Jim Steranko's Outland.

I found the film pretty uninspired – Sean Connery was in the middle of a run of distinctly sub-par films¹, and nobody ever said to themselves 'I've just got to see that new Peter Hyams film' – but Steranko's comic adaptation looks like all sorts of fun.

[Via @sizemore]

1. Seriously. Between 1979 and 1984, Connery's filmography goes as follows: The First Great Train Robbery, Meteor, Cuba, Outland, Time Bandits, The Man with the Deadly Lens, Five Days One Summer, Never Say Never Again, and Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Thankfully, his next three films were Highlander, The Name of the Rose and The Untouchables. ↩

Steven Moffat on his decision to 'rest' the Daleks for a while:

Moffat said: "There's a problem with the Daleks. They are the most famous of the Doctor's adversaries and the most frequent, which means they are the most reliably defeatable enemies in the universe."

How long should they stay away? Long enough that when they return viewers will be glad to see them even if they're still iDaleks.

[Via The Medium is Not Enough]

Quote of the day: Charlie Stross,¹ quoting a character from his forthcoming novel, Rule 34…

"The twenty-first century so far has been a really fucking awful couple of decades for paranoid schizophrenics".

1. Prompted by a demo of NewsTweak. ↩

Comment of the week, from a discussion¹ of the chances that hotel staff might inadvertently walk in on a guest who was in a state of undress:

dsquared 05.26.11 at 8:36 am

I have only once had any similar experience in fifteen years' business travel (as an aside, I would suggest in general[1] that if you are in your hotel room at any time when the cleaning staff might be there, you are not working hard enough). I was in a hotel whose blushes I will spare, in the town of Rosmalen half way up the Netherlands coast. I did indeed forget to bolt the door and was surprised while in a state of partial undress. But there were extenuating circumstances!

1. It was not mid-morning or turndown time, it was 2am.
2. The female worker who surprised (and indeed woke) me was not a housekeeper; she was a prostitute who had got the wrong room number.
3. She was naked herself.

So I think I can throw myself on the mercy of the court. The (male) hotel employee who was called on to resolve the situation had a somewhat resigned look to him, as if this was a frequent occurrence only complicated by the fact I don't speak Dutch. I frankly did not see it as a tipping situation at the time, but I will always treasure his apology; "this hotel is popular with sailors, and the women who love them".

True story.

[1] The exception being those cases when someone flies you half way round the world for a single meeting.

1. Prompted in part by a post by Megan McArdle in response to the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. ↩

Courtesy of McSweeney's: P.G. Wodehouse's American Psycho…

The affair of the inferior business card is one which casts rather a gloom over the otherwise illustrious annals of Bateman family history. The fault, if it comes to that, was entirely that of Paul Owen, and the solution was, as ever, down to Jean, the finest secretary for which a man could wish. [...]

Maciej Ceglowski of Pinboard has been trying to quantify how large a problem linkrot truly is, based on an analysis of bookmarks stored at the site going back as far as 1997:

Along with the pretty graph, I've published the detailed results by year here. Links appear to die at a steady rate (they don't have a half life), and you can expect to lose about a quarter of them every seven years.

I'm actually surprised that the percentage of pages being moved or otherwise disappearing from their original URL is that low. I'm inclined to agree with Ceglowski's suggestion that as these links have been retained by Pinboard's users – going back to the late 1990s in some cases – dead links are likely to have been identified and updated or deleted in users' bookmark collections, thereby biasing the sample in favour of working links.

Part of me thinks that I probably should do something about the no-doubt-large proportion of links I've posted in 11 years or so of blogging that no longer point anywhere useful. Then I contemplate how much work it would be ((Particularly given that I'd be inclined to try to find updated URLs for links wherever possible!) to go through and find them all and then amend or delete the associated posts, and I come to my senses…

In the light of the news that NASA is declaring the Spirit Mars Rover mission completed it seems only fitting to post a link to one of my favourite xkcd webcomics.

[NASA press release via MetaFilter]

Judging by the number of links I've seen to "Literally Unbelievable"¹ today, I gather that I'm required to post a link to my favourite entry on pain of losing my blogging license.

1. Subtitle: Stories from The Onion as interpreted by Facebook. ↩

New York at Night.

[Via Curved White]

Who'd be a referee?

"All referees are good, and all are bad. A referee only needs to make one mistake, or an assumed mistake, against a club and if he lives till he is a hundred he never gets over it."

So said Charles Sutcliffe, former referee and president of the Football League, d. 1939. Yep, 1939. And you thought your contempt for officials was all modern and shit. [...]

