Forks

The human ability to take things to fantastic levels of refinement and intricacy is simultaneousty baffling and enchanting. It is impossible to imagine that thirteen types of fork were useful, let alone necessary for existence. Still, a world that would not allow thirteen fork types would be so much poorer.

http://www.designsponge.com/2009/08/past-and-present-history-of-the-fork-collecting-care.html

Kodak’s Problem Child

It’s astonishing how it can feel like an enterprise or an institution can be around forever, to be financially and culturally impregnable, and then gradually fall away. If Google blinked out of existence tomorrow, the way we all use our devices and the way most people do their jobs would probably need to change substantially. That said, they probably will fail one day, all careers end in failure.

https://medium.com/failure-inc/3e1d3fc4a3e

To the people in the trenches, like Demoulin, the failure always comes back to the same key error: Kodak, they say, suffered from a fundamental breakdown between, on one side the engineers and tinkerers — many of whom saw the digital future clearly and fought to bring it forth — and on the other the top management, whose interest remained fixed on molecules and the miracle of near-monopoly profits.

The NSA

I don’t think anyone can hear the words ‘secret court order’ and not have mixed feelings. The PRISM/FISA debacle doesn’t surprise me, but I had read about he FISA authorisation, and heard before about the practices of allied intelligence services in having them gather by proxy and feed back the reports. It seems reminiscent of the tax avoidance schemes of the large corporations: you funnel your intelligence gathering through a friendly party to avoid direct responsibility. What is important to me is that I feel, as the week develops, that the Guardian have significantly exaggerated some parts of this, and worked extremely hard to make things look illegal that are not. That is extremely destructive to the quality of the debate, and the public understanding of the issue. Two articles that seem to be slightly outside the normal narrative are presented below, to hopefully provide some interesting balance.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/06/surveillance-0?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/govtlessthangoogle

LET’S get the most contentious point out of the way first: Edward Snowden made the right call to make public the extent of the National Security Administration’s surveillance of electronic communications. The American people can now have a debate about whether or not they consent to that level of surveillance in order to prevent terrorist attacks, a debate that we were previously denied by the government’s unwillingness to disclose even the broad outlines of what the NSA was doing. There may be some slight risk that knowing more about the breadth of NSA surveillance will lead terrorists to take better precautions in concealing their communications. But that risk seems manageable, and is of far less importance than the ability of Americans, and the rest of the world for that matter, to finally have an honest discussion about how much we think our governments should be able to see of our online behaviour.

http://davidsimon.com/we-are-shocked-shocked/

Is it just me or does the entire news media — as well as all the agitators and self-righteous bloviators on both sides of the aisle — not understand even the rudiments of electronic intercepts and the manner in which law enforcement actually uses such intercepts? It would seem so.

http://jackofkent.com/2013/06/prism-ns-edward-snowden/

When a major news story breaks, it is always important to look at the information revealed. Whilst the pundits make heady claims and counter-claims, the rest of us should do a gap-analysis.
As a lawyer would ask, does the evidence come up to proof?
At the moment, the evidence is mixed. The evidence does not (yet) come up to proof. The documents so far disclosed do not substantiate the (initial) contention that the US government has direct access to the servers of various internet service providers; but the documents cannot be easily dismissed either.
As a police officer would say, there is enough here to form a reasonable suspicion.

Should you take your vitamins?

Since I switched to a more controlled diet, I also added a daily multivitamin. I did this not least because I had ended up in a situation where I was eating a lot less overall, and a lot less dairy in particular (I have pretty much stopped consuming milk entirely, and I eat only low-fat dairy by and large). I am also aware that as I occasionally have to diet, I want to maintain my nutrition, even if my calories are low. Still, this article makes me wonder. I am, by an large, less subject to the naturalistic fallacy. I have even overcome most of my misgivings about GMO (which were not very significant to start with). Still it’s important to remember with food that nothing is ‘bad’ unless it’s in ‘bad amounts’. It seems one should eat some fat, some carb, some protein and so on, and an integrated source such as plants or animals seems like the best source, because it might be harder to over-dose or get too narrow (or is that my naturalistic fallacy?) and it tastes better.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/opinion/sunday/dont-take-your-vitamins.html?src=me&ref=general

To neutralize free radicals, the body makes antioxidants (good). Antioxidants can also be found in fruits and vegetables, specifically in selenium, beta carotene and vitamins A, C and E. Some studies have shown that people who eat more fruits and vegetables have a lower incidence of cancer and heart disease and live longer. The logic is obvious. If fruits and vegetables contain antioxidants, and people who eat fruits and vegetables are healthier, then people who take supplemental antioxidants should also be healthier. It hasn’t worked out that way.

