a few weeks back: it's a NASA standard for man-machine interfaces, with a handy section of 'Human Capabilites'. Of course, it's strongly biased towards the sort of thing that might come in handy when designing spaceships, but it does have a lot of really useful stuff - plus a lot of random stuff about how bodies react to microgravity (they get bunged up noses, apparently - food should therefore be saltier. Remember that).


As a design tool, it has lots of flaws - essentially, it's based on young, fit American males, so using it to design, say, a playpen for toddlers would be a bit silly. Nonetheless, v interesting - in a dry, NASA-speak sort of way.

Black is the new Green (according to Google)

http://www.blackle.com/


It sounds like a wind-up - probably because the logic of it is so beguilingly simply and obvious. Some bright spark (or possibly some much more eco-friendly, less energy-consuming dim spark) at Google has pointed out that powering all those white pixels on Google's front end is more energy-intensive than leaving them all black. Hence, Blackle - Google's search, but in black. Individually, each screen won't save much... but there's an awful lot of people using Google. Cute.

BMW publishes 'The Secret Life of Cars'

Via dezeen:

BMW have just published a report entitled 'The Secret Life of Cars' (download the 3.3MB pdf
here). On one level, it's a long paean to BMW dressed up as research; and there are a few places where some juicy nugget of information has, one suspects, been deleted (I can spot at least one reference to a paragraph no longer there). But there's still some interesting stuff. I especially liked the guy describing how the seating arrangements in British cars varied according to class:


"My American friend sent me a description of where English couples sit in cars. It made me laugh because it's so true. It said with a working class couple the two men sit up front and the women behind. With a middle class couple one couple sit in the front with the man driving and the wife in the passenger seat. And if its an upper class couple the couples mix up so one man drives and the other man's wife sits in the front. Genius."

There are also some interesting observations about who we allow in front of us (small cars let other small cars in, women are more likely to let others in, etc) - although it seemed obvious to me that similar cars are more likely to be polite to each other. After all, the drivers have something in common already.


I do, however, harbour a secret suspicion that every driver quoted is a BMW driver.

Full emotional disclosure - in infomatic form.

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/59770086/

One suspects that Hell might have no fury like a woman reduced to six symbols on a chart.

Like ships in the night (52º23'01''...)

http://platial.com/paiges/map/1535#hopeless_romantic_map
Ah, the romantic notions conjured forth... such sweet little messages!

Tour de France 2007 - Prologue

I had an unscheduled trip to London this weekend, where (as luck would have it) about a zillion other people had also decided to spend their time. Also, as luck would have it, it was the Tour de France. I suspect these two might have been related.

Anyway, I spent a considerable part of Saturday up a tree, with my camera, taking photos of the time trials which preceded the race proper. I'm afraid I got a little trigger-happy - I managed to take something like one hundred and fifty photos before the battery died. This is a selection of the best, from which you can infer the number of photos I shot which consisted entirely of some blurred pavement.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
I'm sure all you star-nuts (yeah I'm thinking of you, charl) will already be aware of this, but I only just found it. It's full of lovely images, and (if I read the jargon correctly), there's a little program which downloads a new one each day and makes it into your PC wallpaper.

A little bit of greetings-card philosophy

I've been rereading Andrew Smith's Moondust - an excellent book for anyone even vaguely interested in the Apollo moonlandings, by the way, when I accidentally misread the phrase " I realise how few people I know who might be described as happy, and how much time I've spent beng unnecessairly less than that myself". I thought it said:

"I realise how few people I know who might be described as happy, and how much time I've spent being unnecessarily less than myself"...

....and I would have gone on thinking that that was what it said, and nodding to myself at the profundity of it, if I hadn't checked the quote in order to post it here. Hah. Still, for some reason, the misquote chimes more deeply with me than the actual one.

Hello random people!

Over the last few months, I've noticed a distinct pick-up in the number of Multiply people who, despite being entirely unrelated (and generally being in some far-distant part of the world) have randomly found their way to my homepage. Hello you random people! Welcome!

Feel free to say hello back... I'm very curious as to how you ended up here.

