Photographer Hans van der Meer has taken photographs of football matches all over Europe. Not professional matches in modern stadia: instead, he's gone looking for amateur matches in small villages and towns all across the continent. Some very nice photos, even if the Flash-based interface makes it more difficult than it needs to be to point out favourites.

Incidentally, if you view the image of a match in Porto (it's the seventh in the sequence of football-related images), look closely at the player in the foreground: how many legs does he have? (I realise it's actually two players, but where's the other guy's torso?)

[Via kottke.org remaindered links]

Shutting down your computer, part III:

Interestingly, the process to design this same feature in Mac OS X was very different, which probably accounts for the different result as well.

For the record, the Apple approach to shutting your computer is at least somewhat superior to that in Windows: there aren't quite as many options, and those that are presented have the virtue of serving distinct functions. What's interesting isn't so much what the choices are, but how they got to be that way and what that process says about the way the two companies make decisions.

[See here and here for context.]

[Via dan sandler]

I guarantee you won't guess the punchline to this story:

I thought at this point I'd heard every comment possible from strangers interested in my knitting. I was, as Shakespeare wrote in Cymbeline, wrongeddy-wrong-wrong. [...]

[Via Making Light (Particles)]

This Flickr set of USSR posters is an absolute treasure trove: 82 pages of images like this gorgeous science fictional image, Pravda's blank slate, and this image of one of my favourite imaginary buildings.

[Via Table of Malcontents]

I think this airport could do with a few extra runways. Not to mention a small army of air traffic controllers.

[Via kottke.org remaindered links]

If you've seen the new version of Casino Royale, you might want to read this post and see if you spotted the links to another film involving death in Venice.

(For the record, I didn't spot it.)

[Via The Sigla Blog]

Who knew that there were so many different designs of Soviet bus stop?

[Via Global Voices Online]

Hole playing Celebrity Skin at Glastonbury in 1999.

I remember seeing their performance during the BBC's coverage of that weekend; say what you will about Courtney Love, but when she was on form she was damned good value. (See also their performance of Northern Star from the same set.)

Apparently The Artist Currently Known As Prince Harry is opening a nightclub in Las Vegas. Or possibly not.

Relationship advice from an economist:

Dear Economist,

I have been going out with a school friend for nearly a year and I think he's "the one" – but we are heading off to university at opposite ends of the country. Will the relationship survive? Is there anything I can do to keep it going?

Yours sincerely,

Natasha, Co. Durham

Dear Natasha,

I understand your concern, but your future looks bright. A long-distance relationship will always put pressure on both of you, but it's a question of how you use that to your advantage.

Economist Tyler Cowen, a professor at George Mason University, has pointed out that the Alchian-Allen theorem applies to any long-distance relationship. [...]

Follow the link to discover the implications of the Alchian-Allen theorem for Natasha's boyfriend.

A couple of Japan-related items that have been sitting in my bookmarks for a week or two:

• A group of schoolkids from Minami Elementary School in Fuchu City made the world's biggest paper aeroplane: 3.1 metres long and 2.2 metres wide, weighing in at 4kg.
• I was vaguely aware of stories that Jesus had lived out the remainder of his life in Japanese village after that whole crucifixion business, but I'd never looked into the myth until the story came up on MetaFilter. See here, here and here for three very different accounts of the story.

[Paper aeroplane via Japundit, Jesus in Japan via MetaFilter]

As a follow-up to this post about 15 ways to shut down a Windows laptop, it's worth noting this account of the labyrinthine process of designing the Windows Start menu from a former Microsoft engineer which goes some way towards explaining why the Windows Vista Start menu is such a dog's breakfast:

I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years total, from 1994 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2006.

The most frustrating year of those seven was the year I spent working on Windows Vista, which was called Longhorn at the time. I spent a full year working on a feature which should've been designed, implemented and tested in a week. To my happy surprise (where "happy" is the freude in schadenfreude), Joel Spolsky wrote an article about my feature.

[...]

[Here's...] how the design process worked: approximately every 4 weeks, at our weekly meeting, our PM would say, "the shell team disagrees with how this looks/feels/works" and/or "the kernel team has decided to include/not include some functionality which lets us/prevents us from doing this particular thing". And then in our weekly meeting we'd spent approximately 90 minutes discussing how our feature — er, menu — should look based on this "new" information. Then at our next weekly meeting we'd spend another 90 minutes arguing about the design, then at the next weekly meeting we'd do the same, and at the next weekly meeting we'd agree on something… just in time to get some other missing piece of information from the shell or kernel team, and start the whole process again.