As an adult, there is no flavour I can think of that I don’t like. Sometimes individual food can taste bad, but I don’t have any class of food that I don’t like. This video brought back to me that this state was not always so. I remember as a child being totally horrified by both mustard and marmalade, which my father ate often, and scandalised by a friend of my parents’ when she told me she would eat a spoonful of English mustard. On the other hand, I always have loved oysters, guinness, strong cheeses. A wide and inquisitive palette is one of the greatest gifts in life.

The Secret Life of Cats

I’ve always liked the equity in the notion of keeping a cat as a pet. In my view, the fact that a cat free to roam chooses to come ‘home’ is a good guarantee of care. We had a particularly affectionate family cat when I grew up, and he came home despite some other households lavishing food and attention on him. I did always wonder what he got up to out there though.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22567526

The 10 cats above are a selection of 50 studied in the Surrey Hills over a number of weeks. Researchers used GPS trackers to record the cats’ movements over six 24-hour periods. Micro-cameras were attached to a selection of cats to film their activities. All equipment was checked by animal welfare experts to ensure it was the right size and weight for cats to wear safely. The maps of the routes of the 10 cats above are not all from the same 24-hour period or necessarily from the same day the cat cam footage was recorded. GPS tracking data was filtered to discard obvious false readings, however some smaller inaccuracies may remain. Time ticks over a 24-hour period and does not reflect the hour of the day.

REBIRTH of GAEA

I found this video fascinating. It shows just how malleable images have become. It takes enormous skill to extract and shape the forms and make them look consistent. It’s very easy for a small error of perspective to be glaringly obvious. Imagine if we had time-lapses for great painters and their methods? It would fascinate me. I already have a great love of videos of artisans and machinery.

How the Romans Swore

It seems to me that the whole point of swearing is that it is taboo, this article seems to miss that mark a little. What counts as an insult or an oath and their hierarchy tells you a lot about what collective perceptions define that culture. A good example for me is that the religious curses now used casually seem to have inverted their position with the scatological or sexual ones in our discourse.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/05/-em-futuo-em-how-the-romans-swore/276397/

Euro-speak

English is a difficult language to speak, not least because it is such a magpie language. There are so many words for slightly different concepts, and almost all of them have some social or idiomatic overtone. It makes for an incredibly rich lexicon, but it fills the dictionary traps the foreign speaker in the form of false friends (even between English and American) and unexpectedly obscure words.

The unexpected double-entendre is another common one. At a recent meeting, a colleague made a perfectly reasonable assertion about a female co-worker, which was entirely innocent, but caused a school-boy snort from the native (English and Irish) speakers.

A good feature of a future dictionary would be to include an indication of prevalence of a word in the corpus, google n-grams could be the basis for it.

I could go on for pages about this topic. Maybe I should?

http://qz.com/89525/european-union-incites-sic-its-bureaucrats-to-speak-better-english/

It also notes that people who give out badges are not “badgers,” as some official signs put it, like those in the Court itself. But those get a pass because they “afford some harmless amusement for English-speaking staff.”

Banishment Rooms

What do you do with useless or trouble-making employees? The idea of having storage facilities for encouraging them to quit seems incredibly toxic, but I know that constructive dismissal has many forms. It’s not unique to Japan either, there was an example in the U.S.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/06/do-japanese-companies-have-banishment-rooms.html

Basically, banishment rooms are departments where companies transfer surplus employees and give them menial or useless tasks or even nothing to do until they become depressed or disheartened enough to quit on their own, thus not getting full benefits, unlike if they were actually let go.

I’ll take Manhattan

I do sometimes fantasise about living in a Big City: San Fransciso, London, Paris, Tokyo or NYC. I do wonder if really being able to afford the lifestyle I imagine would mean working so hard that the lifestyle would be impossible to live. It seems to be the paradox of great places like that.

As a weird aside, as I read this I was increasingly sure that the author was male, with a male partner. I was surprised.

https://medium.com/editors-picks/cd19c630f090

In 1898, what are now the five boroughs of the city of New York were united for the first time, adding a million residents to what was already the largest metropolis in America. One borough-to-be in particular was a holdout, eventually joining but reluctant to do so. That was Brooklyn, which until the consolidation had been an independent city with its own very distinct culture and identity; it was also the third-largest city in America on its own. Today, Brooklyn is the city’s most populous borough, with about 2.3 million residents.

Very soon, I hope, I will no longer be one of them.

Philosophy in Schools

The interaction between the State, philosophy and the people is fascinating. The line between philosophy and religion can be quite blurry, especially if your particular viewpoint is not the one on offer. For some people, yoga in schools appears to be religious. Health advice, especially psychological advice, can verge also on the State endorsing a particular path, if not destination. On the whole, the question of whether ‘benevolent paternalism’ can be justified, and whether it automatically causes governments to tread dangerously near the reefs of establishment has yet to be clearly understood. I think that equipping students to be critical thinkers is an important part of the education that the State owes its future citizens. The French attitude appeals to me very much. I worry that there is an urge to skip such topics in the English speaking world, to avoid conflict and unpleasantness.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22729780

The purpose of the philosophy Bac is not to understand the history of human thought but to leap into the stream that is the actuality of human thought.

