- Awesome design work on the new Manhattan transport maps… A significant improvement in an interesting balance between the London Underground maps and a street map. Very nice.
- My search for a headshot has now become an attempt to make a decent picture the most ‘interesting’ one on Flickr… Hence I’m linking to it here, hoping that the few extra page views it gets will result in it usurping that bloody thing Kottke linked to a while back. Bastard.
Category: Links
- A planet has been found that’s only 1.5 times the size of earth and appears to have liquid water running on its surface… Wow. That’s pretty amazing. What interests me is twofold. Firstly, obviously, is there life. Secondly, if there isn’t, how easy would it be to introduce some?
- Natalie Downe talks about Oxford Geek Night 2… This was a while back, but I love grassroots events and Nat’s done a really sterling job getting this one together. The next one’s supposed to be in June, I believe…
- Etsy’s Splatgirl creates beautiful little carrying cases for your Moo Cards – both for men and women. Also keyfobs! These are really lovely, and I actually might have to go and buy some.
- The Independent is quoting studies saying that WiFi is dangerous and could result in a whole bunch of cancers and stuff… These studies are highly dubious and have been quite rigorously debunked in certain quarters. This seems to me to be scaremongering to find a story, combined with a little bit of anti-technology angst.
- A fascinating follow-on editorial from The Independent on the whole WiFi gives you cancer scare… Really interested to note the absolute absence of citations of anyone who might conceivably disagree, or any quotations from people who might actually be generically expert in the areas concerned…
- Ian Betteridge dissects the current hysteria around WiFi as a cause of Cancer with significant aplomb… A good read, and a pretty comprehensive evisceration of the Independent’s coverage.
- Modern Life is Rubbish posts on the top UK weblogs by Bloglines subscribers… It’s an interesting list. I’m not sure I buy the figures though. RSS feeds are messy things. Many sites support multiple URLs for the same content. Still interesting.
- The song “Guy Love” from Scrubs is sort of lovely… Thanks to Simon Minor 9th for helping me find this beautiful expression of comfort in the homosocial without getting all anti-gay and stroppy. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, be aware!
- Those lovely chaps at Moo have launched their second product – attractive combo post/greetings cards that you radically personalise… I got a few of these a few days ago as part of their beta-testing programme and they’re pretty lovely. I’ll probably post a snap of them on Flickr if you’re in the area…
- Josh Clark talks about the new ‘People Search’ project Spock that’s currently in a closed beta and relates it to ideas about cross-site identifiers… He proposes that Spock might be a good way to correlate IDs for people across a web of data. It’s a fascinating idea with only one area of anxiety for me – people freak out about the privacy implications of stuff like this. I’ll have to think more about this one.
- TechCrunch talks about the Spock people search engine… Still, it comes right back to me that generally people really don’t like the idea of information about themselves being aggregated against their will, and user generated annotation of individuals seems troublingly susceptible to accusations of libel…
- Bryant is the font that MOO.com use for their logo and headings… It’s really nice. I think they use the alt version with the single looped ‘a’. [Update 18th June, 6.05pm – Thanks to Peter for informing me that they actually use this variant, which now I want even more than ever]
- To compensate for yesterday, here’s where you get to tell me all about my bad traits… This is nohari – the negative of johari. Everyone was frankly far too easy on me yesterday, so now we get to see the dark stuff…
- Kurt Vonnegut has died aged 84… One of my all-time favourite authors, responsi ble for the creation of probably all-time favourite book Slaughterhouse Five, has died. Gutted.
- The Guardian has a rather better obituary for Kurt Vonnegut
- The Johari window allows other people to describe you and matches that with how you describe yourself… This is my Johari window. Choose some words that you think describe me (don’t be too unpleasant, please) and it’ll help me get a better sense of myself. If I take it seriously. Which I hopefully won’t.
- EMI songs are to be sold on iTunes without DRM and at a higher bit rate for a bit extra cash… Now this is a significant step in the right direction and I have to confess a surprise! We’re all agreed that DRM is a clumsy and often inadequate experience, but normally it’s been the rights holders forcing it. Stunning news.