This weekend's Radio 4 adaptation of Ian Fleming's Goldfinger has a pretty solid cast:

• Goldfinger … Ian McKellen
• James Bond … Toby Stephens.
• 'M' … John Standing.
• Col. Smithers … Ian Ogilvy
• Pussy Galore … Rosamund Pike
• Du Pont … Henry Goodman
• Hawker … Alistair McGowan
• Helmut Springer … Hector Elizondo
• Johnny Solo … Tim Pigott-Smith
• Mr Strap … Tom Hollander
• Fleming … Martin Jarvis

I know I shouldn't prejudge it, but on the face of it that's this week's portion of my license fee justified.¹

[Via Ben Hammersley's return to old-fashioned blogging]

1. Oh yes, and I hear there's some science fiction show returning to our screens this weekend. Might be worth a look. ↩

Tim O'Reilly's The State of the Internet Operating System is being linked to all over the place, with good reason. It's a wide-ranging survey of the state of the internet, and the fork in the road that's fast approaching:

I've been talking for years about "the internet operating system", but I realized I've never written an extended post to define what I think it is, where it is going, and the choices we face. This is that missing post. Here you will see the underlying beliefs about the future that are guiding my publishing program [...]

We are once again approaching the point at which the Faustian bargain will be made: simply use our facilities, and the complexity will go away. And much as happened during the 1980s, there is more than one company making that promise. We're entering a modern version of "the Great Game", the rivalry to control the narrow passes to the promised future of computing. (John Battelle calls them "points of control".) This rivalry is seen most acutely in mobile applications that rely on internet services as back-ends.

I've seen still images of Daphnis causing a perturbation in Saturn's A Ring before, but this Cassini video of Daphnis ploughing through the rings was new to me. Seriously cool.

[Via Joe Haldeman, via Kevin Riggle]

I had no idea that the development of Microsoft Bob also prompted the creation of the world's least favourite font:

In October of 1994, a Microsoft designer named Vincent Connare saw a beta of Bob, and found the use of the staid Times New Roman typeface in its word balloons to be out of whack with the software's playful personality. He began work on an aggressively casual font that wound up being dubbed Comic Sans; it didn't make it into Bob, but was later bundled with Windows itself. Comic Sans ended up as the Microsoft Bob of typefaces: It's famous mostly for being unloved.

If only Bob had taken Comic Sans down with it…

[Via Daring Fireball]

Sometimes the sight of multinational corporation embracing social media ain't pretty. In the midst of a discussion about a controversy over the environmental practices of some of Nestle's suppliers, a company spokesperson told posters to the company's Facebook page not to use amended versions of the company's logo as their profile picture on the company's page, on pain of having the offending icons deleted:

Paul Griffin: Not sure you're going to win friends in the social media space with this sort of dogmatic approach. I understand that you're on your back-foot due to various issues not excluding Palm Oil but Social Media is about embracing your market, engaging and having a conversation rather than preaching! Read www.cluetrain.com and rethink!

Nestle: Thanks for the lesson in manners. Consider yourself embraced. But it's our page, we set the rules, it was ever thus.

"Consider yourself embraced." Someone give that spokesbot a pay rise.

[Via The Browser]

The impending arrival of both the iPad and News Corporation's Great Paywall has prompted a number of interesting posts about the past and future of print media.

The reception the iPad is getting reminds Scott Rosenberg of the CD-ROM years:

[These...] flashbacks I'm getting as I read about the media business's iPad excitement – man, they're intense. Stories like this and this, about the magazine industry's excitement over the iPad, or videos like these Wired iPad demos, take me back to the early '90s – when media companies saw their future on a shiny aluminum disc.

I thought that CD-ROMs were a pain: you had to have the disk to hand to access the content, it was a hopeless format for frequently-updated content¹, and you might have to add a CD-ROM drive to your PC before you could even get started. A web-based publication is a very different proposition: all you need is a deceny web browser and an internet connection. That said, Rosenberg's thoughts elsewhere in his post about the propensity for media companies to imagine that all that's required to succeed is to distribute existing content via a new medium are entirely valid.

John Naughton is just glad someone is finally going to put newspaper paywalls to a proper test:

This is the kind of large-scale controlled experiment that we’ve needed for ages to determine whether there is, in fact, a real market for online news – in the sense of a market in which readers will pay real money for access. Whether the Digger's experiment succeeds or fails we will all have learned something useful.

