Bad Thing! These American anti-gay-marriage ads are insane. Edit: But good thing! This parody response is wonderful, and has George Takei.
Good Thing! Anton Vowl's Christmas cards for Daily Mail readers are fabulous.
Bad Thing! People think they have the right to know what BBC employees earn. Problem is - apart from privacy concerns and all that - unless they know what other people in the media industry earn, the raw figures for the BBC tell them nothing. It's just another excuse for the Mail to have a go at the BBC. When I worked at the Beeb, you actually earned slightly less than the competitors because of the benefits of working there (job security, status, looks good on CV) and because it's publicly funded, but it would obviously still look like a lot to someone on minimum wage.
Good Thing! That kid who peed on a war memorial got community service. Seems to have had a sensible judge who wasn't going to imprison him just to "send a message".
Also, it's sunny. Hurray!
Things:
- Letterman talking about his blackmailer was pretty funny. And I admire him for it. And I really, really wish people would stop going on about his "affairs" and his "cheating" - have they never heard of open relationships or polyamory? I'm not saying either of these things apply to his relationship with his now-wife, but I'm not assuming they don't, either.
- Interesting how media opinions on the Polanski thing have changed in the last few days. Looks like quite a lot of the industry mouthed off before reading about the facts, or were very out of sync with public opinion, or both. Wonder how many people regret signing that petition now. (IMO, if anyone cares: He was convicted of a crime and fled before sentencing. He should be extradited, and if he thinks there was judicial misconduct, he can ask for a mistrial or appeal, like anyone else. I wouldn't if I were him, mind you, because I doubt he'd get off with a "sex with a minor" charge these days - it was rape, pure and simple. And now he also has to do his time for fleeing.) Good list here of celebrities supporting the extradition. (And jeez, if Kevin Smith is more sensitive to gender and rape issues than you, take a look at yourself. Much as I love him.)
- Less than 24 hours between the first girl-dies-after-cancer-jab story and the information that she actually died of a huge tumour in her chest that could have killed her any time, and yet people are still claiming the vaccine's unsafe, it's a cover-up, it would be irresponsible to have your daughter vaccinated without more testing, and so on. Argh. Hoping Ben Goldacre gets round to ranting about it soon.
- New TV season! Derren Brown's been great. I quite enjoyed the first three new Heroes, though (judging by the number of downloads and the number of pages of TWOP forum comments) the viewership has plummeted. Although it helps that one of the new characters reminds me of a younger Anthony Stewart Head. First Dollhouse ep was very good (as was Epitaph One). I quite enjoyed the first Flashforward, too, and am about to watch the second - I've read the book, so I'm in that weird place of knowing what happens in some storylines, *until they change it*. All a bit Schrodinger. And I've got two Big Bang Theory eps to watch, too, yay.
- Also: Unspeak wonders how to spell I'ma/Imma/Ima. Comes to the same conclusion as I have at work, and is therefore Right. Rats playing miniature musical instruments. May be my new wallpaper. Almost Cththuloid balloon creatures. Escher bunk beds. (Want!) Onomastikon - names from many countries and time periods. RP resource, but fascinating. Best porn I've seen in ages - Beautiful Agony; people film themselves from the neck up while orgasming. (Probably NSFW. Especially if you have speakers.) Salon talks about Polanski. A companion project to FML, My Life Is Average. Strangely heartwarming. Gay teens in Oklahoma. Straightforwardly heart-warming. Carl Sagan talks about the pale blue dot. Awesome.
- And worthy of a line of its own,
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
fjm's book Diana Wynne Jones: The Fantastic Tradition and Children's Literature is out in paperback. I've had the hardback on my wishlist since it came out four years ago, but could never quite justify the £60. £20? Hell yes.
Thanks to all those I've nicked these links off, over the last week or so!
- Write a 1,500 word Nine/Donna story for sudge. I actually have a triptych in mind for this, in different styles, but we'll see.
- Set up my shiny new PS3 that arrived today and have a go at Guitar Hero 5. All Along The Watchtower!
