Fractal Gary Busey: the stuff of nightmares.

Tim Bray, On Toast:

It's important. If I had to list things that differentiate us from Neolithic club-wielders or fundamentalist Scripture-wielders or videospud remote-wielders, good hot morning toast would be right up there. It seems simple and it is, but not easy. [...]

Things My Beard Can Lift:

For weeks, I've been grooming, conditioning, stretching, and toning, and now my beard's finally become the talk of the town. But it needed purpose, direction – a mission – and now it's got one: lifting heavy objects. Heavy objects and the human spirit.

What kinds of objects? All kinds of objects. I've warmed up with birdhouses, lamps, and plastic plants. I've trained with globes and framed pictures of Tom Selleck. But from here on out, it's up to you: please click here to donate to Chicago's Off the Street Club. Every Wednesday, I'll announce the total amount donated, every Thursday you'll make your suggestions, and every Friday, my beard will lift one pound for every hundred dollars raised.

He's a braver man than I.¹

[Via MetaFilter]

1. I'm guessing that his hair follicles will give up the ghost before his hair itself breaks under the strain. Either way, it's going to smart. ↩

BREATHTAKING: the pseudo-scientific 'reasoning' behind the new Pepsi logo.¹

Talk about retrospectively coming up with a line of reasoning to explain why the new logo you've designed is a good fit with your client's brand.²

[Via GromBlog]

1. NB: link points to 6.1MB PDF document. ↩
2. And yes, I do get that this document may well be a neat bit of viral marketing. That doesn't make the arguments contained therein one iota less batshit insane. ↩

Opening Times takes your UK postcode or town name and tells you the times local shops are open. In my neck of the woods this amounts to listing the opening hours for local branches of some¹ national supermarket chains, but perhaps that's a just a feature of my locale retail landscape.

It would be good if the site covered more stores, though I appreciate that this is a really difficult problem given that it's probably really difficult to gather all that information; when I was looking at various retailers' web sites over Xmas trying to work out when they'd be open over the holiday season I found wide variations between chains, with some giving detailed opening hours for every branch and others not listing any variations on their normal opening hours. I think this is the sort of site that is better done locally, perhaps with information collated and published by a local council or newspaper or chamber of commerce.

I'll be interested to see how the site deals with public holidays; I don't have trouble remembering what time the various nearby supermarkets are open on weekdays and weekends, but I nearly always manage to misremember which ones are open at any given point over a Bank Holiday weekend. If come Easter weekend Opening Times tells me correct opening hours for the local Tesco and Morrisons supermarkets then it'll be somewhat useful.²

[Via Kevan Davis]

1. Not all – for example, there's a Co-op supermarket in North Shields town centre that it doesn't pick up. ↩
2. In fairness, the site's creator mentions that he's aware of the issue of variations in opening hours. Whether he can get the requisite information to update the site in plenty of time is a whole different question. ↩

The Pedreres de s'Hostal on Minorca is a disused stone quarry that is gradually being turned into a heritage park:

In actuality, not only has the quarry been turned into an outdoor history museum decorated with artifacts, it's been landscaped as an arboretum showcasing native Minorcan flora. In keeping with the stonecutters' tradition of cultivating orchards and vegetable gardens in disused quarries, each excavated spaces plays host to a different plant community. For instance, there is a quarry for fruit trees, another for bushes and shrubs and another containing cultivated olive trees and aromatic plants. In one quarry, there is a pond containing freshwater Minorcan plants.

Go and see the photographs; it's a remarkable site sight.

"At times, real life is more like what happens in novels than you might think."

It is a plot of which Jorge Luis Borges would have been proud: some of the best military and juridical minds in Italy are wrestling with the problem of how to dispose of the unwelcome legacy of tens – perhaps hundreds – of thousands of soldiers who never existed. [...]

The International Space Station in the Moon.

James Nicoll has a very twisted mind:

[I assume that...] Somewhere in the Gojira-verse is a Ahab-like Japanese chef who pursues the atomic monster for the express purpose of serving its flesh in his restaurant.

