plasticbag.org

A new version of Blogger is to be revealed tonight. Will all present please report back to the interhighweb immediately afterwards. I thank you.

A usability question relating to Opine Bovine – the links to various other parts of the site are by way of buttons that look like form elements. I did the same thing with Cal on Morning After TV. There’s something strange about them. I can’t bring myself to click on them, because they look like submit buttons and part of me is convinced that if I click on them I will in fact be submitting some kind of form. Submit buttons also being generally contentless items, my eyes seem to slip over them on the page – as if they only have a meaning in context. It feels like someone started writing interesting little titbits in the bit at the top of the book page where it normally says what chapter or book you’re reading. And they did it half way through the book. Just to confuse you.

This is me, by Georg Bush, “This is my flag. My name is georg bush and I am presidant of america. This is a pitur of me. I get to wear a tie evry day. This is my favourit gun….”

According to a card posted in my local newsagent’s window, Andrew McCarthy has now taken up a new career doing high pressure cleaning with jets of water. Good luck to you, old chap.

I’m not going to comment on this piece except to say that I’m horrified. Here’s a quote from the it:

“The US came out of [World War Two] with a deep distrust of European wisdom and European advice. No matter how much older and wiser they claimed to be, they hadn’t managed to do what we had ourselves: unite a huge area under a single government and live without war. We fought our Civil War, but that was 140 years ago and we’ve mastered living together ever since. And it took our meddling and our military occupation†to make them live together without war.”

It’s very funny. I think. Or it’s really mean. And gross. Or funny. Or gross. I can’t decide.

Today I got the coolest e-mail from Douglas Rushkoff. Douglas Rushkoff is cool. I like Douglas Rushkoff. Douglas Rushkoff smokes. I want to make Douglas Rushkoff a new website. I bet other people would help.

Every time I apply for a job at the BBC, I think it will take an hour to fill in the horrible online application form, and it always takes me nearly four. And then even though I get lots of interviews, I never get the bloody jobs.

From a typo made in an AIM message with Matt Jones that mispelled ‘quantum’ as ‘quantuum’ we came up with a concept called the ‘quantinuum’ – a contraction of quantum and continuum. I thought up a definition on the spot for a laugh, “a continuum of uncollapsed possibility”. So then I did a search on Google, only to discover that it’s a word mentioned in several places on the web already – particularly in an article called Holic Principle and the relations between Physics data. As a super-intelligent Austin Powers might say, “Quantum topological invariance, baby!”

Is it the end of the line for Black Holes?

• New Theories Dispute the Existence of Black Holes