- Finish off the Eisenhorn book that I really need to get back to laerad.
- Do some ironing, I suppose, before my airer actually collapses under the weight of the things on it.
That's not unreasonable, I don't think. Writing first, or I'll never do it.
I'm listening to the Magnetic Fields, who I should obviously have started listening to at least ten years ago. Making up for lost time now.
Some linkage:
Great video about the acceleration of technological change, via
andrewducker.The guy behind the Alan Turing petition writes about his phone call from Gordon Brown.
miss_s_b has been interviewing Nick Clegg, in a Doctor Who t-shirt. Jennie, not Nick.Salon interviews Dennis Baron about how the internet is NOT breaking our brains, any more than the ability to write made us forget how to learn things by heart, as Plato worried about.
And I'm not sure if I need a Rubix-esque dodecahedron with pentagonal faces, but I really want one. Not that I ever mastered the original Rubix cube, so...
So, anyway, linkspam:
I didn't know who Ed McMahon was before he died. Farrah Fawcett reminds me more of a couple of lines of Buffy dialogue than anything else. I was never that into Michael Jackson. The only "celeb" death that's really affected me this week is that of Steven Wells, an ex-NME writer. He died of cancer: this was his last column, a couple of weeks ago, for the Philadelphia Weekly. ( Quote and more links under the cut )
(Vaguely related aside: watching Lauren Laverne presenting Glastonbury makes me want to look out my Kenickie CDs. She's one of my only girlcrushes.)
I've mentioned the Lord of the Rings re-read and discussion on Tor before, but I'll take the opportunity of them starting The Two Towers to plug it again - totally geeky, utterly fantastic conversation. Put aside a day or two and read the whole thing from the start.
If anyone hasn't read
![[info - personal]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cereta's post On Rape And Men yet, please do, especially if you're a man. And read at least the first couple of pages of comments. I've been meaning to link to this and post about it for a while - I might still do a post. But I've been reading through all 17 pages or so of comments, too.On a lighter note, blankets with sleeves! We saw these on the Big Bang Theory, and I looked them up because I Need One. Totally. Sometime before winter.
The Nieman Journalism Lab tells us that the New York Times has data on which words its readers look up in the dictionary. Interesting. And it also has an article about the Guardian's crowdsourcing experiment on the MPs' expenses claims.
An overview of the gay marriage debate, in chart form.
The best optical illusion I've seen in ages, and another illustration of why no, you shouldn't believe the evidence of your own eyes.
HTML Playground seems like a good way of relearning html and CSS by example, in a very web 2.0 stylee.
Jesus And Mo is always entertaining, but I particularly liked the latest one.
I thoroughly commend and recommend this How To Meet A Nerdy Girl post, if only because point #9 made me laugh out loud.
Tip #9: Embrace her collectibles.(Yes, I have
That is not a euphemism for something pervy. It’s just a fact. When you walk into her apartment for the first time and notice a glass cabinet filled with a miniature TARDIS, a sombrero-wearing Giles, a 17-inch Han Solo and a two-foot long replica of the Enterprise NCC-1701-D, do not say, “What the hell is all this stuff?” Instead say, “What the hell? Why don’t you have MORE of this stuff? And may I mail order something for you?”
And finally, in case anyone hasn't seen it yet, Buffy meets Edward from Twilight. With inevitable consequences. One of the best mashup videos I've seen.
Watching The Apprentice and then seeing clips from Prime Minister's Questions, you notice how alike they all are - mendacious, blame-shifting, ambitious, point-scoring, morally bankrupt gits, the lot of them. (Except James.) The fake chortling of the Labourites at Nick Clegg was kind of pathetic.
Good things: Jacqui Smith and Hazel Blears both gone from the Cabinet! If only they'd quit completely, rather than just their Cabinet posts. Wonder if we can get rid of Geoff Hoon and Jim Murphy. For some reason, I still mostly feel mild pity for Gordon Brown - he's a bit tragic now.