If you learn about what Kant or Spinoza once said, it is not so much to understand their argument as to use their argument.

Flying in Somalia

I guess it’s hard to imagine, when you think about just how safety conscious and thorough airlines are in the West, that it’s possible for such a shambolic flight system to work. I suppose it doesn’t, in the sense that there is a real fear of death in these journeys. It does illustrate just how many factors of safety aircraft are engineered with, and how tolerant they are.

http://voicesofafrica.co.za/somalia-pray-before-during-and-after-your-flight/

Lil Abdi was spoilt for choice compared to the other kids on the flight. He had the pick of two laps to sit on for the journey. But he preferred to sit on mine because I was seated next to a window, which had a small crack that let in cold air. The little things like a window crack are attractive bonuses when you’re on a Somali flight.

Sailing Hydrofoils

There’s been a big shift in high-performance sailing recently from conventional displacement hulls to hydrofoils. There are even single-person hydrofoil dinghies(such as the moths below), I have seen them in Dublin Bay. This is a great explanation of how they work, and why they are so hard to sail. They appear incredibly tricky, even once they are ‘up’ on the blade.

http://www.penzba.co.uk/Catastrophe/

Dialect Maps

English is such a magpie language, words seem to appear and disappear with incredible speed. The variations inside regions are fascinating, with some terms I never would have heard apparently being quite common. The great ‘pop’/'soda’ debate is always interesting when you add the Irish rural choice: ‘mineral’. It’s worth following the link to the original survey data, since it has Irish/UK information as well.

http://spark-1590165977.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com/jkatz/SurveyMaps/

I enjoy cooking very much. I really want to try baking bread, it seems almost magical. This video is one of a few excellent ones by the same baker. In this one, he makes a no-knead bread that makes my mouth water.

Søren Kierkegaard

I’ve long searched for some chewable access to Western Philosophers. I think I’ve found a part of the puzzle in Nigel Warburton’s Philosophy: The Classics. In a strange coincidence, the subject of the Aeon magazine essay this week was Søren Kierkegaard, so I was intrigued by both sources on the man. He seems like a fascinating fellow, and the either/or conundrum feels like something I have experienced recently, in moving from a life of indulgence in food and drink to one of calories counted and meals earned.

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/julian-baggini-i-love-kierkegaard/

Even his name emanates romantic darkness. ‘Søren’ is the Danish version of the Latin severus, meaning ‘severe’, ‘serious’ or ‘strict’, while ‘Kierkegaard’ means churchyard, with its traditional associations of the graveyard.

Mad Irishmen

Irish people seem to have a tendency toward mad adventure, and not just for nationalist or criminal causes. For religious, ,military, social, or even just for the hell of it, it seems that our forefathers have gone out into the world and made it a far more chaotic place. I don’t know why the rest of the world puts up with our regular out-pouring of so many apparent lunatics, but I hope it helps to bring balance to the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_Dhammaloka

U Dhammaloka (c. 1856 – c. 1914) was an Irish-born hobo (migrant worker) turned Buddhist monk, atheist critic of Christian missionaries, and temperance campaigner who took an active role in the Asian Buddhist revival around the turn of the twentieth century.

Titled Property

This is interesting, and probably quite timely for Ireland. Our property tax registration deadline passed this week, and there is a big question about who will ‘get away’ and for how long. There’s a deep contemplation of the psychological effects of the Irish tendency to want to own land, and the historical overtones.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/05/titling-of-property.html

… less than 7 percent of the country has been properly mapped, officials say. Experts say that even the Balkan states, recovering from years of Communism and civil war, are far ahead of Greece when it comes to land registries attached to zoning maps — an approach developed by the Romans and in wide use in much of the developed world since the 1800s.

Bad at Estimating

This is something I struggle with a lot. I have noticed that I tend to underestimate what I have eaten if I do not pay careful attention. Other people I know over-estimate, they tend to be thinner. Because of this, I tend to stick to things I know the caloric value of, for the most part. It’s also a handy bulwark: I don’t go to the chipper, and in part I make the excuse that I don’t know how to work out how much I have eaten. I’ve been thinking about how framing affects perception of food. If you are, like me, trying to be careful about what you eat, there are a lot of traps out there. Also, the last line of the article is interesting.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/study-subway-sandwiches-are-worse-than-we-think/276244/

RESULTS: The average meal was 836 calories for adults, 756 for adolescents, and 733 for kids. Two-thirds of people underestimated that. One quarter underestimated it by at least 500 calories.

Cup of Joe

I’m always interested to hear the history of curious idioms

http://qz.com/88453/why-coffee-is-called-joe/

Joe is, of course, short for Joseph. And in American English, “joe” can refer to an average guy, a soldier, or—somewhat strangely—coffee.