There's lies, damned lies, and Dell's advertising:

Noted in passing: advert for the Dell XPS-15, containing the phrase

Finally, the power you crave in the thinnest 15" PC on the planet*.

Wow, the thinnest? But wait, what's the asterisk? [...]

[Via Memex 1.1]

The best cover letter of all time?

[Via web-goddess]

Jeff Atwood yearns for the infinite version:

One of the things I like most about Google's Chrome web browser is how often it is updated. But now that Chrome has rocketed through eleven versions in two and a half years, the thrill of seeing that version number increment has largely worn off. It seems they've picked off all the low hanging fruit at this point and are mostly polishing. [...]

Chrome's version number has been changing so rapidly lately that every time someone opens a Chrome bug on a Stack Exchange site, I have to check my version against theirs just to make sure we're still talking about the same software. And once – I swear I am not making this up – the version incremented while I was checking the version. [...]

Annoying.js:

/**
 * Annoying.js - How to be an asshole to your users
 *
 * DO NOT EVER, EVER USE THIS.
 *
 * Copyright (c) 2011 Kilian Valkhof (kilianvalkhof.com)

[Via Waxy.org]

Nice bridge, shame about the decking.

[Via You Look Marvelous]

Daz Wright flies the flag for Eric Pickles:

I, like most people, gave a little patriotic cheer when Eric Pickles announced that the pointlessly bureaucratic rules on flag flying are going to be relaxed. Pickles has always been a man that is willing to confront the issues that others shy away from. [...]

[Via We Love Local Government]

File under It's Funny Because It's True: Mitchell and Webb reveal the secret origins of The Apprentice.¹

[Via Wis[s]e Words]

1. For the record, I can pinpoint the precise point at which I gave up on The Apprentice: season 4, episode 3, the sequence starting 6m 50s in. I found myself thinking that I wouldn't voluntarily spend 5 minutes in the company of these people in real life, so why on earth was I devoting an hour a week of my time to watching them on TV? Truth be told, if it hadn't been then, the moment would probably have arrived an episode or two later. By the fourth season The Apprentice had succumbed to the problem that eventually ruins all game/competition-type 'reality TV' shows: reaching the point where the contestants have seen enough of the show's format to know exactly what sort of attitude and behaviour is going to get them noticed. If anything, The Apprentice probably deserved some credit for managing to fend off that moment longer than most, possibly because there weren't that many reality TV shows set in the business world at that time so it looked fresh and new for a bit longer. ↩

You can't embarrass an honest man.

The Metropolitan Police, on why files relating to the force's investigation of the Whitechapel murders should not be released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request:

Detective Inspector 'D' told the tribunal that unveiling the files could deter informants from coming forward in future, and could even put off members of the public from phoning Crimestoppers or the antiterrorist hotline.

"The interpretation on the street will be that the police have revealed the identity of informants," said 'D'.

"Confidence in the system is maintaining the safety of informants, regardless of age."

Det Insp 'D' said the passage of time did not make publication of informants' identities less sensitive because their descendants could be targeted by criminals with a grudge.

"Look at one of the world's best-known informants, Judas Iscariot. If someone could draw a bloodline from Judas Iscariot to a present day person then that person would face a risk, although I know that seems an extreme example," the officer said.

STOP PRESS: News reports have been received of the murder of a Mr Julian Iscariot of 1 Gethsemane Gardens, Whitechapel, London. Detective Inspector 'D' of Scotland Yard has announced that the Metropolitan Police will be interviewing every Christian in the UK to establish whether they had an alibi for the night in question.

[Via The Morning News]

Asked to comment on the prospect of one day archiving Facebook, Jason "Archive Team" Scott got his rant on:

Facebook is a living computer nightmare. Just as viruses took the advantages of sharing information on floppies and modems and revealed a devastating undercarriage to the whole process, making every computer transaction suspect… and just as spyware/malware took advantage of beautiful advances in computer strength and horsepower to turn your beloved machine of expression into a gatling gun of misery and assholery… Facebook now stands as taking over a decade and a half of the dream of the World Wide Web and turning it into a miserable IT cube farm of pseudo human interaction, a bastardized form of e-mail, of mailing lists, of photo albums, of friendship. While I can't really imply that it was going to be any other way, I can not sit by and act like this whole turn of events hasn't resulted in an epidemic of ruin that will have consequences far-reaching from anything related to archiving.

Follow the link – trust me, the full rant is well worth a read.