Three (three!) great gay stories today - Obama announces July as LGBT Pride Month on the 40th anniversary of Stonewall, New Hampshire legalises gay marriage, and a gay penguin couple adopt a chick. Eee. Penguins! I'm going to Edinburgh Zoo tomorrow, penguin parade! Yay! But I've just realised that the schools will be off for the election, so the zoo will be full of children. Boo.
Ahhh, and an old HIGNFY on Dave with Diane Abbott is thankfully reminding me that some politicians are great. (Also that Michael Buerk saying "gimp mask" is funny.)
- Tory Atlas of the World, from Spitting Image in the '80s, but still funny. Can't remember who I stole that from days ago, sorry! In an '80s politics vein, I'm reading the Yes Minister Diaries just now and they could have been written this year. In fact, they're a bit like The Day Today in that they don't really seem like satire any more.
- I was mildly shocked by this article by Charlotte Allen on CiF the other day - imagine the fuss if an atheist talked about Christians like that - but it's turns out she's just another nutter (or, if I'm feeling charitable, the print equivalent to a shock jock). This article she wrote for the Washington Post is frankly mind-boggling:
So I don't understand why more women don't relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts' content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are...kind of dim.
- There's a great post by lone_lilly explaining privilege here (via miss_s_b)
- And a good article from CiF about the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller, with loads of links, and a bunch of anti-choice crazies in the comments. (Calling them pro-lifers now would be PARTICULARLY ironic.)
- The BBC has pretty pictures of a new kind of cloud that Gavin Pretor-Pinney is trying to get classified
- And Richard Wiseman and the New Scientist are doing an experiment on remote psychic viewing via Twitter, starting tomorrow afternoon. Er, this afternoon. Tuesday. There was a test run on Monday that was pretty interesting and kind of fun, although I can't see how the thing can be seen as remotely* scientific.
- Also, thebookpeople have a clearance website, bananas.co.uk - it's EVEN CHEAPER. Thankfully there's not that much on it, or I would be killed by my book mountain sooner than expected.
*No pun intended, but I must leave it now it's there.
- Dollhouse has been renewed! Utterly unexpected yay! For people who intend watching it when it starts on Sci-Fi in the UK (Tuesday, I think) - stick with it! It starts off....variable, for various reasons, but it does get good. (And I must watch the last two episodes.)
- Eurovision was pretty good - even though I wasn't with my normal Eurovision buddies, there was plenty of texting going on. Can't believe Germany didn't get more points for Dita von Teese and whips.
- I have finished reading The Silmarillion! Hurray! I don't think I'll read it again, but it will make my next re-read of LOTR quite different. (I was inspired to finally finish the damn thing - I'd started about three times before and not got far - by kate_nepveu's LOTR re-read blogging and the subsequent comment conversations on Tor. They're a combination of recap, snark, and deep analysis of the world, language, plot, characterisation, and anything else they care to touch on, and I'd recommend them to everyone.)
- And I've started reading PopCo by Scarlett Thomas, which, while looking like chicklit, is mostly cryptography and maths and codes mixed with hip new corporate design and marketing shenanigans which may or may not be shady in some way. Although it's just taken an unexpected left-turn into homeopathy, which is frustrating, not least because Godel and Turing and Asche and everyone else she's namechecking would slap her silly for believing in it. Guh.
- nextian posted a fantastic quote from Alexander Hume's Of The Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue, and now I have the whole thing downloaded from Gutenberg. Early 1600s linguistics glee!
- Also I ordered prettyshiny Dave McKean postage stamps with Neil Gaiman short stories to go with them. I can't remember the last time I bought stamps. (Oh, er, yes I can - it was another collectors' edition thing, an Eccleston Doctor Who special something-or-other. I don't post things unless there are Freepost envelopes, apparently.)
- Nadine Dorries went nuts about the Telegraph's story on her expenses but only managed to come across as ranty and illiterate, as usual, and actually incriminate herself further, which is impressive.