(I've also noticed there must be a fair few non-Multiply people stopping by, too. Hello to you too! I'm sorry there's no way for you to leave comments - mind you, you're all probably related to me anyway so you can just jolly well use email, or pop over for a cup of tea)

Review: Happy Gilmore

I watched 'Happy Gilmore' at the weekend. It's a gentle comedy about a talentless but fixated hockey player who tries his hand at golf and turns out to be a genius - but stil treats it like an ice hockey match. It's perfectly watchable - Adam Sandler is, well, Adam Sandler, and the acting - what little there is of it - is perfectly passable. The script, similarly, is pretty much okay - par for the course (sorry) when it comes to this sort of comedy genre. Nothing wrong there, either. Sure, it's all a little lightweight, but hey, it's a lightweight movie.


And yet it was bad.

It took me a while to work out why. I mean, the performances are okay, the script is okay, the camera work seems fine - what else is there? And yet I came away unsatisfied. Only much later did I realize - this movie has been irretrievably mauled by its editor. The editing is not merely bad, it is execrable. People turn up in places with no explanation of how they got there, and no buildup to their arrival. The movie takes far too long to build to the showdown, which is then over all too quickly. Somewhere, I feel certain, there is enough footage on some cutting room floor to make good these shortcomings - but for some reason the editors decided to leave in unnecessarily long sequences of Granny Gilmore being terrorized in her old folks' home.


This was a new one on me. Whenever I've seen bad films before, it was because the acting was wooden, or the script dreadful (or the sets, or the continuity, or the effects...). For someone to have edited a film, retained a decent-sounding script, and yet have successfully avoided any dramatic tension or coherence, is not something I've come across before. It was an educational experience. Thanks to Happy Gilmore, I've discovered a whole different way in which a film can fail.

How to Soundproof an Apartment to Muffle Your Wife's Drumming

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2007/06/soundproofing
Um... that's what this article in Wired is about. V interesting. I'd never heard of Green Glue - sounds like cool stuff.

The future is going to be awfully expensive

I really need to start saving. There's not just the constant spiral of property prices in this stupid country - there's the upgrades on the kids' genetics, the kids' education (after all, the UK has the lowest social mobility of anywhere important, so I'll have to shell out for a good school for the little brats), plus any tricky drug treatments I may need in the future (the NHS does a good job, bless it, but it probably won't be able to afford my Alzheimers treatment by the time I get there).


And of course my death inoculation, which is going to need another mortgage.

Gecko-inspired tape sticks to Teflon

http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2007/06/19/gecko-inspired-tape-sticks-to-teflon
Worth it for the first comment alone. Pretty cool anyway.

Floaters

Have you ever had little floaty things move across your vision?

Matt, you really are a complete freak. What is this new medical weirdness?

 

 0

Oh yeah, I've always had these

 

 22

I had this happen to me once, just before my legs melted and I went bald overnight.

 

 2

This happened to me once, but I figured it was all that time staring at rats' asses.

 

 0

...no, not that sort of floater.

I've been having some trouble with my eyes today - feels like some sort of spasm, or clot, or something, which makes the world appear to move as if you're sitting on top of the washing machine during the spin cycle - most unpleasant and not a little alarming, especially when you're operating heavy machinery at the time. Anyway, I did a bit of research, and while I was bumbling around the internet I came across the following, unrelated bit of eye-wrongness trivia:

You may sometimes see small specks or clouds moving in your field of vision. They are called floaters. You can often see them when looking at a plain background, like a blank wall or blue sky. Floaters are actually tiny clumps of gel or cells inside the vitreous, the clear jelly-like fluid that fills the inside of your eye.

Floaters may look like specks, strands, webs or other shapes. Actually, what you are seeing are the shadows of floaters cast on the retina, the light-sensitive part of the eye.

Now, I know some people don't see them, but I know that most people in my family do, and I'd always assumed that most people did and the freaks were those who lacked them. But apparently not. Have you ever come across this? It appears that things can be done about them. Not sure if I consider it sufficient a problem to ask anyone to fix it - after all, I've lived with them for as long as I can remember and they seem harmless. To be honest, I've never regarded them as a problem - in fact, it can be kinda fun chasing these things around your eyeballs. I know, I need to get out more.