The Big Picture has published a spectacular set of photos of last year's visit to Liverpool by La Princesse.

Apparently we're in the middle of a Ferris wheel arms race:

There's an international battle going on. The prize is height, width, rotation. Its weapons are not guns, nor tanks, nor arrows. The weapons of this battle are wheels. Ferris wheels. This year, Germany will unveil the Great Berlin Wheel. Upon its completion, the wheel will be 606 feet high — as high as two football fields are long, as high as three Niagara Falls. It will be taller than what's currently the tallest Ferris wheel in the world, the Singapore Flyer, a soon-to-be-disappointing 541 feet high. This year, China also plans to unveil the Beijing Great Wheel. At an awesome 682 feet high, it will be taller than both the Great Berlin Wheel and the Singapore Flyer (which only debuted as the world's tallest Ferris wheel last year).

China has, in fact, built wheels in six cities since the start of the new millennium. The Great Dubai Wheel, at 607 feet, is set to enthrall visitors to Dubailand some time in 2009. There's the Great Orlando Wheel in Florida (400 feet), and Australia's four-story-high Southern Star, which just opened last month. There are whispers that a Great Wheel might hit Mumbai, though no one can say when. Or how tall. [...]

Kate Micucci: Dear Deer.

So cute.

[Via orbyn@tumblr]

IBM is offering American-based staff an alternative to being laid off: moving to another country and working for IBM there instead:

Big Blue is offering its outgoing workers in the United States and Canada a chance to take an IBM job in India, Nigeria, Russia or other countries.

Through a program dubbed Project Match, IBM will help interested workers whose jobs are on the chopping block to identify potential opportunities in growth markets and facilitate consideration by hiring managers in those markets, according to an internal company document obtained by CNN.

The company also will help with moving costs and provide visa assistance, it says.

Other countries with IBM opportunities include Argentina, Brazil, China, Czech Republic, Hungary, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Turkey, and United Arab Emirates, according to the document.

Only satisfactory performers who are willing to work on local terms and conditions should pursue the jobs, the document says. IBM would not immediately confirm if it means that the workers would be paid local wages and would be subject to local labor laws. [Emphasis added]

IBM may not be willing to confirm that local wages would be paid to workers who move abroad, but it's hard to imagine that they'd move an American manager overseas and then negate the cost savings they're looking to make by continuing to pay that manager their US salary and benefits package. Come to that, I can't see bringing in managers on US-level salaries being a terribly popular notion among IBM's local staff in those countries, who would presumably continue to work to local terms and conditions.¹

So, to sum up: IBM are saying to staff that they might be able to continue working for IBM if they're willing to uproot themselves and their families and move to [India|Nigeria|Russia|insert country of choice] and then find a project willing to take them on in that country.

It's almost as if IBM is trying to provoke a socialist revolution…

[Via MetaFilter]

1. Which, for them, doubtless would include levels of salary/pension/social security/health insurance. ↩

The Cure's Friday I'm in Love in pictures.

[Via No Rock and Roll Fun]

This screencast of Ubiquity for Firefox is fascinating: essentially, it's an add-on that allows you to grab content from the web page you're looking at and combine it with other data available online on the fly. For example, it lets you highlight the address of a restaurant on a web page and it'll grab a map from Google Maps and will even dump that information in an email ready to send to someone in your address book.

The screencast makes a great deal of the 'natural language' used to run these queries, but I suspect that for many users it's more bother than it's worth to learn a set of conventions expressed in a psuedo-English dialect, particularly if they find themselves only using some of those commands once in a blue moon.¹

I find the concept of Ubiquity neat, but I think it's a pity that it's tied to a particular browser. On OS X², programs like LaunchBar and Quicksilver provide only a fraction of the functionality that Ubiquity will offer once it moves out of the alpha stage, but they work across multiple web browsers and, come to that, with other software on OS X. To my mind, that's a worthwhile trade-off.