Earthquakes

I am often thankful that I live in a country almost totally barren of climactic or ecological dangers. There are no snakes, no (significant) poisonous plants, no scorpions, camel spiders, jellyfish, or worse nightmares. Admittedly, even in dangerous places, the headline-grabbing creatures often do less harm than more mundane events. Geologically, we’re also pretty secure, no volcanoes and no earthquakes, or maybe I spoke too soon…

http://www.earthquakes.bgs.ac.uk/earthquakes/recent_events/20130529031610.html#page=summary

Lessons for the UK
How would central London cope with a large earthquake during rush hour?
One might think that this is not an issue in countries like the UK, but although the scale of the problem is far smaller, similar issues arise. Most people have no idea of the earthquake history of their country, and have no knowledge of past earthquakes beyond the scope of living memory. And the same issue of increased exposure to earthquakes applies just as much to Britain as to the rest of the world.
One of the strongest earthquakes to have affected Britain occurred on 6 April 1580; the magnitude, estimated from the size of the area shaken, was about 5.5, and the epicentre was in the Dover Straits. Although it was some distance away, London was quite strongly affected, probably because the soft Thames clays are more susceptible to being shaken. Nor was this an isolated event; a very similar earthquake occurred in 1382, which also caused damage in London.
What has happened twice can happen a third time; what will be the effects on the London of today? In 1580, two people in London were killed. Modern London has about 40 times as many people living in it and while a comparable earthquake would certainly not cause a disaster on an international scale, the level of shaking would come as an unpleasant shock in a country that tends to think of itself as immune from earthquakes.

Nuclear War: Closer than we thought?

We can be very thankful that imminent nuclear war between the US and the Former USSR no longer seems to be an issue. The sheer number of close-calls and near-misses is terrifying. It’s also crazy to think that it might have been on the whim of men like these to decide our global fate.

http://m.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/05/the-ussr-and-us-came-closer-to-nuclear-war-than-we-thought/276290/

• Containerisation
• Clans and Culture
• Story vs. Statistics
• Dublin in 50s
• Why (otherwise) Rational People Believe Conspiracies

Containerisation

The world still runs on ships. The great clippers have been surpassed by cargo container-laden freighters, but they still are the life-blood of the economy. In fact, with just in time supply chains, they are perhaps even more vital. I’ve wanted to run a Traveller RPG game based around break-bulk cargo carrying for years, despite the constant reinforcement of the fact that it would never, ever, work like that in space.

http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21578041-containers-have-been-more-important-globalisation-freer-trade-humble

The results are striking. In a set of 22 industrialised countries containerisation explains a 320% rise in bilateral trade over the first five years after adoption and 790% over 20 years. By comparison, a bilateral free-trade agreement raises trade by 45% over 20 years and GATT membership adds 285%.

Clans and Culture

There is a strong sense, in these difficult times, that something needs to be done about our current system. One recurring trend, both on the left and the right, is the idea of moving towards libertarian/anarchism. Perhaps the State does over-reach when it seizes our raw milk, our guns or our mp3s? Perhaps there is no need to over-regulate so much? Could the minimal state be just a courts system and an army? Why should the state have the sole monopoly on force? It’s interesting to look at the historical precedents. The article below addresses it directly, and the recent In Our Time podcast on the Icelandic Sagas provides other insights into the consequences of having a judiciary without executive force. TL;DR blood-feuds escalate until everyone dies or a compromise is found much too late.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2013/Klingclan.html

Weiner looks at the problem of social order from the perspective of legal history and anthropology. He finds a pattern of order that he calls the rule of the clan, which does not require a strong central state. However, he shows that rule of the clan relies on a set of rules and social norms which are inconsistent with libertarian values of peace, open commerce, and individual autonomy. He argues that the atrophy of the state would lead to an undesirable resurgence of the rule of the clan.

Story vs. Statistics

I’ve been wrestling with the question of narratives as a way of communicating scientific concepts truthfully and clearly for some time. It often seems like the anecdote is the best way to illustrate and hook, but there are invariably such critical health warnings attached to their applicability and factuality that it can be problematic if you intend to be even remotely fastidious. These two links below are interesting. One tells us about the effectiveness of statistics (notably, even untrue ones) and the other is a good example of how an apparently firm scientific anecdote can need careful unwinding.

http://evidencebasedfitness.net/how-statistics-can-protect-your-willpower/

The Bottom Line: Information presented in a statistical manner seems to have a higher impact on impression ratings than information presented as anecdote or testimonial. However, according to this study, this effect may hold regardless of whether that statistical information is actually correct, since none of the essays presented to the subjects was factual. So even though statistics could protect you from the influencing effects of testimonials, the problem is being able to figure out if the evidence is of value or not; which is not always so easy. So in a totally self-serving manner, my advice is to keep reading this blog . ‘Til next time, guard your willpower.

http://thonyc.wordpress.com/2013/05/20/the-phlogiston-theory-is-not-equivalent-to-the-aquatic-ape-hypothesis/

But the aquatic apes theory is more like Ptolemaic models of the cosmos that Copernicus overthrew. These models of the solar system had to be ever more complex to keep the Earth in the middle and also account for the incongruous movement of the planets. In the end Copernicus’s moving the Sun to the center of the solar system simplified the model…

This paragraph is of course a complete myth that has absolutely nothing to do with what really happened in the sixteenth century. As this is a standard myth that gets repeated time and time again I shall briefly sketch, not for the first time, the true facts of the story.

