If I had to choose the gay men that I consider to be worthy of the 100 Greatest Gay Britons poll that is happening over at Naked Blog, I would probably make sure that the following were among them: EM Forster, Alan Turing, Siegfried Sassoon, Cary Grant, Dirk Bogarde, Morrissey and Neil Bartlett.
Everyone in the UK pays a license fee for their television which means that we can have a high-quality public-sector television broadcaster: the BBC. The BBC also has the most-popular site in Europe. And yet while I’m delighted that it’s there, and don’t begrudge paying the organisation, there have only really been two things that I use them for – BBC News (TV & web) and Fame Academy. Well now there’s a third reason to pay the license fee: BBC Kitten Cam. Tiny kittens, real-time, 24 hours a day (although at night it tends to be completely dark)…
From Richard Stallman’s (creator of the free software movement and the man behind GNU which is itself at least partially behind Linux) website:
I’m a single atheist white man, 49, reputedly intelligent, with unusual interests in politics, science, music and dance. I’d like to meet a woman with varied interests, curious about the world, comfortable expressing her likes and dislikes (I hate struggling to guess), delighting in her ability to fascinate a man and in being loved tenderly, who values joy, truth, beauty and justice more than “success”–so we can share bouts of intense, passionately kind awareness of each other, alternating with tolerant warmth while we’re absorbed in other aspects of life. My 19-year-old child, the Free Software Movement, occupies most of my life, leaving no room for more children, but I still have room to love a sweetheart. I spend a lot of my time traveling to give speeches, often to Europe, Asia and Latin America; it would be nice if you were free to travel with me some of the time.
I’m a master of the pre-packaged culinary treat. You get it in a packet. You put the packet in the oven. You take the packet out of the oven. You have lovely food. It’s that simple! So as I’m sure you can imagine I was horrified to discover that the Lemon Chicken I purchased from Sainsbury’s required a baking sheet. You have to remove the chicken from the packaging, place it on a baking sheet and then add the sauce shortly afterwards. But if there’s a baking sheet, then it counts as cooking. And if it’s cooking food rather than magic oven food – where’s the pleasure?! It’s an invasion. I feel violated. I’m exhausted.
If I was a better geek, this article on XFML at diveintomark.org would be fascinating, illuminating and revelatory. Instead I stare at it in desperation, terror and confusion as the words change and resolve themselves in front of me to read, “Rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb”. This is not the kind of thing I’m supposed to admit in public.
Ok. I can just about buy the idea that you can use soundwaves to cool things down, and that you might be able to assemble a fridge that operated by those principles. I can almost buy the idea that two researchers are using “enormously loud sounds to keep their chiller cabinet cool”. And I’m grudgingly prepared to accept that one might be able to convince people that, “the sounds pumped through the Penn State fridge reach 173 dB, tens of thousands of times more intense than any rock concert”. But you have to start laughing when you read that a fully functioning acoustic fridge has been launched into space. And you’re going to look stunned and giggly when you’re told that “sounds of 165 dB would cause a person’s hair to catch fire from the frictional heating caused by air undergoing such intense compression and expansion”! [BBC News | Thermoacoustic Research at Penn State University]
I’ve added a couple of nice little things to the right-hand menu of the site today. You can now talk to people who live near me and work near me via UpMyStreet Conversations. The site’s progressing quite well – there are more conversations every day and new uses for the software keep emerging. Some people are just asking about areas they are moving to, debating London’s new congestion charges or complaining (at length) about layabout teenagers – but others are using it to answer very specific questions or even just to meet new people. I’d love it if UK webloggers decided to put a link to their local areas on their weblogs – I think that could really make it a useful and interesting place to relate to your local geography… But I guess I’ll just have to wait and see if that takes off…
New today – there’s a huge slab-like rambling tome of an interview with Grant Morrison over at my other major ongoing project (barbelith.com). Here’s a sexy quotable:
“The space in The Invisibles, the idea of reclaiming space is based on Situationist ideas – I’m interested in the idea of re-empowering the imaginative city and making detournements through the architectural spaces; that was a thing my friends and I used to do a lot. And cameras; because obviously they’re the real colonisers of space just now, social space, they’re keeping the homeless out of the multiplex shopping centres, they prevent ‘bad things’ from happening to it, there are more and more of them all the time.”
I know it’s not finished yet and everything, but Technorati still hasn’t figured out that plasticbag.org is a weblog or that plasticbag.org, www.plasticbag.org and plasticbag.org/index.shml are the same page. I just want to have my own little ‘Cosmos’. It doesn’t seem too much to ask..
Here’s a not-particularly-good example of how diseconomies of scale can interfere with the practices of those who would abuse the network and transform it into something it was never supposed to be – a broadcast medium… The BBC News article Computer viruses face slow down (a couple of days old now) talks about how creating bottle-necks in the network can interfere with the spread of computer viruses. A virus is – I suppose I could argue – a weird entity that changes bits of the network into broadcast nodes, eventually bringing it all down as a direct consequence…