I also booked an appointment with the optician, before anyone asks.

Calton Consort Recordings

http://cc.konx.net/caltonconsort.html
Oooo! This is us! Recorded, from the back of the hall, via dubious means. And probably with attendant dubious sound quality, I have no idea. I don't dare listen, frankly.

It's official: the universe has excess time in it

http://jeffdeboer.com/Galleries/CatsandMice/tabid/77/moduleid/433/viewkey/photo/photoid/120/Default.aspx
Otherwise, how do you explain this?


I mean, yeah, it's cool and all - amazing, frankly - but really, one or two pieces would have made the point, yes? Producing thousand of variants starts to look slightly, well, like you need to get out more? That's my humble opinion, anyway.

via my little brother.

The Google Carpet Marker

http://www.robertsollis.com/page/pages/google/google.html
Ah... I've got a feeling this isn't the first time this has been done, but since it's someone at my old alma mater (hah), the Royal College of Art, I kind of have to post it. Plus, it's cute. Although I'm not entirely certain where the tent would be, it doesn't appear that the satellite photos have been updated fast enough - predictable, but still, how cool would that have been?



On a completely unrelated note, why the heck did the designers of my computer keyboard put the quotation marks as a 'Shift +' key? I use them far more than I do, say, #, or [], all of which have their own keys. Dammit people, get a grip.

I've been climbing the walls

I've been doing a bit of DIY, gradually (oh so gradually) doing up the flat so that it no longer looks like a rather tired 1970s DIY magazine centrefold. (What it looks like now, I don't want to speculate on). Just finished this set of shelves last weekend, and I'm pretty pleased with them. I wanted a set of shelves I could climb up - I was bored with having top shelves which I never used because I couldn't be bothered to fetch a ladder - so I designed and built these. On the left, you can see my original computer mockup; and to get the picture on the right, I had some fun with my camera and some very long exposure times.


As long as you never get close enough to see the quality of the build, they look pretty good. Happy with that.

Rizhao - China's solar-powered city

I just love this photo. It's from an inhabitat report on Rizhao, the Chinese city which claims that 99% of the households in the central district use solar water heating, as well as nearly a third of the outlying houses. What everybody does when it's cloudy, I don't know.

I was reminded of this while reading this good-news story about education in Tibet which mentions that solar cookers are apparently extremely popular in Tibet - and the list of benefits has a few unexpected items on it. Apparently, yaks produce more milk if they can drink warm water! How lovely.

Designer//Slash//Model

http://www.designerslashmodel.com/
Oh this is good. "Perfect people create perfect design" - of course! Why didn't I see it before. As core77 puts it, "a sort of mockumentary site that pokes fun at the nauseating glam-o-rama image fest otherwise known as the design scene." V good.

When will Dubai sink?

As yet another stupidly tall building is proposed for this little desert oasis, I'm starting a sweepstake: when will Dubai sink beneath the combined weight of all these buildings?

I'm plumping for 19th July, 2029.

BBC NEWS | Bear robot rescues wounded troops

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6729745.stm
"The Battlefield Extraction Assist Robot (BEAR) can scoop up even the heaviest of casualties and transport them over long distances over rough terrain.

New Scientist magazine reports that the "friendly appearance" of the robot is designed to put the wounded at ease. "

Isn't he cute? How long before someone gives him a gun, do you think? Mental images of a row of cute little teddy bear robots, armed to the teeth, mowing down anything in their path...



Anyway, fans of Dan Simmons will know what I mean when I say this thing looked suspiciously voynix-like to me...

What the World Eats | Photo Essays | TIME

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1626519,00.html
Fifteen families from around the globe show off their weekly food shop. Photographs by Peter Menzel from the book "Hungry Planet". Fascinating.

Sony unveils My First Ecogizmo

Talking of narratives (well, I was), Sony has unveiled a new range of eco-friendly product concepts (check out the 'no photos' sign in the back of this, er, photo). Most popular seems to be the 'Spin 'N Snap' digital camera (it's the one that looks like a slightly flattened video cassette) - stick your fingers in the two holes and give it a twirl to power it up.


