November 2011
1 post
Stupidity for the benefit of nobody: UK to force...
via guardian.co.uk Under the threat of losing their benefits, which amount to a paltry £53/week, young people in the UK are being bullied into working for no pay for supermarkets and budget stores. The stupidity of this boggles my mind. Not only are these young people being given a deeply negative working experience but the roles they are filling could (and should) be paid positions. The...
June 2011
3 posts
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Life sentence for Bahraini blogger
Dr. Abduljalil Al-Singace has been imprisoned for life for the crime of blogging views contrary to that of the Bahraini government. This sad event makes abundantly clear the dangers of speaking out for Bahrainis. Read more at ReadWriteWeb. Posted via email from Mad With Glee | Comment »
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Fair use blues: Too expensive to fight for your...
Original photo © Jay Maisel. Low-resolution images used for critical commentary qualifies as fair use. (Usually! Sometimes!) Kind of Bloop is a chiptune tribute to Kind of Blue by Waxy. All the musical samples on the album were very carefully cleared but the use of the album cover was not. Waxy’s assumption, that was probably correct, was that the transformative nature of his image...
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News organisations don't like it when we don't...
via techdirt.com Stefanie Gordon took a striking picture of Space Shuttle Endeavour’s recent launch from an aeroplane window. When the plane landed she uploaded the image to Twitpic, tweeted it and (as far as she was concerned) that was that. It’s a great image and several news organisations started to use the image to illustrate their coverage of Endeavour’s last outing. ...
May 2011
6 posts
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Images of the (mostly) subtle effects of violence:...
141 Boxers is a photoseries of images taken of (mostly) young amateur boxers before and after their fights. What is most interesting to me is not the obvious physical trauma, which is limited by protective headgear and short(ish) fights for amateurs, but the more subtle effects of eight minutes of violence on these young people. Some are upset by the experience and some are energised. I...
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Young people are engaged with politics, just not...
via youtube.com The people being assaulted by the armed and armoured police are protesting about the financial crisis in Spain and elsewhere and what it will mean for Catalan society to deal with the consequences of the Euro collapse. Evidently a tent city had just been forcibly dismantled and the people were sitting to prevent municipal cleaning trucks leaving Plaza de Cataluna. The police...
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Ralph Lauren the badge of Mexican drug lords
Jo Tuckman writing in The Guardian points out a sad indicator in the battle for hearts and minds in the Mexican drug trade. Several bosses of drug cartels have been arrested wearing Ralph Lauren polo shirts. There is a cycle of aspiration expressed in the wearing of these shirts. The drug bosses are wearing them as the shirts several years ago as they were popular amongst Mexico’s weathy...
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Pay what you can evidently works with food as well...
via csmonitor.com It warms the remaining cockles of my cynical jaded heart to read stories like this. A US cafe chain Panera Bread has switched to a donations-only model and it’s working well. I’m sure it helps that excess funds go towards a community kitchen project but it seems that given the choice most people will opt for the choice that benefits everyone. Posted via...
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Big brother is a fictional Italian plumber....
Hard on the heels of the Free Software Foundation’s Day Against DRM earlier this month, the advocacy organization last week launched a new campaign targeting the Nintendo 3DS. “The Nintendo 3DS comes with Terms of Service (TOS) that should not be accepted,” wrote the group’s campaign manager, Joshua Gay, in a recent blog post. “In fact,...
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Mass infringer lawsuit duplicated: Nude Nuns With...
via techdirt.com It seems really unfair to make lawyers think, but it seems that’s what the world of digital media is doing. Camelot Distribution Group filed a shakedown lawsuit against 5,865 alleged dowloaders only to have their suit copied by Incentive Capital who claim they own the rights to Nude Nuns With Big Guns. The suit is almost identical and is filed against the same...
April 2011
7 posts
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Destroying art in the name of religion: Sarkozy...
via guardian.co.uk Piss Christ is a dramatic piece of art and was intended to be so by Andres Serrano when he made it in 1987. It is a photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in the artists urine. Serrano claimed the work was a criticism of what he called the, “billion-dollar Christ-for-profit industry” and a “condemnation of those who abuse the teachings of Christ for...
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More potential means nothing if unreliability...
via geeksaresexy.net I may be generalising hopelessly but I had lots of bits of tech stuff in the old days that seemed to last forever. They just didn’t break. You could leave them in the cupboard for years pull them out blow the dust off them and fire them up. Modern gear just doesn’t seem to last the same way. This may just be the result of pushing the processors harder so...