- Graham Linehan posted a link to the YouTube clip of the dream version of My Lovely Horse, Father Ted's Eurovision song actually by the Divine Comedy, and Neil Gaiman retweeted it. I can just imagine a lot of Gaiman's followers boggling slightly. In other top TV comedy Eurovision moments, have Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson singing Pif Paf Pof on The High Life.
So far, so normal, maybe, but the BBC ran a headline story on the article with the headline What is Hazel Blears Up To?, and the lead story just now is Alan Johnson having popped up to defend Brown to the media. In a somewhat lukewarm fashion, I have to say, and without ruling himself out of a leadership bid.
Ah well. I don't have all that much against Brown personally, and I'm not at all convinced that any of the rest of that mob could do better. The thought of Jacqui Smith, Prime Minister is pretty terrifying. But he's certainly got himself in a bit of a mess at the moment - I reckon if he stays leader till the election, it'll only be because nobody else wants to take charge of the sinking Labour ship, because they see the election as unwinnable.
Still, at least it's not swine flu, eh? One of my friends was meant to be going on his dream trip to see the Mayan ruins in the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, and his tour's just been cancelled. (He's in the US just now, on his way to Australia, also going via Fiji, which is having trouble with its martial government. A fabulous itinerary which all seems to be going a bit wrong, oh dear...) Alas, because I don't have Tweetdeck here, I've missed watching "swine flu" on Twitter, but luckily XKCD has told me about it. Hee.
Pretty much every news story these days just makes me want to know what Ben Goldacre has to say about it. I've just read his Guardian article about swine flu - it's good, if not reassuring if you like certainty in your pundits - and I want to know what he thinks about this face cream that absolutely, positively has been proven to reduce wrinkles. (Apart from "who cares", obviously.)
- Music:Magnetic Fields: Too Drunk To Dream
Second post-mortem finds that Ian Tomlinson died of abdominal bleeding, not a heart attack as the first post-mortem claimed. There would never have been a second post-mortem without the combination of citizen video footage, decent journalism from the Guardian and C4 News in particular, and sustained public outrage. Also, the guy that carried out the first post-mortem has previous form for diagnosing a murder as a heart attack. A police officer has been questioned under caution in a manslaughter investigation, now.
Obama publishes torture memos but guarantees no CIA employees will be prosecuted. I'm not particularly surprised by the latter (and I have mixed feelings about it), but some of the stuff in the memos is just gobsmacking.
As we explained in the Section 2340A Memorandum, "pain and suffering" as used in Section 2340 is best understood as a single concept, not distinct concepts of "pain" as distinguished from "suffering"... The waterboard, which inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever, does not, in our view inflict "severe pain or suffering". Even if one were to parse the statute more finely to treat "suffering" as a distinct concept, the waterboard could not be said to inflict severe sufering. The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering.
Somebody on metafilter called the memos Orwellian, which gets over-used, but in this case? Yeah. I'm impressed Obama has published the memos, and I would hope that it leads to someone in charge getting into some trouble, though I doubt it. Hey, I wonder if the Tories will publish memos on things like Britain's involvement in extraordinary rendition when they get in. Doubt it, somehow.
In both of these cases, I would much rather see investigation into and prosecution of the people in charge, who drew up the operational policies, than the people on the front line who carried out the orders as they interpreted them. The officer who batoned and pushed Tomlinson was by no means the only officer acting with excessive violence that day; in many ways, he was just unlucky. The CIA agents carrying out the torture were also "just following orders". It's not an excuse...but there's certainly more excuse for them than for the people who drafted the policies in the first place.
The other big story of the day was the Pirate Bay founders being jailed and fined. It was just a bit baffling, really. An over-the-top sentence, an over-the-top fine, which I'd be surprised if they could pay. Some news stories say that Swedish courts take the financial situation of the defendents into account before they decide on a fine, so maybe these guys have been making millions in profit on ads, but it seems unlikely - I doubt if you can charge that much for advertising on a file-sharing site; most major advertisers wouldn't touch it. Unless they're huge hypocrites, which is perfectly possible. I expect most file-sharers have ad-blockers, too, which would lower the value of advertising space if the advertisers were smart enough to realise that.