Personally, I'm a bit baffled as to why Sony unveiled this range (which is called 'odo'). From a styling point of view they're deeply unprepossessing, and let's face it, since windup radios have been around for a while, these aren't particularly revolutionary in concept. I'm normally a big fan of Sony's industrial design department, who do an excellent job in spite of being hampered at every turn by their bosses' insistence on lumping everything with a proprietary format... but this leaves me totally cold. I mean, what is that viewer thing?

Personally, my feeling is that somebody took their eye off the ball here. IMHO, there are relatively few people that actually need to watch a DVD in the bathroom; basically, it's a prop for your make-believe life where you live in the future. These gadgets do not, it seems to me, have that "just dropped in from 2059" look which is the prerequisite for this sort of gadgetry. They're clunky - even the camera, which is definitely the best of the bunch. They just don't fit into the 'living in the future' story that gadgeteers like to tell themselves. And maybe I'm missing something, but the technology, while admirable, doesn't seem to me to be sufficiently exciting to distract from the clunky design.

On the other hand, this is Japan we're talking about. Where even the trains have cute little ears. So maybe it's just jarring to my Western sensibilities.
A few photos here

Maths and internal narratives - a random thought

I'm sitting at work, doing a bit of maths (something I'm not used to, although I should be), and it occurs to me how the process of doing maths has a very strong, single narrative: A plus B equals C, multiply it by this, divide it by that, integrate it, add a constant, etc., etc... concentrating on one single thing the whole time. And I'm reminded of a story which I've blogged previously (sorry, I'm doing this via email so can't manage links) of a kid in a young offender's institute who was freaked out by discovering he actually had an internal narrative... and I'm wondering this: modern society is very good at chopping up and scattering our attention over wide areas. You could argure that a lot of marketing is aimed at doing exactly this, in order to prevent us from thinking rationally and logically about things and promoting an emotional response (so much easier to manipulate, my dear). So, are we shooting ourselves in the foot? Are we creating an underclass which will never be able to conceive a logical train of thought, because the concept of the single internal narrative is completely alien to them? There have certainly been times in my life when I've struggled to focus on one thing and my attention has been scattered. Are there people for whom life is always like that? Does modern society promote such a state? Personally, I suspect so.

Extreme Personalisation of mobile phones

http://www.janchipchase.com/blog/archives/2007/05/extreme_persona.html


Some professor in Istanbul does crazy stuff to phones. I like the one with the AA batteries.

Genetic telltale identified for Crohns Disease

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6724369.stm
Okay, so Crohn's Disease isn't ulcerative colitis, but the two are pretty close, so this is quite encouraging. I've always felt there was a genetic component, since my Mum has psoriasis and my sister has psoriatical arthritis - and like UC, those are immune system disorders. So it seemed reasonable.

Still, good news.

Congratulations Tom and Ellie!

My little brother got married at the weekend.

Indian billionaire builds urban Tracy Island

http://www.mumbaimirror.com/net/mmpaper.aspx?Page=article§id=15&contentid=20070530022210718d7460de5

...well, that's what it reminded me of.

"According to the plan, the house will rise to a height of 173.12 meters, equivalent to that of a regular 60-storeyed residential building. However, Antilia will have only 27 storeys in all, which means each floor will have a ceiling considerably higher than the current average of nearly three meters."

The first six floors are for parking. It will also have 'refuge floors' spaced throughout it, so that people can temporarily shelter from the enormousness of their dwelling.

Hear me, O gurus of photography

I did a bad thing this week. I spent a lot of money I don't have on a camera: an Olympus E-500 dSLR.



Hear me, all you who are wise in the ways of photography, and please reassure me I did a wise (or at least, not crashingly stupid) thing.

Moom in concert - la figure humaine

Start:	Jun 9, '07 7:30p
End:	Jun 9, '07 8:45p

This year we've sung some pretty challenging stuff, and this gig is no exception. Poulenc's music is, imho, fiercely intellectual and by no means easy listening, and the Tormis stuff is... well, it's in Estonian, okay?

