Quite a few this week, thanks in no small part to my having recently discovered the wonders of RSS feeds of Flickr's tagged photostreams:

• A selection of stunning sunsets.
• One scary cat.
• Some images of the erotic gherkin. (I saw the Gherkin for the first time when I was in London a few weeks ago. It was from some way along the Thames, and it was an overcast day, but I thought it looked amazing – a striking, futuristic piece of work which was no more out of place than any dozen other buildings modern looking out over the river.)
• I couldn't make up my mind which daily dose of imagery I liked best this week, so I picked two contrasting but equally striking images: yellow maple leaf and dark alley.
• I'd have quite liked to see a colour image of .roads by mi4. Not that there's anything wrong with the monochrome version, but I'm curious.
• Ediblity by lorrainemd. Yum!
• Look, a smiling stingray. (But has anyone ever seen one frown?)
• If I'd been travelling on this Virgin train on the south west coast line the other day I think I'd have got off at the next station and waited for the weather to clear up before resuming my journey. Trains aren't supposed to get that close to waves, dammit!
• A couple of shots from 8lettersuk's trip Down Under: the Sydney Harbour Bridge as seen from inside the Opera House (I've never seen a view from inside the Opera House before), and a rather nice view of what appears to be a giant-sized New Zealand-themed Xmas tree decoration.

So, does anyone have a clue what this strange building is for? Other than livening up a dull skyline, that is.

I think everyone's probably linked to it by now, but just in case: this film of cats in zero-G is just priceless. (NB: 1.9MB Quicktime movie.)

[Via Boing Boing]

Keith Richards is playing Captain Jack Sparrow's father. That's either the worst piece of stunt casting in the last decade or a really brilliant idea. (I'm inclined to think it'll be a disaster, but then I didn't think that a film based on a theme park ride would be much fun so what do I know?)

[Via Do You Feel Loved?]

According to Lester Haines of The Register, Russian scientists have come up with an interesting theory about the effects of swearing:

Those readers who like the spoken language liberally peppered with expletives and barrack-room terminology had better clean up their act, a Russian scientist has warned, because excessive swearing causes women to turn into blokes and blokes to lose wood.

The shocking revelation comes courtesy of Gennady Cheurin's team at the Yekaterinburg Centre for Ecological Safety and Survival. Cheurin made the discovery after conducting ground-breaking research into the effect of bad language on water. The theory goes that water can be influenced by "negative vibes", and the team spent several hours hurling abuse at a glass of the stuff. This Devil's liquid was then sprinkled on wheat seeds – of which just 48 per cent subsequently germinated. Seeds favoured with water from natural springs, on the other hand, enjoyed a 93 per cent germination rate. [...]

One for the Annals of Improbable Research, I think.

[Via uk.comp.sys.mac]

The Hierarchy of Blogging. Scarily accurate.

[Image mirrored from Random Acts of Reality, found via linkmachinego]

Jude Law may be the star of Alfie, but he's not the best thing in the film. That would be Susan Sarandon's turn as the older lover who teaches Alfie more than one important lessons. Actually, the film's supporting cast as a whole was pretty good value: Sarandon, Nia Long, Omar Epps, Jane Krakowski, Sienna Miller and Marisa Tomei gave uniformly fine performances which helped throw a harsh light on Alfie Elkins' immaturity and self-centeredness.

It's a thankless task following Michael Caine in one of his signature roles, so Jude Law probably won't get the credit he deserves for this performance. Law displays the sort of charisma here which was sorely lacking in his performance in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and actually manages to make us feel some sympathy for this deeply unlikable man. Jude Law has had a busy year and this may not be the 2004 role for which he's best remembered, but it's a solid effort.

I've just seen a trailer for what looks like being an interesting new BBC documentary series called Space Odyssey.

The trailer isn't up yet at the web site – in fact, the site at the moment is effectively just a placeholder – but the trailer broadcast on BBC2 depicted what appeared to be a modern take on Man Conquers Space, except that instead of showing a prediction of the near future it appeared to be depicting an alternate history showing how the manned space programme might have unfolded if it had maintained the pace set by the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programmes.

Of course, it's possible it'll turn out to be a science-lite tour of the solar system with a few special effects adding men in spacesuits to the various spectacular planetary vistas on view. But let's hope not.

