Comment of the week, from a discussion at MightyGodKing dot com about the prospects for a fourth Mission: Impossible film:
Tom Galloway said on April 18th, 2010 at 11:46 pm
I still wish, assuming his family was notified in advance and was OK with it, that the day after Peter Graves' death either Secretary Clinton or Secretary Gates had made a public announcement that they disavowed any knowledge of Jim Phelps' actions.
Alain de Botton pictures a world without planes:
The wise elders would explain that inside the aircraft, passengers, who had only paid the price of a few books for the privilege, would impatiently and ungratefully shut their window blinds to the views, would sit in silence next to strangers while watching films about love and friendship – and would complain that the food in miniature plastic beakers before them was not quite as tasty as the sort they could prepare in their own kitchens.
[...]
At Heathrow, now turned into a museum, one would be able to walk unhurriedly across the two main runways and even give in to the temptation to sit cross-legged on their centrelines, a gesture with some of the same sublime thrill as touching a disconnected high-voltage electricity cable, running one's fingers along the teeth of an anaesthetised shark or having a wash in a fallen dictator's marble bathroom.
[Via cityofsound]
Even if the iPad turns out to be a footnote in the history of personal computing, the challenge of making good use of the touchscreen/tablet form factor has at least prompted some interesting writing:
[iA post via swissmiss, Dan Hon's post via Ben Hammersley]
Coming soon: a bulletproof T-shirt?
Modern high-impact military vehicles and bulletproof vests are reinforced with a substance called boron carbide. It's the third hardest material known to man at room temperature, with a hardness of 9.3 on the mohs scale, just a hair behind diamond's hardness of 10. It's hard to imagine how such a rigid material could be comfortable to wear, but scientists have recently developed the technology to use cotton T-shirts to create boron carbide nanowire cloth. [...]
You'd end up with a hell of a bruise at best as the energy of the bullet was dispersed across your torso. Still, it'd unquestionably be preferable to the alternative.
JK Rowling on the Nasty Party:
Now, I never, ever, expected to find myself in a position where I could understand, from personal experience, the choices and temptations open to a man as rich as Lord Ashcroft. The fact remains that the first time I ever met my recently retired accountant, he put it to me point-blank: would I organise my money around my life, or my life around my money? If the latter, it was time to relocate to Ireland, Monaco, or possibly Belize.
I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain's; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles.
A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major's Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. On the available evidence, I suspect that it is Lord Ashcroft's idea of being a mug.
[Via Crooked Timber]
Cole Morton wonders whatever happened to the full English breakfast:
The Full English is the one meal that England does well, with fat bangers, sizzling rashers and eggs oozing sunshine, strong tea and two buttered toast.
This is food that makes you feel good just thinking about it, a platter that pulls on the heartstrings (as well as straining the heart). It's an icon of Englishness, as much of a symbol as the flag of St George, but here's the thing: who really eats it these days?
Less than 1% of the population starts every day with a cooked breakfast, compared to the 1950s when it was more than half of us. I was thinking about this the other day, chewing (and chewing) my compulsory muesli while dreaming of bacon and eggs. If the full breakfast is so representative of the English, what does it say about us? And if our attitude to it has changed so much, what does "the Full English" really mean – not just in the sense of what is on the plate, but in terms of being fully English? [...]
Foreign Policy's list of The World's Ugliest Statues is pretty hit-and-miss. Some of them are just your standard-issue Dictator-erects-oversized-statue-of-himself-in-public-square affair – not terribly attractive, but not shockingly ugly either.
My favourite entries on the list:
Composer and sound artist Andreas Bick likes listening to ice:
I made this sound recording of a frozen lake in the winter of 2005/06 in the area around Berlin. Frozen lakes are known to give off most noise during major fluctuations in temperature: the ice expands or contracts, and the resulting tension in the ice causes cracks to appear. Due to the changes in temperature, the hours of morning and evening are usually the best times to hear these sounds. In my experience, thin ice is especially interesting for acoustic phenomena; it is more elastic and sounds are propagated better across the surface. Snowfall, on the other hand, has a muffling effect and the sound can only travel to a limited extent. [...]
[Via BLDGBLOG]
Alaska eagle survives mating dance fall:
An acrobatic display of passion proved too much for a pair of eagles engaged in a mating dance over Alaska's Prince William Sound. [...]
Be sure to follow the link and scroll down to the second photo of a dazed, post-coital and thoroughly confused female eagle. Poor thing.
[Via James Nicoll]
I adore this photo. I can't pinpoint the reason – it's just something about the composition, the tone, the subject's pose … really striking work.
Adam Curtis on history repeating itself in Afghanistan:
There is a growing sense in the West that we no longer know what we are fighting for in Afghanistan. The question that is almost never asked is what they are fighting for? What do the Taliban want?