The programme is chosen by our conductor - he always chooses really interesting lineups. I haven't asked him, but the theme I see running thorugh all this stuff is a meditation on humanity, or perhaps humanism (although I'm a bit vague on the precise definition of humanism). Anyway, the Poulenc piece seems very humanist to me, as are the French Chansons (I'm sure that should be Chansons Francais, but what the hell), whereas the madrigals are full of lusty singing about sex (as all madrigals are). Even the Jaanilualud (which means St John's Songs in Estonian) seem to be a mix of religious and profane themes. And of course the Ken Johnstone piece, as the name suggests, is about death, and our relationship with the dead. It's kind of an interesting mix, in an intellectual kind of way.

Some samples here.

Infomatics Hysteria + Royksopp = just amazingly cool

via core77, via Bruce Sterling.

kosmos

http://www.fleischfilm.com/html/kosmos_1024.htm
Okay, this is deeply weird. It's also long (5 mins), and at 50-odd MB takes a while to download - but it has a certain aggressive, hypnotic attraction to it.

Basically, this... person... grew crystals directly onto film, and projected the result. It's odd. People with epilepsy, or a tendency to hear voices in random noise, should probably not try it. For the rest, just make sure the volume on your PC is at fairly low.

The Stake - Burning Issues at Your Disposal

http://stake.quasimondo.com/
I didn't have time to burn Kevin J Anderson's entire portfolio, but it was still very, very satisfying. Just a shame the stats don't feed through to Amazon - 'people who burned this book also burned...'

I found this on worldchanging, via the following, particularly fascinating article - I commend it to you heartily.

Colitis update

There's recently been a lot going on in my medical life, and I realized I should really put in an update, for all those people who really really want to know what it's like to have a long term immune system problem. You weirdos.

First off: a recap. I am currently on mercaptopurine (6MP), an immunosuppressant drug which used to be (but is no longer) used for chemotherapy. I've been on it for, I dunno, maybe six months? In that time, my inflammation has reduced to the point where my blood tests look normal, and my poo has become solid (you have no idea how good that feels). However, I've also completely lost my appetite, and left to my own devices I've become very lazy about feeding myself. I've also had very low energy levels (which not eating probably doesn't help). In general, I've experienced symptoms which look and feel like anaemia - tiredness, dizzyness, etc.

Oh, and 6MP and alcohol don't mix.

So that's the baseline situation, if you like - I've cut back on all my strenuous activities, and by avoiding anything overly active (GF is well trained now, and has pretty much given up on sex after 7pm) I can pretend I'm leading a more-or-less normal life.

However, the last couple of months I've been feeling particularly bad. I suspect this might be due to taking on the task of redecorating the bedroom; the textured wallpaper did come off, but it was a tough and wily opponent, and left me in a weakened state. A couple of stressful weeks didn't allow me to recover, and since then I've been struggling. Case in point: I went away this weekend with some friends to a hostel outside Edinburgh. We were rehearsing some choral music, so nothing particularly strenuous was planned; even so, I had to go to bed at ten o'clock, feeling rough, when they all stayed up and partied 'til 3. That sort of thing really brings home to you how things really are; most of the time, with nobody living with me to compare to, I can bumble along without worrying about it; but when you're living cheek-by-jowl with your peer group for a couple of days like that, it becomes painfully obviously how far off normal you've become. It's upsetting, and slightly embarrassing.

I was all ready to break out the prednisolone and start popping steroids, but having discussed it with Generic GP today, we came to the conclusion that actually, my run-downness has probably been a result of something post-viral rather than a flare-up of my UC, which according to my blood tests seems to be pretty normal. That's heartening; at least I'm suffering from something normal people get, and it doesn't have to be walloped with something potent and chemical.

On top of this, I've just had the results of a bone density scan. Irritable bowel illnesses (Crohns, UC, etc.) reduce the uptake of nutrients, and over a long period of time this can lead to reduced bone density. In my case, it appears that while my hips an joints are normal, my spine has a considerably lower density than normal (two - well, actually nearly three standard deviations). So now I have osteoporosis in my back. Great. Anyway, I've been given some alendronic acid to take. As far as I can work it out, the bone is undergoing a constant process of breaking down and being renewed; this stuff slows down the breaking-down part of the cycle, which kind of gives the building-up part a chance to catch up. Apparently. It's a once-a-week thing, and doesn't sound particularly scary at all, compared to some of the stuff I've been on - but I guess I'll be wary of lifting anything heavy for a while. Great; so now when I avoid helping anyone with heavy equipment, people will think I'm rude and lazy, as well as a malingerer. Hey ho.

