The Treptow crematorium in Berlin might just be the most imposing place of mourning in the world.

[Via deputy dog]

Sadly, I’ve written code that merited this comment more than once:

/* ---------------------
This is the messiest code I've ever produced. But that doesn't matter, as it's clearly been spec'd as a quick'n'dirty throwaway project that'll never be reused.

If you're reading this, that's been disregarded. Quit your job, leave the country, fake your death, whatever it takes to avoid working on this file.
--------------------- */

The worst of it is, it’d probably be me¹ reading it again a couple of years hence.

1. Assuming that my job survives the inevitable slash-and-burn of huge swathes of the public sector over the next five or ten years. ^

Malcolm Gladwell is sceptical about the case made by Chris Anderson in Free: The Future of a Radical Price:

Anderson begins the second part of his book by quoting Lewis Strauss, the former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, who famously predicted in the mid-nineteen-fifties that “our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.” “What if Strauss had been right?” Anderson wonders, and then diligently sorts through the implications: as much fresh water as you could want, no reliance on fossil fuels, no global warming, abundant agricultural production. Anderson wants to take “too cheap to meter” seriously, because he believes that we are on the cusp of our own “too cheap to meter” revolution with computer processing, storage, and bandwidth. But here is the second and broader problem with Anderson’s argument: he is asking the wrong question. It is pointless to wonder what would have happened if Strauss’s prediction had come true while rushing past the reasons that it could not have come true.

As the governments of Kiribati and Tuvalu contemplate the prospect that their islands are going to disappear beneath the waves of the South Pacific, they come to very different conclusions about how best to proceed:

[The government of Kiribati ...] recognises that migration schemes will eventually need to be accompanied by humanitarian options. It is keen to secure international agreements in which other governments recognise that climate change has contributed to their predicament and acknowledge “relocation” as part of their obligation to assist. The government of Tuvalu, on the other hand, does not want relocation to feature in international agreements because of its fear that if it does, industrialised countries may simply think that they can solve problems like rising sea levels by relocating affected populations rather than reducing carbon emissions, which would not bode well for the world as a whole.

The whole article is a fascinating read: strongly recommended.

Oops.

[Via Blood & Treasure]

jacko.jpg

[Via Word Magazine Blog]

Rafe Colburn has posted a couple of entries about Scott Rosenberg’s history of weblogging, Say Everything:

[Scott...] does a truly outstanding job of capturing the essence of events as they occurred. The toughest job for a historian or journalist is making the events recognizable to those who observed them closely, and Scott succeeds admirably on that front.

There are also pieces of analysis in the book that really impressed me. [...] He draws a distinction between “professional” bloggers and “traditional” bloggers that never occurred to me but that defines things perfectly – the pros write about what they think will interest their audience. The traditionalists write about what interests them. The difference is profound. I read all sorts of amateur blogs but very few professional ones. And what’s interesting to me is that the line is not whether the author gets paid or not – it’s the sensibility they bring to their work.

I’ll have to get a copy of Say Everything at some point. I’ll be interested to see how he tackles the question of what exactly makes a site a weblog.

As long-time readers may be aware, I’m finicky about this. Online journals aren’t weblogs, even if the author posts using WordPress or Movable Type. Personal sites that consist of a series of posts ordered chronologically but that don’t normally link to an external source aren’t weblogs, they’re opinion pieces.

There’s nothing wrong with either type of site, obviously – I read and enjoy plenty of both sorts – it’s just that IMNSHO they’re Not Weblogs. If the intent of the site’s author is to point out and/or comment upon material the author comes across on the internet, it’s a weblog,¹ be it a linklog like LinkMachineGo or Bifurcated Rivets or a series of short essays on things the author has seen online or been thinking about like Rafe Colburn’s very own rc3.org or Amygdala.²

At any rate, that’s another title to go on my To Read pile some time soon…

1. Obviously, a weblog author may occasionally find him or herself writing a link-free post, just as the author of a journal site may sometimes point their reader to an external site they’ve seen. The point is whether the usual intent of a site’s postings is to point visitors at material on other sites. ^
2. But then, hackers aren’t crackers in my book, and after a decade of misuse by offline media I’m afraid that battle is pretty thoroughly lost. ^

Kevin Kelly hails the triumph of the default:

A default is an assumption that can be changed. The assumption of right-handedness in a hammer, or pliers, or scissors, could not be switched. The assumption of a driver’s gender as manifested in the seat position in an automobile could not be altered easily in the old days. But in much of modern technology it can be. The hallmark of flexible technological systems is the ease by which they can be rewired, modified, reprogrammed, adapted, and changed to suit new uses and new users. Many (not all) of their assumptions can be altered. The upside to endless flexibility and multiple defaults lies in the genuine choice that an individual now has, if one wants it. Technologies can be tailored to your preferences, and optimized to fit your own talents.

[Via Rebecca's Pocket]

T-shirt of the day: It Came Out of Nowhere.

[Via orrnyereg, posting at MetaFilter]

Adam Brent Houghtaling on applying Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies in the kitchen:

In his yearlong diary, A Year with Swollen Appendices (Faber & Faber 1995), Eno wrote, “I’m starting to think that all the world’s problems could be solved with either oyster sauce or backing vocals.” He has often used cooking as a metaphor for the artistic struggle to proclaim something never said—or sautéed—before. A Year with Swollen Appendices is peppered with references to oyster sauce, garam masala, and the Zen of cooking. Upon the release of his 1982 album, Ambient 4: On Land, Eno compared the creative process of a cook to improvisation, saying that an intelligent cook will abandon his or her recipes at a certain point: “You taste the dish and you realize there’s the seed of an interesting new taste. So you work on that and forget you were making chicken Kiev, or whatever. You make something new.” And in 2000 he showed how little difference existed between his approach to the kitchen and the studio: “My style of cooking is let’s see what’s in the kitchen, and think of something imaginative to do with it. Which is exactly the same idea one has as a producer.”

These metaphors blossom within the Strategies as well, specifically with the proverb “Discover the recipes you are using and abandon them.” [...]

[Via The Morning News]

Comment of the day¹, from a thread about South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s trip to Argentina at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ weblog:

pbk – June 24, 2009 12:33 PM

Somewhere in Chicago, Rod Blagojevich is standing in awe…..

1. Granted, it was posted yesterday. I read it today, so IMHO it qualifies. ^

A neat design for a collapsible plug to use with the standard UK 3-pin electrical socket.

I hope the designer has a patent pending and some funding lined up.

[Via the null device]

The Evolution of Online Journalism.

(Alternative title: Why I Love Privoxy and ClickToFlash.)

[Via currybetdotnet]

Apparently Oprah Winfrey has treated her employees to a holiday:

Oprah Winfrey is, even as we speak, on a Mediterranean cruise with an estimated 100 work colleagues and their families. The billionaire chat show host paid more than £500,000 for an all-expenses-paid 10-day holiday that takes in Malta, Italy, Turkey, Greece and Spain. Doesn’t this generosity make Oprah the best boss in the world? And shouldn’t all bosses follow her example? The answer to both questions is no, and here are 10 reasons why.

1. The office Christmas party is bad enough. Imagine a 10-day office party that you can only leave by diving overboard to likely death.
   [...]