Dublin in the 50s

This video goes down Lower Baggot Street, across Mespil road. I love to see what is preserved and what is not. It’s really striking when you street view the City Centre how much has gone even in recent years. Other videos from the 60s, 70s, and a grim one from the 90s.

This is Water

My obsessive admiration of David Foster Wallace only deepens with each of his works that I experience. I feel each encounter as true genius and depth, and an almost painful lightning bolt of self-recognition. Every day is about trying to make a thousand right decisions, and each small battle of will can be won or lost. Do I eat my lunch early, knowing I will be hungry later? Do I add an apple or some other thing to a meal because I feel the need? How much will I regret these things later, when I am faced with a smaller dinner, or a rumbling tummy in the afternoon? This is water.

Why (otherwise) Rational People Believe Conspiracies

I think even those of us who strive to be rational fail most of the time. The human brain just does not seem to be built for objectively balancing facts. It appears to me that there are two factors: one is the long-term, evolutionary bias towards pattern finding. We’re bad at recognising random events because millenia of evolution have promoted the brains that connect apparently unconnected events into patterns. The second factor is the more immediate, pressing need for control. It’s most obvious in health and diet. The most painful and frustrating part of illness, injury, or weight reduction is the waiting; you feel more and more pressure to do something, to feel some control. All of these also feed into people’s beliefs about the larger world.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/magazine/why-rational-people-buy-into-conspiracy-theories.html

Our access to high-quality information has not, unfortunately, ushered in an age in which disagreements of this sort can easily be solved with a quick Google search. In fact, the Internet has made things worse. Confirmation bias — the tendency to pay more attention to evidence that supports what you already believe — is a well-documented and common human failing. People have been writing about it for centuries. In recent years, though, researchers have found that confirmation bias is not easy to overcome. You can’t just drown it in facts.

Bureaucratics: A Global Portrait of Red Tape

I could not resist posting this, even though I may be the only one interested in bureaucracy. I would love to find a good source on the Byzantine Empire, which seems to have given its name to complex organisational charts. I gather modern-day India’s organs of state are a sight to behold.

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/04/04/jan-banning-bureaucratics

Bureaucratics [is] the product of an anarchist’s heart, a historian’s mind and an artist’s eye. It is a comparative photographic study of the culture, rituals and symbols of state civil administrations and its servants in eight countries on five continents, selected on the basis of political, historical and cultural considerations.” Jan Banning

What panhandlers do with money.

This is interesting, but not representative. What would you buy if you were given $50 to spend right now? I would probably use it for food, or get a book. It’s a interesting question. Homeless people are generating data from their experiments too. I was also interested to discover that Ontario has a state alcohol monopoly. Another interesting experiment in this area involved a starbucks card.

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2010/08/28/how_panhandlers_use_free_credit_cards.html

What would happen if, instead of spare change, you handed a person in need the means to shop for whatever they needed? What would they buy? Can you spare your credit card, sir?

Bloomberg Hacking

This Bloomberg hacking incident seems like it could be utter dynamite. The system itself is reputedly intricately built with many complex features.Abuse of data access has been incredibly wide-spread, and it has had explosive conseqences.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/business/media/bloomberg-admits-terminal-snooping.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Reporters at Bloomberg News were trained to use a function on the company’s financial data terminals that allowed them to view subscribers’ contact information and, in some cases, monitor login activity in order to advance news coverage, more than half a dozen former employees said.

Engineered Meat

The idea of practical, affordable manufactured meat seems intriguing. One thing is that you can cast the net much wider for creating different structures, as well as interesting animals. One reddit commenter a while back suggested that you could even try eating a burger of human meat, even of yourself, which has fascinating implications.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/science/engineering-the-325000-in-vitro-burger.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1368418364-9BbUl9iWpNavnGGiS9Hqxg

\ The idea of creating meat in a laboratory — actual animal tissue, not a substitute made from soybeans or other protein sources — has been around for decades.

