Author: Tom Coates

Spotted, Cool T-shirt Slogan: “And Jesus spake unto Burt Bacharach: ‘I am the way to San Jose’.”

Bizarre facts about stair-cases? rebuke.org reveals all. [Courtesy of notsosoft.com]

“An architect guy I met said that when designing stairs, you should always have an odd number, because people tend to take the first stair with their leading foot (in my case, my left), and it balances the body better if the last stair is on the leading foot as well. “

Gallup poll: [via Metafilter]

• As far as you know, does the earth revolve around the sun, or does the sun revolve around the earth?
  “Probing a more universal measure of knowledge, Gallup also asked the following basic science question, which has been used to indicate the level of public knowledge in two European countries in recent years: “As far as you know, does the earth revolve around the sun or does the sun revolve around the earth?” In the new poll, about four out of five Americans (79%) correctly respond that the earth revolves around the sun, while 18% say it is the other way around. These results are comparable to those found in Germany when a similar question was asked there in 1996; in response to that poll, 74% of Germans gave the correct answer, while 16% thought the sun revolved around the earth, and 10% said they didn’t know. When the question was asked in Great Britain that same year, 67% answered correctly, 19% answered incorrectly, and 14% didn’t know.”

• As far as you know, from what country did America gain its independence following the Revolutionary War?
  “When Americans are asked to identify the country from which America gained its independence, 76% correctly name Great Britain. A handful, 2%, think America’s freedom was won from France, 3% mention some other country (including Russia, China, and Mexico, among others named), while 19% are unsure.”

Due to a particularly interesting and apparently “old-fashioned” and “biologically determinist” section in Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine (Chapter 10: ‘An orgasm saved my life’), I’ve been scouring the web for information on evolutionary psychology’s positions on homosexuality. As yet, my aims remain relatively unrewarded, but I have found an astonishing document of an almost staggeringly dubious nature, which may or may not be true: “The Evolutionary Psychology of Human Sex and Gender”. One of the horrors of the Internet is, of course, that there is a lot of information but little way of judging what parts of that information are accurate and based on expertise or authority. I’m going to be pondering this one for a while, I fear.

So it’s nearly 11pm and I get a text message from my flatmates which demands to know what film Nick Nolte and Treat Williams have been in with a room full of monsters (or something like that). So I do a search on IMDB and it says that the only film that they have been in together is: Mulholland Falls. I assume that monsters was supposed to read Mobsters as that’s what the film is about, and predictive text input is always a little buggy. So I send a message back telling them that and get a reply saying that apparently the correct answer was Deep Rising. So I feel let down by the IMDB and suddenly concerned about the kinds of questions that my flatmates ask me long distance on a Tuesday evening.

Awesome new stuff from Apple includes: itunes (free MP3 encoder / ripper / player), omnipotently powerful powermacs and sickeningly gorgeous new powerbooks [design in detail]. Note to self: it is very important that my new job (whatsoever that may be) can provide me with enough money to buy a powerbook.

As Organizine shuts its doors, and everyone asks why, one sole piece of comment comes from its creator: “Mistakes were made”.

I just stumbled upon what I assume to be an old interview with Jason Kottke, in which he is asked Seven Questions – mostly about Weblogging. It must get very frustrating for him to be known for a site that encapsulates only a fraction of his work on the net.

A new article about weblogs, in which I am name-checked (along with blogger, megnut.com, kottke.org, web queeries and medianews.org) illustrates the gulf that lies between journalists and the finished product. While the feature itself says:

[Big Issue Jan 8-14 2001]
“Essential Multimedia: Read my diary”
“To the uninitiated, bloggers can seem narcissistic and slightly geeky, but by putting their lives online they’re probably closer to the DIY utopian dreams of the early internet pioneers than any dotcom ‘cash cow’ can ever be.”

… the pull quote (the part that is larger than the main text and sits in the middle of the article to encourage people to read it), in a piece of impressively ‘missing the point’ editing reads as follows:

“They’re geeky, but they’re close to the DIY dreams of the early internet.”

So my first day back at work after handing in my notice went by fairly smoothly. It kind of feels like everyone is looking at me like I might snap at any moment and douse them in petrol, which couldn’t really be further from the truth. As it is I feel this really strange mixture of horror and delight at my actions.

Because I am leaving, I don’t feel as emotionally involved in the site and the decisions that are made about it. This means that work itself has become quite relaxing. And as the stress fades, the things that I love about the company are becoming clearer to me: the people I work with are almost uniformly great and I love the company’s attitude and outlook. This then triggers the horror – I’ve handed in my notice. Oh my god. But it only lasts a moment. I know that if I stayed I’d be fighting the frustration daily.