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The horns of a credit crunch dilemma: Should the...
via guardian.co.uk The Met police may investigate News International regarding payment of officers for information. On the face of it this looks like a very good thing but delving a little deeper this is in response to a comment by Rebekah Brooks (the chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s News International) made to a House of Commons committee in 2003. It would be cynical to think...
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Kettling peaceful protesters is illegal and so...
via guardian.co.uk Using violence to detain a peaceful crowd is illegal. The high court has ruled that the Metropolitan police broke the law by kettling and attacking the Climate Camp in Bishopsgate in 2009. It’s nice to have confirmation I suppose but I’m doubtful that there will be much change for people protesting on the streets of Britain any time soon. The point of...
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David Cameron struggles to rebrand xenophobia
via guardian.co.uk Perhaps it’s the desperate search for a scapegoat or maybe it’s just an expression of his core Thatcherite values but today that milquetoast PR flack who somehow became our Dear Leader is going to deliver a speech blaming immigrants to the UK for the racist treatment they receive and imperilling our welfare system. He won’t put it exactly like that....
Ignorance and bile in the Daily Mail: UK Paper...
Permalink. UK Paper Insists Google Is Out To Destroy British Culturefrom the troll-bait dept Matthew A. Sawtell was the first of a whole bunch of you (seriously, stop submitting this!) to send in the hilariously myopic rant by Daily Mail editor Alex Brummer in which he claims that Google is out to destroy British culture. Brummer takes a criticism that has been levied by a few folks...
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Spitalfields Nippers: Horace Warner's photographs...
via spitalfieldslife.com This set of 16 photographs is striking, mostly for me because for many of the images it is hard to credit that this is Edwardian and not Georgian London. Alan Turing was born in this year yet these images look a million miles away from the age of computing. The context of the images is not known and they may have been taken to illustrate the problems of child poverty...
March 2011
7 posts
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Being creative is one thing making a career from...
via feedproxy.google.com Arts courses are becoming increasingly popular in the UK as the incentives to stay in education rise. Unemployment and underemployment are rife among young people so many try to stay in education for as long as possible, but are all those arts courses useful. Of course it depends what the objective of the course is, but if you’re looking for a viable carrer...
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My Favorite Color: The (current) king of YouTube...
via youtube.com kutiman has made a wonderfully beguiling and musical mashup of some lovely YouTube music videos. There is wonder aplenty here both in the source videos, which are all attributed as they should be, and the sum of the parts. Posted via email from Mad With Glee | Comment »
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Animating the spread of documented events: A...
via vimeo.com Gareth Lloyd and Tom Martin have extracted all the events documented in Wikipedia that include both geographic coordinates and dates (15,500 of them) and created this animated representation compressing the time scale down to 100 seconds. I find this fascinating and well worth watching several times as there seem to be different inferences to discover with each viewing. The...
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Selective use of "science" to juice up patent...
via smbc-comics.com Once I was a wide-eyed innocent who became excited that science was being seen as important by a wider audience. My eventual disappointment was hard to bear upon discovering that many people were not interested in the wonderful insights of Bohr, Heisenberg or Feynman but only in appropriating the term “uncertainty” to add a patina of credibility to anecdotal...
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We don't hate and mistrust all politicians: A...
via boingboing.net Many of us have come to see our elected representatives as scheming mendacious conmen with all the integrity of a four-year-old high on Sunny Delight. It is heartening to see the emergence of a very human hashtag, #edano_nero on Twitter. It means Edano sleep and is aimed at Yukio Edano who has become the public face of the Japanese government making frequent TV...
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The simple equation of piracy (in emerging...
via geeksaresexy.net The Social Science Research Council has released a report on piracy with particular focus on emerging economies. The conclusions are not too surprising but are clearly stated, definitely a good thing. Piracy is highest where the price of the media is high (compared to income) and digital copying is inexpensive (presumably also compared to income). Legislation, DRM, cute...
February 2011
13 posts
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Digital self-flagilation: CBS serves itself with a...
via boingboing.net CBS posted a story on its website including a YouTube clip of a reporter speaking strangely at the Grammys. Meanwhile CBS files a DMCA takedown request with YouTube for the same video. I know that there are two different departments of a huge company involved here but you would think that there would be a coherent content strategy that would reflect CBS’s view on...
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Perhaps piracy is an abstracted form of lending
via youtube.com Neil Gaiman talks sense about online “piracy”. It hasn’t hurt his sales at all. In fact in several cases, that he can clearly identify, it has helped. He also makes an interesting point about how people discover authors. It tends to be through people lending eachother books they love. Online distribution is an abstracted form of this. If I don’t know...