We are told that we are fighting to prevent terrorist attacks in Europe and America. But the reality is that the Taliban have no interest in attacking the West. In the public imagination and in much journalism the Taliban are seen as exactly the same as political Islamists such as bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri. The truth is that they are the very opposite of each other. [...]
The truth is that we may be fighting an enemy in Helmand – and soon in Kandahar too – that also no longer knows what it is fighting for. Both sides are locked together in a nihilistic war.
But the fascinating thing is that we, the British, have been through all this before in Afghanistan.
In 1919 there was a grand attempt to create a modern Islamist state in Afghanistan. But it collapsed into civil war and horror and led to the resurgence of old Islam coupled with the most traditional and reactionary forces in the country. And the Royal Air Force and British army was left fighting a futile, pointless war in the mountains of Waziristan. [...]
Henry Rollins seeks advice from Tom Waits.
Be sure to listen to the whole story, lest you miss the great, great punchline from Waits.
[Via Artw, posting at MetaFilter]
The Right Honourable Stephen Timms MP is getting some stick for writing a letter that suggests that he believes that the term 'IP address' means 'Intellectual Property' address. It really doesn't help that Stephen Timms is the Minister for Digital Britain…
I have some sympathy for Timms. I suspect that he probably does know what an 'IP address' is, given that the concept of an 'IP Address' is central to one of the key issues around the problem of identifying 'internet pirates.' The logging of an IP address by an ISP can – at best – allow online activities to be associated with a particular ISP customer's account but not a particular person. In the case of a commercial provider of internet connectivity, like a cafe or pub or hotel that offers free wireless internet access, they may not even be able to manage that much.1
Given that Timms and his civil servants have probably been using the term 'IP' as shorthand for 'Intellectual Property' for months now as they've exchanged goodness knows how many emails and memos and drafts of bits of the Digital Economy Bill, I can easily imagine whoever drafted the letter either having a brain-fart, misinterpreting the abbeviation when they typed up the letter, or simply falling foul of Microsoft Word's ever-helpful AutoCorrect feature.
It's a poor show that nobody spotted the slip before sending the response, but I'm deeply sceptical of the notion that it represents evidence that Stephen Timms believes that my computer's connection to the internet has been allocated an 'Intellectual Property address' by my ISP.
[Via Why, That's Delightful!]
John Lanchester has noticed something:
What's unique about this election? The quality of the debate? The riveting closeness of the contest? The charisma of the party leaders? The visionary vistas opening up in front of the British people as we contemplate the party's rival visions for out future?
None of the above. [...]
I could have sworn that I linked to Alan Becker's Animator vs. Animation years ago, but I can't find a trace of it and it's definitely worth seeing, so here it is (again?)
[Via Leedsboy, posting at Word Magazine Blog]
Less than a year after the demise of Personal Computer World magazine, the title's star columnist Guy Kewney has died.
John Lettice remembers his former colleague:
I remember an awe-struck staffer returning from a visit to Guy's terraced house in Hackney, babbling that he didn't have any carpets but that he did have his own PBX system, which in 1983 was non-trivial cabling to have running up and down your staircase. And not a lot of IT writers were chums with the late Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhiker's Guide, either. Or able to survive (absolutely unscathed) costing his publishers a large sum of money to pay for a new encryption system for Acorn, after he'd published a crack in his column.
Danny O'Brien gives us the enthusiast's view:
I still remember one of his columns. In it, Kewney, boggling at the effort to which software publisher Acornsoft had gone to copy-protect software, published the one-line command for rendering its primitive DRM completely useless. I don't remember the details, but I do recall just stopping and staring and then laughing and rocking in glee at the audacity of it, and wondering why no-one ever said all those other hidden incantations that I was sure existed out loud in other newspapers and magazines. Then I watched him defend his decision after a barrage of outraged readers (swamped by those who cheered him on) chastised him the next month. It really stuck in my mind as this example of the power of words to unwind elaborate but unsustainable practices.
John Lettice says in his obituary that PCW had to pay Acorn for that Kewney column. They shouldn't have. And if they had to because of the law, well then, the law was wrong: spelling out these magical words of power, causing corporate battalions to flash out of existence at a single, carefully-researched command, really was Kewney's job, and he did it masterfully.
Epsilon Aurigae is in a very interesting neighbourhood.
A Dyson Sphere in the making, maybe? The remains of a Dyson Sphere after a Berserker paid the system a visit? The aftermath of a civilisation's encounter with an Outside Context Problem?
[Via James Nicoll]
Marina Hyde on newspaper coverage of the wives of the party leaders:
According to a recent poll, 89% of people said the wives of party leaders would have little or no influence on the way they voted – a result that should have seen 11% of Britons immediately stripped of suffrage. Instead, journalists upon whom the vote also appears to be wasted fill pages analysing whether these women can "rock" the "shoeboot trend", and award them meaningless "bonus points" for embracing British fashion designers. It's not like feminism never happened; it's as though the leap to Homo sapiens never happened.