In any case, I have another appointment with Kindly Consultant in a couple of weeks (he's a nice man), when we'll really know if the last few days (which have been much better than anything previous) have been an aberration, or whether I'm genuinely coming out from underneath something that normal people get.

It's been a bad day for architecture.

First of all, I discover via inhabitat that Kisho Kurakawa's Capsule Tower is to be demolished. This will make all fans of Transport Tycoon very sad (incidentally, I never realized that Chris Sawyer took so many of the buildings in the game from local landmarks in Glasgow). It makes me a bit sad, too - all of Japan's major architecture institutions have pleaded for a refit rather than demolition, and it seems sad to me that a design which has modularity as its central concept is not being allowed the chance to really put that modularity to the test - after all, so far, none of the capsules has ever been removed. Residents have complained (And with good reason, imho) that the pods are small, and have become increasingly unpleasant to live in; but why not replace a bundle of two or four capsules with a single, larger, more modern living space? All sorts of exciting possibilities suggest themselves.



Money, that's what it boils down to. A new-build can fit more people onto the land, which means more money. Shame.

And then on top of that, BBC's PM programme has just informed me that the current architect in charge of completing Gaudi's famous Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona has warned that it could collapse even before it is finished, thanks to an underground railway which is planned to run under the site. I can't find any confirmation on that, though, not anywhere on the web - so I might be spreading scurrilous lies. I truly hope so.

Cirrus Aviaticus

http://www.astro.ku.dk/%7Eholger/IDA/S/page0092.html

Part of a quite interesting slideshow about plane contrails. I always assumed that the world was too big to really be affected by one li'l plane, but these photos would suggest a different story.

Air

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Science Fiction & Fantasy
Author:	Geoff Ryman

Geoff Ryman is an interesting author; his books are often both deeply sentimental and full of hard-science innovation at the same time. The first book of his I read was The Child Garden, and it pulled at my heartstrings so powerfully that I was both exhiliarated and slightly scared when I saw Air on the shelves. It certainly comes highly recommended though - it won the James Tiptree Jr (no, I don't know either), Arthur C Clarke and Sunburst awards, and was shortlisted for the Nebula. That's not bad.

I'm older now, and I'm rather better at seeing the emotional manipulation coming, but Ryman is still a very powerful author. The story of Air is set in a tiny village in the nation of Karzistan, an utterly poverty-stricken backwater that has basically missed out on the entire internet revolution, and now must prepare itself for the next big informational transformation, when information will free itself from wires and computers and become ubiquitous. Most of Chung Mae's fellow villagers assume this will be like a TV in their heads, where they can watch football and soap operas while they go about their daily lives. When they test the system, however, Chung Mae gets a terrifying view into what might actually be in store for all of them, and struggles to educate her fellow villagers, even as her own personal life starts to unravel...

If that sounds unprepossessing as a story line, then don't worry, there's plenty going on - but this isn't one of those future history books documenting the Great Events of the Future. This is about one woman, one village, living on the brink of change and trying to come to terms with it. It's a great and simple story, with charming characters who became deeply important to me as the tale progressed. Ryman seems to belong to a similar school of thought to authors like Adam Roberts and Charles Stross, who see technology as not necessarily good or evil, but a profoundly powerful agent of change in our attempts to live, to understand the world, and to work out how to be human.

I think I ate a bug.

I had the weirdest
dream last night.

I dreamt we had a
fishtank at work, and that there were some little fish in it which - despite
looking very much like miniature koi carp - were supposedly whitebait (for the uninitiated, whitebait are great to eat whole, deepfried in batter). At
lunchtime me and my boss decided to have sushi, so we each took three of these
little orange 'whitebait' and dared each other to eat it. He chickened out
completely; I let two of mine go, and went to swallow the third... but I
snatched it away from my mouth at the last minute. All I bit down on was a
little fragment of spine at the tail end, which tasted crunchy and
bitter.

I think I may have
swallowed a bug in my sleep.