Over at Apophenia, Danah Boyd suggests that RSS feeds, like email, are primarily being used by the older generation: she says it's Instant Messaging and SMS that's got the attention of 'youth,' and the main type of feed they're interested in is their LiveJournal Friends Feed.

I don't doubt that the preference for IM over email exists, or that the preference is reversed on the other side of the age divide. As a fortysomething who's been using email for a dozen years, I have very little use for IM: I have ICQ, AIM and Yahoo! Messenger accounts, but I rarely bother to fire up my IM client. The main reason I prefer email to IM is that I like being able to time-shift my electronic communications. I wonder how long it'll take the generation which is growing up now with SMS and IM to decide that they want the ability to decide when they'll be bothered by incoming messages?

I understand that the generation gap with respect to IM is a real phenomenon, but I'm not at all sure that any of this has much to do with the take-up of news feeds. I'd guess that the reason for the relatively small-scale use on the part of young and old internet users alike is twofold. First of all, other than weblogs (which are still far from a mainstream phenomenon) not that many web sites outside the techie sector offer newsfeeds, and many of those which do are news sites: given that we're always being told that younger people aren't interested in news, isn't it to be expected that they'll have found less reason to use RSS feeds than we older types?

Second, for the most part users still have to go out and find, install and configure yet another application in order to make use of newsfeeds. At the moment only information junkies are particularly aware of the advantages of RSS and Atom: that is, those who (like me) have a horrendously long list of bookmarked sites they'd like to keep up with on a regular basis. As more web browsers integrate RSS/Atom feeds into their bookmarking systems (as OmniWeb and Firefox do, and the next version of Safari will) and online portals routinely start offering to include syndicated content in users' home pages, newsfeeds will become at once more ubiquitous and less visible.

[Via Many-to-Many]

Another fairly quiet week, pictures-wise:

• A rather stark image of the statue of Eros from Lorissa at apparently nothing.
• Malaysia's twin tower looks particularly impressive at night.
• On a grey day like today it's pleasing to contemplate a nice sunset.
• Come to that, as autumn deepens a good flower shot is always welcome.

Rolling Stone has a fun little article by Hunter S Thompson on the US presidential election. According to the Good Doctor, things have come to a pretty pass:

Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like George Bush. Indeed. Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him?

If Nixon were running for president today, he would be seen as a "liberal" candidate, and he would probably win. He was a crook and a bungler, but what the hell? Nixon was a barrel of laughs compared to this gang of thugs from the Halliburton petroleum organization who are running the White House today — and who will be running it this time next year, if we (the once-proud, once-loved and widely respected "American people") don't rise up like wounded warriors and whack those lying petroleum pimps out of the White House on November 2nd.

Nixon hated running for president during football season, but he did it anyway. Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for — but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.

You bet. Richard Nixon would be my Man. He was a crook and a creep and a gin-sot, but on some nights, when he would get hammered and wander around in the streets, he was fun to hang out with. He would wear a silk sweat suit and pull a stocking down over his face so nobody could recognize him. Then we would get in a cab and cruise down to the Watergate Hotel, just for laughs.

[Via Amygdala]

The Guardian set Alexis Petridis a truly terrible task: listen to an entire month's album releases in the space of week, and write an article about the experience:

I worry that I might have completely short-circuited my critical faculties, which, given that I am a rock critic, seems about as disastrous as it can get. Then I play the soundtrack to Shark's Tale, hear Sean Paul and Ziggy Marley's pop-ragga cover of Three Little Birds – a song of almost supernatural ghastliness even in the hands of Bob Marley, let alone his son – and recover my critical faculties in no uncertain terms.

Still, I am worried about breaking my CD player through overuse of the fast-forward button, and equally worried about my mental equilibrium if I just sit here listening to CDs for five days. I decide to make use of my Walkman instead, with October's new releases as a sort of ongoing soundtrack to my life. This at least leads to some intriguing juxtapositions. At one point, I find myself listening to the debut album by furious east London duo Selfish Cunt while following a Nigella Lawson recipe for pan-fried scallops wrapped in bacon. I can't help feeling this isn't the activity Selfish Cunt hoped to soundtrack when they wrote Authority Confrontation and Britain Is Shit.