Or, to put it another way, Microsoft in 2006 has become the IBM of 1990.

[Via Joel on Software]

Good news: BBC2 have bought the free-to-air UK rights to Heroes.

I just hope BBC2 have the sense to give the show a reasonable time slot (i.e. 9.30pm or 10pm, not 6.45pm) and time to establish itself and gain an audience. They don't have to give it Torchwood levels of hype, but some promotion would be nice.

[Via feeling listless]

Over at Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Novels, a little switch of genre as they bring us summaries of 40 Nebula Award winning novels in haiku format:

1965 – Dune
Don't drink the water
You find on desert planets
It will make you God.

[...]

1973 – Rendezvous With Rama
What is this huge thing?
Alien passing by Earth?
You don't get to know.

[...]

1985 – Ender's Game
Outcast kid genius
Though unpopular, saves Earth
Guess why geeks love this.

1986 – Speaker for the Dead
Gosh Ender's Game rocked.
And wow! Now there's a sequel!
Hey, wait a minute…

[...]

This excerpt from Simon Winder's The Man Who Saved Britain reminds us just how different British notions of glamour were back when we were first introduced to agent 007:

Casino Royale is a book all about privilege, but privilege of a very marginal and almost grimy kind, and it shows the reality of British life with startlingly greater clarity than the Coronation. The action is entirely based in and around the dull, failing Normandy coastal town of Royale – a sort of hopeless Deauville. One can imagine that French casinos circa 1950 had been through rather a lot – the previous decade having seen a "mixed crowd" at the tables. The nature of Bond's privilege is to be at Royale at all. Currency and travel restrictions meant that the Channel, the barrier essential in 1940 to keeping the Germans out, was now quite actively penning non-military British people in. The very wealthy, or those with friends in France, could make arrangements to get round the restrictions (which stayed in place in various ways until the 1970s – yet another example of how strange the recent past was), but for virtually everyone France, even blustery, sour northern France, had become as exotic as Shangri-La. Fleming could not have chosen his location more cleverly: he would need to ratchet up the flow of exotica with each of the later books (until by the end Bond is mucking around with Japanese lobster eaten live as it crawls around his table), but Britain's frame of reference had shrunk so small by the early fifties that Royale was quite enough.

[Via Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal]

Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen invited Helsinki residents to air their pet peeves and set the results to music.

Helsinki was the artists' second take on the concept. They did it first in Birmingham, but for me somehow that ensemble didn't work as well. Partly it's that hearing the complaints sung in a language I can understand drives home how mundane they are, whereas with the Finnish version I can appreciate the sound of the voices first and foremost. But I think the major factor is that the Birmingham choir is so much smaller. My experience of choral ensembles is extremely limited, but it seems that there's something about a sea of people singing together that appeals to me. (See also the Scala Choir & the Kolacny Brothers, though in that case their choice of material is also a factor.)

(Also, the Helsinki video has a really nice joke about ringtones…)

[Helsinki Complaints Choir via Neil Gaiman]

A striking cover for Richard Layard's Happiness. Simple, but very effective.

Someone alert John Edward Hollister Montagu: McDonalds have applied to patent the "method and apparatus for making a sandwich".

(In fairness to McDonalds, they appear to be patenting their carefully-planned method of making sandwiches quickly by simultaneously preparing the various components, rather than claiming the right to the concept of the sandwich as such. Presumably it's the likes of KFC and Burger King who should be worried.)

[Via Louise Ferguson, posting to the ORG-discuss mailing list]

Joel Spolsky on the madness that is 15 ways to shut down your laptop under Windows Vista:

Every time you want to leave your computer, you have to choose between nine, count them, nine options: two icons and seven menu items. The two icons, I think, are shortcuts to menu items. I'm guessing the lock icon does the same thing as the lock menu item, but I'm not sure which menu item the on/off icon corresponds to.

On many laptops, there are also four FN+Key combinations to power off, hibernate, sleep, etc. That brings us up to 13 choices, and, oh, yeah, there's an on-off button, 14, and you can close the lid, 15. A total of fifteen different ways to shut down a laptop that you're expected to choose from.

The more choices you give people, the harder it is for them to choose, and the unhappier they'll feel. [...]

You may or may not agree with the suggestions he goes on to make for simplifying the process, but the general point is well made.

What with 007 being on everyone's mind this week, it seems appropriate to link to a behind the scenes video of a famous Bond stunt of yesteryear: the crocodile jumping scene from Live and Let Die.

That's one stunt double who definitely earned his money. (Don't watch the first take and assume you've seen all you need to see: the third and fourth takes are well worth a look.)

[Via rc3.org: Of Interest]