It seems like a verdict to try and "send a message" about the immorality of piracy, but...it's way too late for that. It was too late for that when Napster got shut down, ferchrissakes. (Technically, it was too late for that when we got LPs out of the library and copied them on to tape, or when we traded Amiga games on blank C90 tapes, or taped the Top 40 off the radio.) The music industry - and the TV industry, in a different way - needs to restructure and find new ways of doing things, selling things, making their money - not just flail like mindless whack-a-moles at whatever bits of the internet are currently "the enemy". They're starting to do that with iTunes, last.fm, Spotify, and so on, but then they take their two steps back and try and stick their fingers in the dams again.
Bah. Too depressing. ( Have a dancing kittens video. )
Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.
( Watch the video )
innerbrat has an excellent post about seeing problems in stories, and the best ways to deal with seeing them, or not seeing them. With handy metaphors.Ofcom is getting complaints about Coronation Street because one character in it questioned the truth of Christianity on Easter Sunday. And called God a "supernatural being", apparently. Outrageous!
And my probably final thoughts on #amazonfail - this blog entry from Clay Shirky about people's reaction to it is great. I'm guilty of being involved on Sunday, but I think I stayed on the right side of the mob mentality line - enough for my own comfort, anyway, and I'll be even more careful in future.
Though the #amazonfail event is important for several reasons, I can’t write about it dispassionately, because I was an enthusiastic participant in its use on Sunday. I was wrong, because I believed things that weren’t true. As bad as that was, though, far worse is the retrofitting of alternate rationales to continue to view Amazon with suspicion, rationales that would not have provoked the outrage we felt had they been all we were asked to react to in the first place.
The commenters handily illustrate the point by shouting about the possible inherent bias of the algorithms, and the fact that there's a filtering system in place at all, without admitting that while both of these things are definitely issues that should be addressed, they would not have stirred up anything near the amount of outrage that happened over the weekend. (And in fact didn't - people have known there was filtering in action since February at least, and have always been able to see the metadata Amazon uses, and neither of these things have previously caused more than minor mutterings.)
Basically, amazon.com have deleted the sales rankings from what they're calling "adult" books, which actually means books with any sort of queerness in them. Like, Ellen Degeneres's autobiography has been de-ranked, but Ron Jeremy's hasn't. Classic literature like Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit has been de-ranked, but Chuck Palahniuk (much as I love him, he's definitely "adult") hasn't. A collection of Playboy centrefolds is fine, but a biography of Harvey Milk isn't. Stephen Fry and John Barrowman's autobiographies, Tipping The Velvet, Brokeback Mountain, and Heather Has Two Mommies have all lost their rankings. (You can tell by the title the latter is an "adult" book, can't you?)
Deleting the sales rankings means that the books don't show up in searches, unless you search specifically for them by title. They don't show up when you're browsing, and they never get recommended. It can have a huge effect on a book's sales, and just generally on the visibility of non-heterosexuality.
I can't tell what's happening with amazon.co.uk - the sales ranks seem to have been deleted for some of the books but not all of them, and it doesn't seem to have affected searches yet. Except that would mean that this has always been what you get if you search for "homosexuality" ( which would be bad: )
This is all over twitter and ye olde blogosphere today:
markprobst broke the story here, and there's more from mashable, Daytona Beach News Journal (somewhat randomly, but it's a good article), the LA Times book blog, and Jezebel. There's a compilation of links here and a post compiling information about what's been affected here, both at ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
meta_writer.I do feel slightly sorry for the Amazon CTO on Twitter, he's getting mashed. Tweets with the #amazonfail hashtag are currently running about two a second, and have been for hours - if you're feeling masochistic, you can try and keep up with them on twitterfall. And Amazon's site hits are going to be MASSIVE today, as the entire internets tries to figure out what they've de-ranked and what they haven't - I do hope this doesn't backfire!
(Also, my semagic really isn't working. Hmm.)