1. Broadchurch—the death of a child in a small town develops a psychological drama of amazing claustrophobia and visceral emotion. Olivia Colman, who I had mostly known for her comedy acting with Mitchell & Webb, gives a masterful performance.
2. The Politician’s Husband— another strong female character. Not quite as good as the original House of Cards, it feels written by an outsider who is using politics as a setting, rather than a real junkie. Hence I suspect, why some people have not liked it.
3. If you have not seen The Thick of It, you must. It is Yes, Minister for our era, with what I suspect is a chilling accuracy.
4. Luther—Set in a world like ours, but where more coin flips turn against you, where guns and violence a lot closer to hand, and where there’s just less light. Idris Elba is excellent.
5. The Shadow Line—Like Luther, this is set in a grimmer world, where guns and conspiracies are more substantial. Very engrossing, though it might slightly lose touch with reality.

I hope you enjoy them, and if you have any recommendations yourself, let me know!

• Making Billions from Useless Items in EVE:Online
• A Year off the Internet
• Reading the Illegible
• Living on the Edge
• The Underwear of the Book
• Finding Oil in Pangæa

Making Billions from Useless Items in EVE:Online

Eve:Online is full of amazing stories of scams, heists, deep agents and other madness. People seem to get involved in the game at an extraordinary depth. These things also point to an intersting thing about the ‘gamer’ mentality, and to people in general. Meta-cognition: being aware of how you think and explicitly changing your strategies, is an incredibly powerful skill. Games naturally encourage you to think about mechanics, and it’s perhaps possible to use that skill to optimise real life strategies as well.

http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/how-a-clever-player-with-a-useless-item-almost-took-down-eve-onlines-entire

This is why it’s so easy to love CCP: Lander went on to describe an exploit that could have sunk the entire game’s economy, and he did so with a big smile on his face.

A Year off the Internet

Sometimes the biggest problems we face don’t actually come from the things we see our problems in. Radical changes in lifestyle don’t, in my experience, make everything better.

http://mobile.theverge.com/2013/5/1/4279674/im-still-here-back-online-after-a-year-without-the-internet

In early 2012 I was 26 years old and burnt out. I wanted a break from modern life — the hamster wheel of an email inbox, the constant flood of WWW information which drowned out my sanity. I wanted to escape.

Reading the Illegible

I came across a facsimile of The Particular Book of Trinity College Dublin, which I am immensely pleased to find was compiled by Mahaffey. I found reading the text extremely difficult. I was amazed by the skill of the transcribers of the 1641 depositions, who seemed to be able to read the spider-crawl like typeset print. It’s amazing what the brain can adapt to with training.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegible-addresses-goes-to-be-read.html

Over the years, the Postal Service has become the world leader in optical character recognition — software capable of reading computer-generated lettering and handwriting — sinking millions of dollars into equipment that can read nearly 98 percent of all hand-addressed mail and 99.5 percent of machine-addressed pieces.

Living on the Edge

A lot of consumers were living beyond their means when the credit flowed. I found some of the things that I saw in America terrifying, such as so-called credit holidays for loans on cars. Lifestyles are changing again now, perhaps this is permanent, but everything seems to be forever until the economic base shifts.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/f5763610-b2bb-11e2-8540-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2SLTVn2nX

We see a pronounced difference between how people are shopping today and before the recession,” the executive explained. “Consumers are living pay check by pay check, and they tend to spend accordingly. Then you have 50 million people on food stamps and that has cycles too. So for our business it has become critical to understand the cycle – when pay [and benefit] checks are arriving.”

The Underwear of the Book

Some people have a natural sense of visual balance: to their eyes, two mis-aligned icons can be as jarring as a note played out-of-tune, or the clatter of a dropped plate. I have some sense of it, though my visual palette is not very refined. I can certainly see when a visual composition doesn’t work, and I do appreciate it when it does, but I find my own work often lacks elegance. This video reveals the order and regularity behind layouts that gives them such harmony. If you are interested, there are some nice tools for decomposing or overlaying grids on websites, to help understand their layout (or lack thereof).

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/07/massimo-vignelli-on-book-design/

The grid is an integral part of the book design. It’s not something that you see, physically. It’s just like underwear: You wear it, but it’s not to be exposed. So the grid is the underwear of the book./em>

Finding Oil in Pangæa

I have not checked with my learned colleague as to whether this is Brent Crude or Snake Oil, but the idea that you can find oil by working out where the world joined up before the creation of the Oceans is a compelling image to me. It certainly puts you on quite an impressively-broad temporal spectrum. There’s also an interesting coincidence that the Portuguese triangle fits an oil pattern.

http://qz.com/81665/how-to-find-oil-using-ancient-geologic-maps-for-the-south-atlantic/

When you are standing in Brazil, you might as well be in Angola. The same goes with Ghana and French Guiana.