Neal Stephenson answered questions on Slashdot earlier this week. I wish that now he's finished his trilogy of works set during the scientific and economic revolutions of the eighteenth century someone would pay him to write a collection of essays on … well, pretty much whatever takes his fancy. Or if he must write novels, can his contract please include a penalty clause if the manuscript comes in at more than 250 pages. Perhaps he could tell us more about the Gibson-Sterling-Stephenson feud:

Q4. In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?

Neal:

You don't have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.

The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson's Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle. [...]

And the victor will, in time, face the might of the Stross-MacLeod-Banks Caledonian Collective.

If you found the notion of William Shatner duetting with Joe Jackson on his recent cover of Pulp's Common People was off the wall, you ain't seen nothin' yet. MP3.com interviewed producer Ben Folds:

MP3.com: Who chose to do the song "Common People"?

BF: That was me. I knew we needed to do a cover song. It would just be a glaring omission not to have Bill do his William Shatner impression. That song wasn't a popular song in America, but it has the weight of a big hit. It's not worn-out. I also thought that he would dig the content, because he's someone who has lived on both sides. He grew up pretty working-class.

That was the thing on the record that I just thought had to happen. We even went so far as to call Bill Clinton. Shatner talked to him for a good 10 minutes about it. Clinton was like [adopting a spot-on Clinton accent], "Yeah, I'll probably do it. Just make sure Ben doesn't make me sound like s***." We took so long to get our act together that by the time we got around to it, his people said he was too busy with the elections and his book. I had grand plans for this song.

I'd dearly love to be living in the timeline where that record happened.

[Via Do You Feel Loved?]

Shark Tale was a distinctly underwhelming experience. I haven't seen Pixar's Finding Nemo, so I can't comment on the suggestions that Dreamworks in just ripping off Pixar's work, but Shark Tale fails to hit the target regardless.

First of all, the scriptwriters were apparently so intent upon shoehorning lines from and references to other films for adults (ideally ones starring the actors providing the voices in this film) into the script that they forgot to actually write characters we'd care about. This may have worked in the Shreck films, but it falls flat here. It doesn't help that the film relies so heavily on our recognising that the various character designs are so closely modelled upon the actors playing them. A little of Will Smith in good-hearted-but-dumb-smooth-dude mode goes a long way for me at the best of times, and with such an uninspired script it went even further. Even the CGI work wasn't anything very special, though I'll admit that this is mostly because standards in animated films are so high nowadays: three years ago this animation work would have been considered pretty hot stuff.

I'm struggling to think of a single reason to recommend Shark Tale, at least for adults looking for some light-hearted fun. It might be a good week to check out what's on offer at your friendly local DVD rental store.

This Flash video for Radiohead's Creep is beautifully done. Really first class work.

[Via qwghlmBlog]

How do you get your hair cut whilst in orbit? Very carefully.

[Via Amygdala]

This screenshot of a build of OpenOffice using a proper Aqua interface to display menus makes me very, very happy. It still needs some work to make it more Mac-like (the icons are still too Windows-like) but it's a big step forward.

The Register's review of the Griffin radioShark makes it sound like the solution to a problem that's been bugging me for ages.

I've looked at software-only solutions which can pull down audio streams from stations' web sites, but over a dial-up connection they're just not robust enough to be worth the bother, particularly if I also need to set up an automated dial-up at the appropriate time if I happen not to be at home. Recording from a dedicated FM radio to my hard disk in a choice of iTunes-friendly formats would be much more like it. My sole disappointment is that the radioShark doesn't record to MP3 format, so I couldn't immediately copy the recordings to my Palm's SD card to listen to on the bus to and from work. (But then, I can solve that problem one of two ways: either convert the AIFF/AAC files the radioShark produces to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis format, or else just give in and buy an iPod. Decisions, decisions…)

It's easy to forget just how powerful even small, handheld computers are nowadays: inspired by a drop in the prices of 1GB SD memory cards, Charlie Stross is planning to carry a text-only copy of Wikipedia around with him on his Palm Tungsten T3.

That's 350,000 files, taking up 2.8Gb, which Plucker should compress handily into a single gigabyte so Charlie can have the facts at his fingertips wherever he goes. Nice…