PUBLIC MARKS with search carry

Hi, Paul. Actually, I tweeted about "Move the Web Forward" on Blue Beanie Day the moment I saw it, and I linked to it from Facebook and Google+, but carry on with the character assassination. I tweeted about it without knowing who was behind it (doesn't matter), and without being *entirely* clear what it was about (you have some copy problems I would have been glad to help with). I was pleased to discover this blog post as I thought, "Ah, now I can reach out to the people behind that site and help them publicize it more" but then, a few paragraphs in, I saw your shitty little whiney character assassination of me (quoted above) and thought, oh, well. Why do you do this to yourself? Why do you create something nice and then shit on someone else? What kind of behavior is that? You did the same thing when you complained about A List Apart even though we've reached out to you for *three years* asking you for content and input. Calling something on the web crap is always a childish move, particularly when that thing is open and your feedback and content have been solicited for it many times. I gather you have some unexplained grudge against me. Or against the young dude in Ireland who created some web standards buttons for fun. If you think my help of his project is how I earn my living, you need to get out of the cubicle more. I'm usually polite to everyone, even very rude people, but you're being both whiney *and* a dick, which is a hard combo most people to pull off (fortunately most people don't try). Your project looks cool and could benefit from outside help, but I won't be helping because you are an asshole. You are, I think, the only asshole I've met in 20 years of doing web work. Fuck off.

But the W3C saw, or was made to see, the writing on the wall and built a set of standard APIs into HTML5 for just this case and most modern browsers have picked it up. The draft for the spec is http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html if you want to read it through or need further info. The API is pretty marvelously simple. This implementation changes the URL to return latitude and longitude when they are available, which we can use in our Django view. Plus, the same code works on mobile devices (at least the iOS ones I carry) with no changes.

This is a familiar drill, as heavy rains often carry mines across the border. In fact, dozens of them washed up in South Korea last year, killing one and injuring another.

Surgeons in Sweden have carried out the world's first synthetic organ transplant. Scientists in London created an artificial windpipe which was then coated in stem cells from the patient. Crucially, the technique does not need a donor, and there is no risk of the organ being rejected. The surgeons stress a windpipe can also be made within days.

Books need to be a predictable size; they have to be manufactured to a price, stored, transported and displayed. Then they have to fit on home bookshelves. People tend to like books that are easy to read, handle, and store. We generally like and need novels to be certain sizes. If you picked up a diary-sized novel in a series one day and the sequel was the size of a family bible, you'd probably find that annoying. I know many readers won't buy hardcovers and wait for mass market paperback editions simply because the regular size of "MMPBs" fits their bookcase, or is easier to carry around.

So, production editors and typographers do a very clever job of smoothing out that big variation using white space and font sizes to get more words on each page - or fewer. They're so good at doing it that a manuscript of 100,000 words can be made into a book that is identical in overall size to one up to twice the length. Don't believe me? Pick a few books at random, do a word count, and then look at the appearance of the pages. You won't notice it unless you're looking for it.

[...]

Page count doesn't mean a thing. It doesn't tell you how much book you're getting for your money. And, to be brutal, if your evaluation of any book is based on how many words you get rather than the impact it has on you and how well it's written - well, that's just dumb. Sorry, but it is. It's not like a pound of apples for 50 pence being better value than a pound for 75 pence. You're not being short-changed if you get a shorter novel. And left wanting more is not being short-changed. It's what good books are supposed to do.

[...]

So don't get hung up about counting pages. A book is as long as it needs to be to tell the story. Just open it, and enjoy.

To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not. Firstly we must understand what aspect of government or neocorporatist behavior we wish to change or remove. Secondly we must develop a way of thinking about this behavior that is strong enough carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity. Finally must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling, and effective action.”

Julian Assange, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies”

The weight and pressure distribution within a pile of any granular material is determined by the way in which the individual grains contact each other and distribute the stress. Quite commonly, grain shapes and sizes mean that there are microscopic chains and networks of grains that are oriented and in contact with each other in such a way that they carry most of the pressure from the weight of the material above them. These chains seem to behave like the soaring arches of Gothic cathedrals, which serve to transmit the weight of the roof, perhaps a great dome, outward to the walls, which bear the load. In a sand pile, particularly one that is confined in a container of some sort, these chains perform the same function—they carry the stress outward to the container, rather than directly downward to the base of the pile.

Crumpled City Maps are soft, yet hard-wearing, waterproof and meant to be creased and crumpled. You can place the area that you’re interested in on the palm of your hand to spot street names then just screw it up, stuff it back into its case or your pocket, and carry on.

speach bubble Comment

Here you are assuming that the crowd is right and the other one is wrong. It might be even true at a moment in time and not such much at another time. Losing memory, lying is a necessary part of human social relationship.

Think, for example, about someone lying about a sexual orientation to get a job.

Then there is living with your own mistakes and having to carry them all along (internet criminal record). The crowd sometimes makes things a lot bigger than it was in real, and specifically for the perception of others (the ones out of the story) a few years after. That’s not good. It makes individual carrying the burden of a poster saying all the bad things they did in the past, just because someone or a group of people decided to make it public.

It touches what most people call private life, and that I prefer to call opacity

Private life is not happening only behind walls but also in public spaces. In a physical world, it is tolerable because the opacity is bigger and that is good.

Posted by: karl at February 27, 2010 12:16 PM