Second was the holy-crap-1TB-of-storage-for-how-much Toshiba hard drive I gave in and bought after my computer blue-screened and I realised that yes, I really should back up occasionally. It's very lovely, too. Smaller than my 250GB hard drive, and shinier, and much, much quieter. I'm busy copying about 130GB of assorted downloaded gubbins to it, which could take a while. And I should get back to putting all my music on to the computer, too - I wanted to listen to the Field Mice the other day, and had to actually go and dig out the physical CD. Horrendous. (Actually, I was listening to a TAPE the other day - Victor and Barry comedy. Must find someone who can put that on the computer for me, too, before the tape dies.)
..and I just got SO distracted on youtube. Someone's put up loads of Victor and Barry stuff, though no songs that I can see. V&B are the comedy duo that Alan Cumming was half of in the late '80s, with Forbes Masson. There's a clip of them on Glen Michael's Cartoon Cavalcade, and I wouldn't have claimed to remember the theme tune to that, but as soon as it started - whoa! Flashback! Heh. Also footage from the Scottish part of an ITV telethon which includes a man singing with his head in a washing machine, while they're mildly sarcastic at him. Very odd. And there is a clip of them doing a song about the Edinburgh Festival on the STV website.
I may have had something else in mind to say before I sidetracked myself, there, but if I did, I've completely forgotten it.
2. I don't wear high heels. But if I did? I would totally wear these high heels:
Although I'm not sure what with.
3. The whole concept of using Omegle - talk to a random stranger, live! - terrifies me, and I don't know why.
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I'm playing with collaborative playlists on Spotify, inspired by
bopeepsheep and James Moran - just now I'm listening to a list of cover versions that James started and other people added to. Flaming Lips do Life On Mars! Kirsty McColl does Days! (That's a Spotify link; it won't work if you don't have it. If you don't have it, you totally should. Free music, with just one short ad every 20 minutes or so. It's the new paradigm, man.)I'm going to start my own playlist and solicit contributions and recommendations from you all, but I suspect I'll get more participation if I don't post it in the middle of the night on a Friday.
I've been avoiding actually participating in RaceFail09, but have been occasionally scanning for bits that look like they might be of worth and aren't people-who-are-mostly-on-the-same-side doing their damnedest to make lifelong enemies of each other. There are interesting things, educational things, if you've got the time to put in searching through and analysing everything. There's a thread on Scalzi's Whatever where he explains why he's staying well out of it despite people's efforts to drag him in. The comments are a very interesting and mostly polite (ahh, moderation) meta-discussion about the "imbroglio" - apparently this is the preferred term and people get very annoyed when you use "wank", even when it displays all the signs of wank - and about how to have this kind of discussion, with a sideline into white privilege, too. And
dolphin__girl's great essay Yelling Class has given me hope that people might get something useful from the flamewar in the long run. And the comments about the tone argument on andrewducker's journal have changed my mind about a few things too.There's a good article and comment thread on Watchmen at Pandagon, about what kind of film it is, and why some people insist on judging it as a straightforward superhero film and complaining that these people aren't heroes or role-models. And, of course, the problems relating to when people DO think, eg, Rorschach is a hero. Interesting discussion about unreliable narrators and satire and genre deconstruction, and how many cues should be provided to tell people what kind of a film they're watching.
From Sunday, an astonishingly powerful essay in the Washington Post about parents whose children are killed after they accidentally leave them in a car in hot weather. It's an upsetting and uncomfortable read (I think especially if you have children, naturally), but it's important, I think. There's a good interview with the author here, too, which expands on some points.
And some funny, to make up for that last one: F My Life gives short anecdotes of why people's life sucks, that you can vote on! Hurrah. And the last three days' XKCD have all made me laugh out loud, mostly at the alt.text...