• Lead & Crime
• Treating the Enemy
• The past of the future of newspapers
• Philosophy That Stirs the Waters
• McDonald’s
• Terminology
• Googleganger
• The Complete Guide to Sleeping at Work

Lead & Crime

Despite falling police resources, it seems crime has nonetheless not increased in the UK. This is a great example of the incredibly hard challenge that is trying to get to the bottom of cause and effect. It’s hard to know if lead is the reason, as asserted in the article below, or whether other social factors had impact, or to what extent each of these things interacted. The power of the internet is that we can, now, begin to research other opinions and ultimately the underlying data, but it’s hard to do, and it seems unlikely that most people have the time or expertise to do it for everything they see.

http://dr-alun-wyburn-powell.blogspot.ie/2013/04/recession-fewer-police-but-crime-falls.html

Crime levels have generally been falling from their peak in the 1990s, after lead was removed from paint and petrol. The UK is not alone. The falls seem to have occurred around the world, irrespective of the crime-reduction policies being implemented by individual governments.

Incidentally, Dr. Wilburn’s blog is an excellent source for articles on politicians of note, hats and other things of political interest. I recommend it.

Treating the Enemy

From one perspective, I think I would have liked to study medicine. I lacked the academic ability to get access through the Irish system, and I probably don’t have the memory for learning that you need to be an effective student or professional. However, when I consider the fact that it means decisions with real impact on real humans, I think that it’s better for me to be playing with bits and bytes, where my errors have much lower, and more indirect, impact. I also have fewer moral quandries in my day to day life, though research ethics is still something that I do face.

http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2013/04/treating-enemy-requires-respect-professionalism.html

As a health care provider, I do not care where you are from, who you are, what you have done or who you have hurt if it is not pertinent to your care or treatment.

The past of the future of newspapers

Will the physical artefact of a printed newspaper last beyond the end of this decade? Will the printed book be like the vinyl record, reserved for the ‘bibliophile’ version of our current audiophiles?

Thus far, media channel innovation has been additive: there are still theatres, despite the existence of cinema. But software is eating the world, and perhaps the wooden reading material will go while the format and (perhaps lofty) goals remain?

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/paleofuture/2013/03/the-newspaper-of-tomorrow-11-predictions-from-yesteryear/

Many of us here in the 21st century like to think of the newspaper as this static institution. We imagine that the newspaper was born many generations ago and until very recently, thrived without much competition. Of course this is wildly untrue. The role of the newspaper in any given community has always been in flux. And the form that the newspaper of the future would take has often been uncertain.

Philosophy that Stirs the Waters

The article below is rather interesting to me, not least because it connected me to these excellent sixty-second videos from the Open University. I particularly recommend the one on the Chinese Room, which I often tell people is how I passed my Irish Leaving Cert.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/books/daniel-dennett-author-of-intuition-pumps-and-other-tools-for-thinking.html

“I’m a robot, and you’re a robot, but that doesn’t make us any less dignified or wonderful or lovable or responsible for our actions,” he said. “Why does our dignity depend on our being scientifically inexplicable?”

Mind Hacks

Most self-help, most ‘life hacks’ are pure rubbish. My favourite pastime used to be to procrastinate on web sites guiding you on techniques to avoid procrastination. An all cases, these things fall into one of two categories: unrealistically complicated and far-reaching systems of organisation/eating/living that you never get around to implementing, or pointless, forgettable ‘tips’ that often don’t work. They both also often come with a healthy dose of blame for an inanimate object, intangible quality or category of things. I think that’s the real secret appeal of this sort of stuff: it’s not your fault that you keep deciding to do something wrong, it’s the fault of carbs/our animal brains/society/the secret controlling conspiracy that runs the world. Sadly, I still have not managed to totally detach myself, and some day I hope to find one thing that is genuinely useful. Perhaps this one is it?

https://medium.com/editors-picks/9216e1c9da7d

I use a trick with co-workers when we’re trying to decide where to eat for lunch and no one has any ideas. I recommend McDonald’s.

Terminology

I am fascinated by language and by semantics, both professionally and personally. I encounter the question of specific meaning all the time. I get great joy from sailing, but I also am quite satisfied by the idea of a sport with such an obscure jargon that they have to rename left and right. Shaw said that “Professions are a conspiracy against the laity”. Certainly, computer science is filled with bizarre misuse of English, and research even more so. I often find though that it’s because, when faced with the specifics, you have to have a term or a clear distinction, sometimes for something that is brand new. What would you call a computer mouse if not that?

http://collation.folger.edu/2013/04/two-disciplines-separated-by-a-common-language/

I should have seen it coming when the Art History professor and the English professor started talking with each other about “print culture” (names omitted to protect reputations). It soon became clear that one had been talking about the circulation of printed pictures, the other had been talking about the circulation of printed words, and neither wanted to let on that they hadn’t been talking about both all along. Full disclosure: when I first came to the library world from the art world, I had no idea that familiar picture-printing terms have different and sometimes contradictory meanings in word-printing. This post is for anyone else who didn’t know that they didn’t know this.

