Links from August 2011

Links for Thursday 4 August 2011
Alternatives to the Singularity - "Google Docs"
"A collaborative presentation for/by grumpy futurists" (via @yoz)
Planning Application Details - 149-157 Whitecross Street, EC1Y
For turning half of the row of empty buildings on Whitecross Street into four commercial units and nine flats, in a  faux Victorian/Georgian style.
Crazy Walls
Cataloguing the walls covered in photos, newspaper clippings, string, etc by obsessive men in movies and TV shows. Because no one else seems to have done this yet.

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Links for Monday 8 August 2011
How to Build a Newsroom Time Machine
A student journalism class puts together a newspaper using manual typewriters, scalpels, glue, analogue photography, etc. Sounds like a good exercise and not just because I'm old(ish). (via Waxy)
The Battle of Mare Street « Viceland.com
A decent report and photos by a style mag from the London riots, #1. (via @alanconnor)
Hackney London Riots | Stylenoir
A decent report and photos by a style mag from the London riots, #2. (via @catfunt)

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Links for Wednesday 10 August 2011
BBC News - One word we don't hear enough: 'Erm'
From January 2010, Michael Blastland shows how wrong the Bank of England's GDP projection fan charts can be. (Also, that daft "The face of uncertainty..." stock photo and caption is priceless.)

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Links for Friday 12 August 2011
The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom – Telegraph Blogs
I've read lots of good things about the many causes of the riots. But I can't help but think they all come back to this kind of thing. I am fucking angry. (via everyone)

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Links for Sunday 14 August 2011
'I have lived over half of my life' | Society | The Observer
"I felt like something beautiful was rushing at me, moving past and around me at breakneck speed, and I couldn’t gather it in and I didn’t want to see it go." All this, although the end of the article feels dully clichéd.
Twitpic, Twitter, Lockerz, YFrog, Mobypic – good or bad? | Jon Boyes - Photographer - blog
A comparison of the T&Cs of five Twitter-oriented image hosting sites. Avoid Twitter, Lockerz and Twitpic; use YFrog or Mobypic.
Why Twitter’s Oral Culture Irritates Bill Keller (and why this is an important issue) | technosociology
Very good, and worth some time. On how Twitter is conversation, and how that compares with written language that some people are concerned is threatened by social media. (via @blech)

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Links for Monday 15 August 2011
Stop Coddling the Super-Rich - NYTimes.com
Billionaire Jim Andrews in 'Doonesbury' won't be pleased when he reads Warren Buffett's latest article.
Martin Woodhouse - Telegraph
"Martin Woodhouse, who has died aged 78, was a psychologist and medic, but worked variously as a novelist, scriptwriter, engineer, programmer, government planner, artificial intelligence researcher and perfumer." That's a life.  (via Infovore)

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Links for Tuesday 16 August 2011
The Living City (1970) - YouTube
I haven't watched it all yet, but looks interesting: a 1970 half hour film about the post-war rebuilding of the City of London, from the London Metropolitan Archives.
Fleet street fox: 43 and never been spanked.
Other people have made similar points, but it bears repeating over and over. That Gove and co can get away with stealing taxpayers' money while normal people get months in prison for doing very little is obscene. (via @megpickard)

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Links for Sunday 21 August 2011
Scripting Languages: PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby - Hyperpolyglot
Handy comparison of features of Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby, for when my brain has trouble switching. (via Kottke)
Rentzsch.tumblr.com: HOWTO Use UTF-8 Throughout Your Web Stack
A couple of things for future reference. (via Daring Fireball)

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Links for Monday 22 August 2011
Golden Grid System
This looks very nice. Making a stretchable grid for web pages, that changes the number of columns depending on the page width. I want to play with this. (via Waxy)
Camelbak Urban Assault Pack Preview
For future reference. Looks like a nice backpack that's thankfully less military than its silly name suggests.

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Links for Tuesday 23 August 2011
First Watch: The Decemberists, 'Calamity Song' : All Songs Considered Blog : NPR
Music video based on the Eschaton tennis scene from David Foster Wallace's novel 'Infinite Jest'. Totally. Awe. Some. My insides have been touched all over.

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Links for Wednesday 24 August 2011
What was daily life like before almost everyone had cell phones? - Quora
I love the responses to this question. I remember it all of course, and it's not that long ago, but it still seems like another world. (via @tomcoates)

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Links for Thursday 25 August 2011
Vincent van Gogh The Letters
When the (£450) book of letters came out I thought "that'd make a great website." I didn't imagine anything as good as this. Amazing, beautiful stuff. (via @holgate)
How can safety at advanced stop zones be improved for cyclists? | Jorren Knibbe | Environment | guardian.co.uk
Interesting if you're a little too obsessed with cars and cyclists who break the law at junctions. I hadn't realised cars are allowed to stop in ASZs if they're already there when the light turns red.
Xdissent/ievms - GitHub
"Automated installation of the Microsoft IE App Compat virtual machines." So you can test web stuff in IE on your Mac. (via Tom Taylor)

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Links for Friday 26 August 2011
Stefan Collini · From Robbins to McKinsey: The Dismantling of the Universities · LRB 25 August 2011
On the higher education White Paper: The gradual movement of responsibility for higher education within government towards business departments; the tortuous attempts to balance a free market and a command economy; the odd language ("the mission-statement present", "the dogmatic future tense"); that studying something often isn't wholly enjoyable; that choosing a university "cannot primarily be price-sensitive, adaptive, feedback-governed consumer behaviour"; the 1963 Robbins Report's emphasis on intellectual inquiry rather than "meeting the needs of employers."

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Links for Monday 29 August 2011
The Grim Threat to British Universities by Simon Head | The New York Review of Books
A description of the business-derived practices now standard in UK universities, alluded to in the previously-linked LRB article, including the Balanced Scorecard, Key Performance Indicators and Research Assessment Exercise.

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Links for Wednesday 31 August 2011
Making the Perfect Listing - Gidsy
A very nice guide to how to list something on this "community marketplace". Scroll down and things move... (via @mattb)
Red Maps
Some nice looking (printed, not electronic) city maps. (via @antimega)
Ulmon Offline Maps and Tourist Travel City Maps & Guides
Meant to link to this a while back. CityMaps2Go was a really nice offline map viewer for iPhone while I was on holiday. Vector-based, so good detail, and no roaming charges.
Populations: End of history and the last woman | The Economist
Taking projections of declining birth rates literally results in Hong Kong's population dying out in 2798, Brazil by year 5000.

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