Rafe Colburn reckons that the price of an iPad newspaper subscription is a bit steep:

Gadget afficionados are licking their chops, but what shocks me is the degree to which media businesses are head over heels over the iPad, thinking that somehow a new form factor is going to reinvigorate their business. News Corp is going to charge more for an iPad subscription to the Wall Street Journal than they charge for a Web-only subscription, more than they charge to deliver the paper to your house, and even more than a subscription that includes both.

It's the debacle that was the music industry's pricing policy for downloads all over again. The WSJ iPad app is going to have to be something special to make that look like a good deal.

Ian Mansfield sees a flaw in the notion of subscribing to a single news source:

[...] I don't methodically visit a news website and work my way through each story in turn. I don't have time for that. I gather the news I want to read, largely via RSS feeds, then I read the stories that capture my attention – regardless of the supplier.

In such a situation, am I going to pay £2 a week to The Times in order to read 2-4 stories per week? Not a hope!

I would however tolerate paying £2 a week to have the ability to read, for example 100 stories per week from a range of newspapers. The news needs to be quality writing though – and there is surprisingly little of that out there.

I'm the same: I follow individual journalists² and get my news from a mix of newspapers and specialist sites. There's absolutely no chance I'd subscribe to umpteen different publications for the sake of following the odd columnist or specialist correspondent here or there.

It'll be interesting to see whether journalists take the approach of the likes of Ben Goldacre and Johann Hari and publish their work on their own site as well as that of the article's parent publication. It'd be one way to enhance their visibility to those of us who have yet to pay up.

If we must live in a future where most newspaper content sits behind a paywall – for what it's worth, I'm not convinced that the paywall experiment will work out well for readers or publishers, but let's assume for the sake of argument that it does turn out to be the way forward – then I'd much prefer that the various media companies pool their resources and enable me to pay a single subscription that allows me to access a reasonable number of articles across various publications.

As with online music, I'm quite willing to pay for convenient access to a decent range of content: I just want the industry to hurry up and understand the need to change their business model to reflect the strengths of a new medium and the demands of an audience that has grown up consuming their print media online, as opposed to adopting the music industry model of frittering away a decade wishing the future would go away.

1. Especially given that home internet usage was by no means commonplace in the early/mid 1990s, so downloading updated supplementary content wasn't terribly practical. ↩
2. I find Journalisted immensely useful. ↩

Whatever you do, do not call Drew Barrymore a celebrity :

Drew Barrymore, whose first film appearance was as a three-year-old and who, at 35, is, by virtue of pedigree, productivity and insanely laconic vowels, the youngest grande dame that ever was, is rousing herself to condemn the state of the entertainment business. "Celebrity!" she says, casting a furious eye across the Manhattan office. "It's become the most disgusting word on the planet. It makes me sick to my stomach." I have just asked whether celebrity aids or inhibits her in studio meetings. Now her earrings are shaking. "When I started out I was an actor. And now when someone calls me a celebrity, I want to shoot them. I want to go, thank you for reducing me – I've worked for 35 years, I've killed myself to be established as someone who is responsible, reliable and accountable in my field of work, yet you're calling me a name of someone who basically got famous for no reason." Her eyes widen to fill her whole head. "It's like the worst name on the planet. I hate it. And people say it all the time: 'You're a celebrity.' No, I'm an actor. I'm a producer. I'm a director. I'm a toad. I'm roadkill. I'm anything but a celebrity."

It's amazing to think that Barrymore is only 35 years old: she seems to have been around forever, though of course it's really just that she started out really young but stayed in a business where so many young actors fall by the wayside.¹

1. I wonder what the chances are that we'll be reading an interview like this with Dakota Fanning in 2030? ↩

I've noted before how much I dislike trying to follow hour-long TV shows that are stripped over a week, even ones I know I'll probably enjoy. It's therefore a tribute to the virtues of Gilmore Girls that I've stuck with the show throughout its latest 5-episodes-per-week repeat run on E4 over the last seven or so months, following Lorelai and Rory Gilmore through seven seasons of fast-talking, quirky, occasionally schmaltzy life in Stars Hollow and thoroughly enjoying the journey.

Monday's episode will be episode 15 of the seventh and final season; mindful that the normal schedule might be mildly disrupted by the Easter Bank Holiday weekend, I was looking ahead in the listings to check when the finale, season 7 episode 22 would be broadcast. Imagine my surprise when I found this.

Repeat run or not, why the hell would you show all seven seasons of a programme but skip the final episode? This had better be an error in the listings.¹ I'll be most displeased with E4 if I have to wait another nine months to see if they deign to show the finale at the end of the next repeat run.