Googleganger

This is brilliant. A fellow who shares the same name with a somewhat more famous person goes around taking pictures of himself in similar poses and situations to the ones on image search for the famous one. I like the notion, from a Cynical perspective, but I also recognise that it is probably also going to trip someone up some day. Still, does established fame or prominence give you rights over others?

http://internet-of-dreams.tumblr.com/post/49349258074/the-googleganger

There are two people named Dan Bejar: one is the singer for Destroyer, the other is an artist in who resembles him slightly.

The Complete Guide to Sleeping at Work

I get up early and go to bed early so that I can get at least half of my fitness regime in before work and still arrive at a somewhat reasonable hour. I still find that does leave me tired by the end of the week, and in particular I find that any really late night throws me out for quite some time. My grandmother was apprently an expert cat-napper, able to set herself with Swiss precision for half-hour or hour-long naps. I’d love to be able to do that, but I find myself groggy. I’ll have to keep with caffeine, the occasional short walk and the pool as my stimulants.

http://qz.com/80032/complete-guide-to-sleep-and-the-workplace/

What’s the cost of showing up for work extra tired? Do power naps actually work? And does closing your eyes during your (non-driving) commute do any good?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/apr/30/jobseekers-bogus-psychometric-tests-unemployed

Edit: Interesting to see the follow-up that the use of deceptive tests like this might breach the law. I am fairly sure that our research ethics guidelines would not permit us to execute a test like it.

I feel like I am monopolising the front page of the beloved ‘cobweb’, so I have added a fold. Let me know if that annoys you.

• 18^th Century Tourists
• Bombs and Bullets
• Twitter & the Law
• Emerging into the world

18^th Century Tourists

The world is undoubtedly more connected than it once was, but it is easy to forget how our forebears communicated. The post used to be surprisingly quick. I think living in Ireland (or the UK) teaches you the pain of parcel delivery in the modern era. I would love to see same-day delivery, but it seems unlikely that the critical mass of people exists for it.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/april/ceserani-grand-tour-041113.html

Analysis of digital interpretations of the records of over 6,000 travelers from the British Isles illustrate just how small the elite world of tourists in this period was, as well as how, “irrespective of profession and social status, travel abroad seems to have lowered social boundaries and enabled otherwise unlikely connections,” Ceserani said.

Bombs and Bullets

One problem with listening to podcasts ‘on the hoof’ is that I often want to stop them to collect some link or remember some detail from them, which typically involves fiddling with my phone, or trying to remember it until the end of a set or exercise. Ken & Robin are an embarrassement of riches in that vein, but this week’s Sunday Miscellany caught my eye for two fascinating facts: the Irishman who invented seismology by blowing up parts of Killiney Beach, and the Irishwoman who shot Mussolini, perhaps for not being Catholic enough.

http://www.rte.ie/radio/radioplayer/rteradiowebpage.html#type=radio&rii=9%3A20187952%3A68%3A14%2D04%2D2013%3A

Twitter & the Law

The UK seems to be at the forefront of the evolving relationship between social media and government institutions. The practice has not always been in the direction that I like—I strongly believe that people should have the freedom to say whatever stupid, insulting things they like online, without consequences. Several examples have shown that my view is not the same as most. How the institutions themselves communicate with the public is also of great interest, and this paper provides an interesting view of two police forces responding to the 2011 UK riots.

http://www.fit.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/fit/de/documents/ukriots%20v89.pdf

With this paper we take a first step to understand the appropriation of social media by the police. For this purpose we analyzed the Twitter communication by the London Metropolitan Police (MET) and the Greater Manchester Police (GMP) during the riots in August 2011. The systematic comparison of tweets demonstrates that the two forces developed very different practices for using Twitter. While MET followed an instrumental approach in their communication, in which the police aimed to remain in a controlled position and keep a distance to the general public, GMP developed an expressive approach, in which the police actively decreased the distance to the citizens. In workshops and interviews, we asked the police officers about their perspectives, which confirmed the identified practices. Ourstudy discusses benefits and risks of the two approaches and the potential impact of social media on the evolution of the role of police in society.

Emerging into the world

I think that part of the reason we don’t go utterly bonkers from the technological changes that go on every day is that they seep into our lives in a gradual way. Most technologies arrive in primitive forms, and slowly (or not) gain mass adoption. As that happens, a code of social practice appears, and evolves, around the artefacts. It’s only when you encounter someone who has been deprived, either by the justice system, or because their whole country is effectively a prison, that you can glimpse what technological wonders we live each day.

http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/santos-getting-online-after-25-years-prison/#

The Internet did not exist when I began serving my prison sentence, in 1987. I didn’t have direct access to the Internet as it dawned onto popular culture and became mainstream for many Americans, throughout the “You’ve got mail!” craze of the ’90s. Years would pass, until my release from prison in 2012 before I’d be able to experience the Internet first hand.