Last night was meant to be roleplaying, but people were late and/ or knackered, so we ate pancakes and played Worms instead. We discovered that with double damage and moon gravity on a Camelot setting, you can kill 12 out of 16 in-play worms in the first turn of the game, simply by setting off a few teeny mines. Well,
laerad can, anyway. Also I don't get nearly as upset when you kill my The Doctor worm as I used to when you killed my Giles worm. Grrr.Tonight I met a friend for coffee at Coffee Republic, where they do a fantastic array of milkshakes made from (or to taste like) chocolate bars. The Bounty one is very nice, and I must go back to try the Chocolate HobNobs one. And the Jaffa Cake one. Ferrero Rocher milkshake sounds a bit odd, though...and they are ridiculously expensive for a drink. But yum.
Random linkage:
- Fry, Brydon and Dee to share hosting duties for I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue
- The National Library of Scotland is trying to track down and categorise UK fanzines from the last 70 years
- David Blunkett, of all people,, warns that Britain is in danger of becoming a surveillance state...
- ..while the Cabinet's former security and intelligence officer said that fighting terrorism will have to involve breaking moral rules about privacy. Sigh.
- Susan Greenfield uses her reputation as a scientist to scaremonger about the internet, and Aric Sigman uses his reputation as a doctor to claim that Facebook could give you cancer.
- Ben Goldacre takes them both on, on Newsnight and the Bad Science blog. Much as I love Paxo, I was mildly irritated by the "Got a child who uses a social networking site like Facebook or Twitter or something?" intro to the Newsnight segment - because none of Newsnight's viewers would have a Facebook or Twitter account themselves, of course!
(Also, I was massively amused when I found this icon, because "nothing is real..." was my signature piece of graffiti on exam desks and so on when I was younger. Such a rebel, me.)
Want. (More about axolotls, and yeah, you can keep them as exotic pets.)
Some links, for I have many.
Hal Duncan talks about Narnia: why Edmund Must Die, but the Story (or the narrativium) undermines the Message. (As always: sweary, longwinded, probably offensive, and utterly awesome.)
What is a deep-fried pizza? In case you're unaware of this, er, delicacy.
80 million tiny images - "a visualization of all the nouns in the English language arranged by semantic meaning."
Neil Gaiman explains why buttons aren't scary. No, really. Not even a little bit freaky. Honestly.
Inauguration via Twitter - a flowing global map of the Twitters about the inauguration, over time.
And if you haven't read it already,
nextian's Whose stories are they? - a personal essay about Judaism. Whatever your religious views, you should read this. It's important, especially for us outspoken atheists who nevertheless try to avoid at least inadvertent offence. Next time you're throwing stones at Christianity, make sure you're not hitting Judaism with rocks instead.- Music:What You Feel - OMWF soundtrack
Rick Warren seemed to make all the right noises, I suppose, although I was too busy muttering about the separation of church and state to really pay attention. Aretha Franklin (and her hat!) - fabulous! I'm sure the classical musicians were too, but I was mildly perplexed by the musical choice of Lord Of The Dance - I hadn't expected the spectre of Michael Flatley to rise up and disturb the proceedings.
Obama's inaugural address (text and video) was sheer brilliance. And his speech-writer is only 27 - I can't decide whether that's depressing or inspiring. It hit so many great spots, while still keeping in all the religion and uber-patriotism that seems to be compulsory. ( Excessive quotation below )
Random Inauguration links:
- Inauguration video from the LA Times, with a Martin Luther King clip predicting a black president within 40 years, clips from the inauguration, and reactions from various people including the Heroes cast who stopped filming to watch.
- The BBC Wordles the inauguration speech. Notable lack of "change", there, actually.
- The new White House site, notably the blog and the technology agenda. "Restore Scientific Integrity to the White House: Restore the basic principle that government decisions should be based on the best-available, scientifically-valid evidence and not on ideological predispositions." I <3 you. Please come and govern here. And bring your "safeguard internet privacy" and "improve science teaching" policies, too.
- CNN's "The Moment" photo blending thingy with Microsoft Photosynth - combines all the photos people have sent in of Obama taking the oath, so you can scroll and drag to see it from any distance and any angle. Technology awe!
- And Anna Pickard at the Guardian reviews the internet reaction to the inauguration.
