- Blog
-
Geek? Moi?
Is it geeky of me to find this history of ISO paper sizes absolutely gripping? I suppose it is… Here’s an entertaining Slashdot thread on the same topic. Why are geeks so pro-standards? I guess there must be some primitive comfort in their predictability. Dare I say it: standards are a borderline-autistic response to a…
-
Ambiguity in product packaging (part 1)
But where shall I go?
-
One thing at a time
Seth Godin links to Woot, a clever ecommerce site whose USP is the kind of gonzo experiment you can only really do online – one product per day. That’s it. Come midnight it’s history and they’re on to the next one (or earlier if they run out). Neat, but I guess it might become a…
-
The great glass elevator
As usual, the space scientists leave me open-mouthed with wonder. Latest preposterous challenge: getting stuff into space is expensive – rockets and space-suits and beef stroganoff in a tube and all that – so why not forget the big bang and winch your satellite up a long cable ‘anchored’ 100,000 km up there in an…
-
A Burma veteran at Foyles
John Giddings was at Foyles the other day for an evening of poetry and literature from the war in Burma. I took his photograph in the coffee bar – you can’t sit and ignore a man with a row of medals like that! The one on the left is an MBE, by the way. Mr…
-
Anti-corporate sneakers
Business baiting is back in fashion. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a firm believer in hassling corporations mercilessly until they meet their obligations – to societies, communities and economies – but I’d like to see some balance and maybe a less dogmatic appreciation of the benefits of the corporate model too. Sure, if you eat…
-
Porn, AIDS and data
Couple of interesting articles. Lessig in Wired thinks compulsory metatags might protect kids from porn and protect free speech from arbitrary censorship (haven’t I heard something like this before?). Richard Horton‘s fascinating and gloomy survey of the slow effort to develop an AIDS vaccine from the NYRB. Dave Birch, in The Guardian, wonders what happens…
-
Disposable legislation
Like a lot of those harried urban Labour MPs we’ve been hearing from lately, I feel a sort of vague discomfort with the idea of people on horses rushing through the countryside in pursuit of small, quite fluffy mammals – it’s just not very nice is it? Unlike most of those Labour MPs, though, I…
-
“It looks like we have a no-chute, sir”
This is how you test the resilience and optimism (and sanity) of a human being. You ask him to work for 14 years on a space science project, you grant his wish and send his path-breaking probe to gather specks of the solar wind (at a fascinating and mysterious location called Lagrange-1), you successfully return…
-
An elephant
Billie, my four year-old daughter, drew this beautiful elephant. That’s all I’ve got to say about it really… (of course, you can click the small pic for a bigger one).