[Via swissmiss]

1. I think programmers and techies sometimes forget how important the advent of the graphical user interface was to ordinary computer users: no more of that DIR C:*.wks nonsense when you want to find your spreadsheet files. I know that a command-line interface can offer much more power and flexibility than a GUI, but only if you're using it so often that you don't have to consult the online help to remind yourself of obscure command-line arguments and syntax rules. ↩
2. I understand that there are similar programs for Windows and Linux, but I use OS X so that's where my chosen examples run. ↩

Ben Goldacre's post critiquing LBC presenter Jeni Barnett's broadcast about MMR and vaccination in general has caused quite a storm:

It is my view that in this extended broadcast Jeni exemplifies every single canard ever uttered by the antivaccination movement. It's a conspiracy by the pharmaceutical industry. Science always changes so you can believe what you like. It's a debate and a controversy. Measles was never that bad anyway. Immune systems are damaged by being understimulated. Immune systems are damaged by being overstimulated. And so on.

The original version of Ben's post included a recording of the entire vaccination-related segment of the show, as he felt that he'd be accused of cherry-picking damning phrases and presenting them out of context if he posted shorter excerpts. This led to legal threats from LBC, ostensibly on the grounds of copyright infringement.¹ Given that Ben Goldacre was neither charging for access to LBC's material, trying to pass his site off as LBC's, nor competing with LBC in any sense whatsoever I think it's a pretty safe bet that LBC are exercising their intellectual property rights in order to silence a critic, as opposed to their trying protect their commercial interests by stopping someone else from making money on the back of their content.

You'd think by now that media companies would know that trying to bully online critics can backfire horribly: a first draft of a transcript of the LBC broadcast can be found at SciencePunk, and links to recordings of the broadcast are popping up at Wikileaks and on YouTube. Never mind about the MMR issue; I'd like to think that LBC are about to be taught a very public lesson about how to deal with online critics. I'll be very disappointed if The Guardian fails to run with this story about an attempt to silence one of their columnists, even if this particular story wasn't one of his columns for the paper.

1. I Am Not A Lawyer, but I suspect that they have a point that posting an entire 40-minute segment of a show is at the very limit of acceptability as far as quotation-for-the-purposes-of-criticism goes. ↩

I didn't post yesterday because I encountered the single greatest timesuck on the internet: FreakyTrigger's continuing attempt to review every UK Number 1 single.

I'd forgotten what a golden period 1977-1982 was. Spotify didn't help one little bit; every few minutes I'd find myself reading about another classic that's not in my iTunes library and resorting to Spotify for a quick fix.

I'm happy to report that the greatest debut single ever to reach #1, Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights, got its due with a score of 10/10. Reading the comments on that entry, I even learned something:

Jonathan King also recorded a cover version sung from Heathcliff's perspective.

I found it strangely easy to resist the urge to find that track on Spotify…

Spacesick's "I Can Read Movies" series is a note-perfect set of covers for movie novelisations.

The covers for Highlander and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are particularly nice.

Something of a slow week:

• Ice and pier
• Goanna
• Sunrise over the alpes
• Stacked
• Frozen drops

Entries from Charlie Brooker's New Media Dictionary:

auntiepathy (auntee-pathee) n. Ingrained tabloid hostility towards the BBC.

[...]

dwindlethink (dwin-dull-think) vb. The process by which a member of the public forms an opinion on a subject of national importance after viewing a plebbledashed (qv) news report, then finds themselves passing it on to the nation when stopped in the street for another plebbledashed (qv) report the following day.

[...]

mock examination (mokk-eggs-ammy-na-shun) n. Close-up zoom-lens photograph of vaguely out-of-shape holidaying celebrity accompanied by disdainful copy pouring unwarranted scorn on their physical failings.

[...]

plebbledash (plebbul-dash) n. To bulk up a television news report with needless vox-pop soundbites from ill-informed members of the public.