1. At the moment the E4 site only shows listings up to Friday 2 April, so I'll have to wait a few days to see if they confirm the myDigiGuide listings. ↩

I'm not at all sure that a filmed version of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is a good idea, but I have to admit that the teaser trailer for Edgar Wright's adaptation makes it look pretty entertaining.

[Via Mightygodking]

Judging by the demo movie, Adobe's 'Content-Aware Fill' feature is downright magical.

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

Courtesy of Jeffrey Zeldman:

When the young Bobby Womack told Sam Cooke he didn't understand [Bob] Dylan's vocal style, Cooke explained that: "from now on, it's not going to be about how pretty the voice is. It's going to be about believing that the voice is telling the truth."

90% of the distant Universe has just been spotted:

This is fascinating news: 90% of the distant Universe was thought to be missing, but it was recently found. And what's weird is, it was found to be in the red. Quite literally. [...]

Rugby on Ice:

At the foot of an active volcano 900 miles from the South Pole, Tom Leard leads a fearless band of men and women over a battlefield of frozen sea, beneath a relentless sun. Ash billows out from the peak behind them as they approach their enemies, who stand staggered across the barren stretch of ice, clad in black from head to toe.

[...]

Here, on a January day in Antarctica's frozen McMurdo Sound, Leard and company have come for the latest installment of a decades-long tradition: A rugby match, played between the American and New Zealand research bases, on a field of sea ice 10 feet thick.

[...]

Today's match is the 26th in the series – which New Zealand leads, 25-0. Zero is also the number of 'tries' – rugby's equivalent of touchdowns – the Americans have scored in the history of the rivalry, which is the southernmost rugby game in the world. [...]

And yes, the post does include a photo of the 'Ice Blacks' doing the haka…

[Via MetaFilter]

Anatomy of a hashtag: #cashgordon.

God, I love the internet.

[Via The Null Device]

Lost meets Avatar.

[Via The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century]

A Periodic Table of Periodic Tables. Thoroughly meta, but none the worse for all that.

(I note that of the various periodic tables I've linked to over the years, only two are still at their original URL.)

[Via Information is Beautiful]

How can you not read a story with a title like How atom bomb tests could help detect wine fraud?

A trace of Bikini atoll could join hints of black cherry and complex citrus notes in the sommelier's lexicon for describing fine wines, research has suggested.

Harmless amounts of radioactive carbon have been found in wines made from grapes harvested since the last atmospheric atomic bomb tests were carried out in the 1960s. [...]

Harmless, but apparently useful in confirming the vintage of a particular bottle of wine.

Forty years on, the cast of Lionel Jeffries' version of The Railway Children remember the making of the film:

The three "children" had an unusual bond on set because they were guarding a secret: while 17-year-old Agutter was close to Roberta's age, Thomsett, playing 11-year-old Phyllis, was already 20. The producers ordered her not to reveal her age to anyone. "It was in my contract: I wasn't allowed to do anything that anybody over 16 could do," says Thomsett. "I couldn't have a cigarette, I couldn't go out with my boyfriend and I couldn't drive my car. I had a fabulous new red Lotus that I just loved. I was sworn to secrecy."

One night, a frustrated Thomsett fled with Agutter to a nightclub in Leeds where a bikini-clad woman danced inside a cage. "We sat down, ordered a drink and a couple of boys came over to ask us to dance," says Thomsett. "The next thing I knew, Lionel Jeffries and our producer were standing there. We were caught red-handed."

Artist Byung Chul Kim has opened a performance hotel in a soon-to-be-demolished house in Stuttgart:

This hotel has a gym, a spa and a private movie theater. There is even original art on the walls. The description indicates luxury accommodation, a five-star resort at the very least. But the cost to stay here is bargain basement: €3, €10 or €15 a night. And this hotel is certainly more adventurous than your average five-star palace: Because, if they wish to, guests can choose to pay for their stay by holding a reading, concert or dance.

[...]

Earlier this evening [Ralph and Frederick Fuller, twin brothers from London...] were at a Stuttgart gallery, then they were drinking at a local pub — a pub they would like to get back to as soon as possible.

But they want to pay for their accommodation before they go out again — with a little "good night concert" as they call it. So they put together a drum set and plug in an electric guitar and a dozen synthesizers. It's the same thing they usually do when they tour clubs with their experimental punk band Kurtz. Only this time the venue is a tiny bedroom and every second member of the audience looks sleepy. "Stick your fingers in your ears," they instruct the audience — and two chords later, every person in the room is doing exactly that. It's a bizarre scene. Nobody will be drifting off to sleep anytime soon.

One Sentence – true stories, told in one sentence:

I swore with excitement when my new Bible came in the mail.

[Via Word Magazine]