For the record, I give the 40s, 70s and (especially) the 80s versions very high marks.

1. I like Daft Punk just fine, it's just that this one track didn't grab me.

Journalism is dead. Come on, we all know it. The only problem is that it's also kinda useful.

[Via Martin Belam]

1.

In my life I have grown three beards, covering many of my adult faces. My present hairiness is monumental, and I intend to carry it into the grave. (I must avoid chemotherapy.) A woman has instigated each beard, the original bush requested by my first wife, Kirby. Why did she want it? Maybe she was tired of the same old face. Or maybe she thought a beard would be raffish; I did. In the fifties, no one wore beards. In Eisenhower's day, as in the time of the Founding Fathers, all chins were smooth, while during the Civil War beards were as common as sepsis. Both my New Hampshire great-grandfathers wore facial hair, the Copperhead who fought in the war and the sheep farmer too old for combat. By the time I was sentient, in the nineteen-thirties, only my eccentric cousin Freeman was bearded, and even he shaved once a summer. Every September he endured a fortnight of scratchiness. [...]

[Via Memex 1.1]

ANY reasonable observer might have thought Bill Millin was unarmed as he jumped off the landing ramp at Sword Beach, in Normandy, on June 6th 1944. Unlike his colleagues, the pale 21-year-old held no rifle in his hands. Of course, in full Highland rig as he was, he had his trusty skean dhu, his little dirk, tucked in his right sock. But that was soon under three feet of water as he waded ashore, a weary soldier still smelling his own vomit from a night in a close boat on a choppy sea, and whose kilt in the freezing water was floating prettily round him like a ballerina's skirt.

But Mr Millin was not unarmed; far from it. He held his pipes, high over his head at first to keep them from the wet (for while whisky was said to be good for the bag, salt water wasn't), then cradled in his arms to play. And bagpipes, by long tradition, counted as instruments of war. An English judge had said so after the Scots' great defeat at Culloden in 1746; a piper was a fighter like the rest, and his music was his weapon. [...]

[Via Electrolite]

Quite a turn of speed there at the end as he chases the cat down the corridor.

[Via More Words, Deeper Hole]

[Via LinkMachineGo!]

[Via The Awl]

London, 1772.

I have been asked by my superiors to give a brief demonstration of the surprising effectiveness of even the simplest techniques of the new-fangled Social Networke Analysis in the pursuit of those who would seek to undermine the liberty enjoyed by His Majesty's subjects. This is in connection with the discussion of the role of "metadata" in certain recent events and the assurances of various respectable parties that the government was merely "sifting through this so-called metadata" and that the "information acquired does not include the content of any communications". I will show how we can use this "metadata" to find key persons involved in terrorist groups operating within the Colonies at the present time. I shall also endeavour to show how these methods work in what might be called a relational manner. [...]

Great stuff.

[Via Crooked Timber]

Green party politician Malte Spitz sued to have German telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom hand over six months of his phone data that he then made available to ZEIT ONLINE. We combined this geolocation data with information relating to his life as a politician, such as Twitter feeds, blog entries and websites, all of which is all freely available on the internet. [...]

Don't get me wrong: the animated map and correlation of the location data with blog entries and tweets to account for what Spitz was up to on a given day in a given place is neatly done, but it's hardly news that having your mobile phone on you allows the phone company to know roughly where your phone is.

The fun bit is the data mining and cross-matching of data. Throw in the sort of information every self-respecting law enforcement agency is itching to get access to, about what phone numbers you called, who you emailed and what web sites you accessed and it's relatively straightforward to build up a picture of what you're doing, where you're doing it and¹, who you're doing it with and – crucially – whether you're deviating from your normal pattern of activity.

Imagine a world where we didn't have the internet and mobile phones to make collecting all this data easy and painless. Now imagine the government in that wireless-free world announcing that it would start gathering this sort of information by having a civil servant follow you around, listening to your conversations with people and monitoring what books and magazines you read and taking notes as you go. I think it's fair to say that there would be hell to pay.

Why should governments have an easier time of it just because they can have Internet Service Providers and telecoms companies do the surveillance for them?

[Via MetaFilter]

1. Given enough data to establish a pattern of behaviour over time.