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Electronic Frontier Foundation is turning 21 later...
via eff.org Electronic Frontier Foundation is an important organisation. If the internet is to be a force for empowerment of individuals and not just another sales channel, data harvesting and government mouthpiece then organisations like EFF are essential. Their lawyers and other experts have successfully defined many key rights for internet users such as anonymity for bloggers, the illegality...
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Walter Murch talks sense about why 3D movies are...
Hello Roger, I read your review of “Green Hornet” and though I haven’t seen the film, I agree with your comments about 3D. The 3D image is dark, as you mentioned (about a camera stop darker) and small. Somehow the glasses “gather in” the image — even on a huge Imax screen — and make it seem half the scope of the same image when looked at without...
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A short film on the pervasive concept of rhythm in...
via youtube.com For the Malinke tribes rhythm (or foli) is everywhere. Without rhythm there is no movement and no life. Time is a crucial element in life and as Einstein said very useful to stop everything happening at once. Posted via email from Mad With Glee | Comment »
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Piracy: A solution to stupid customer service
via techdirt.com A big lesson from popular (geeky) understanding of the internet is that you can route around problems. This was one of the “wow” things about the net in the early days it was robust and flexible. Perhaps that has permeated into our digital culture as this online chat screengrab demonstrates. A potential customer wants software but is worried about localisation...
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Creative revenge for Kenneth Cole's ignorant Cairo...
via coilhouse.net Evidently Kenneth Cole owns a chain of clothing stores in the US and has a Twitter account. Actually I know he has a Twitter account because I followed a link to a message sent by Mr Cole on February the third. The message, now deleted, suggested that the uproar in Cairo might be about his clothes rather than a desire to reform the government of Egypt. This message was stupid...
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Study concludes infringing anime downloads...
via boingboing.net This isn’t just wishful thinking from new paradigm fetishists. The Japanese Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry have looked into the effect of both YouTube viewing and illegal downloading of anime DVDs and found that there is some negative effect on rentals but a positive effect on sales. I wonder if the tribal and enthusiastic nature of anime fans is...
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Hugging reveals the importance of 3-second units...
via news.sciencemag.org The comfortable duration for a hug turns out to be three seconds. This has been confirmed by analysis of TV coverage of Olympic athletes hugging. They hug opponents for a bit less and their coaches a bit more but the average is three seconds. It seems there’s something fundamental about this duration with lots of activities divided into three second units, waving...
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Big society tzar to cut his voluntary hours as...
via guardian.co.uk Oh dear! The Big Society was the answer to all our problems in the UK, cut local services and encourage folks to step into the breech as volunteers. That way we’ll all work for the services we really want. Unfortunately it doesn’t really seem to work. Not only are many of the roles that need to be filled skilled roles but having a surplus of time is not that...
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A scientific study: The music you like effects...
Male and female college undergraduates estimated numerous behavioral traits and evaluated the desirability of a potential heterosexual date. Following videodating conventions, the date provided information about her-or himself in a videotaped presentation. This presentation was manipulated. With other revelations about self held constant, the date disclosed her or his love of classical music,...
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On the need for legends, mystery and fear in our...
via viruscomix.com Winston Rowntree’s SubNormality is remarkably good and this comic is up there with some of the greats (check out the archive on the site). When everything is mapped and quantified where do we get our mystery from? We develop technologies and systems to increase the our knowledge and tinker with our systems of organisations but we still need mystery and we seem to...
January 2011
27 posts
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Leave the libraries alone. You don’t understand...
Best-selling author Philip Pullman spoke to a packed meeting on 20 January 2011, called to defend Oxfordshire libraries. He gave this inspirational speech. You don’t need me to give you the facts. Everyone here is aware of the situation. The government, in the Dickensian person of Mr Eric Pickles, has cut the money it gives to local government, and passed on the responsibility for...
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Further uses for Granny: Council to heat swimming...
A council is proposing to save money – and combat global warming – by heating a leisure centre and swimming pool using heat generated by the crematorium next door. Redditch council in Worcestershire says it can save £14,500 a year by warming its new Abbey Stadium sports centre with heat from the crematorium’s incinerators that would otherwise be lost. via guardian.co.uk Bravo Redditch! ...
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US Government Officials Admit That They Lied About...
You may recall that when Wikileaks released those thousands of documents on the Afghan war, the official US government position was that it should be shamed for putting lives in danger and “compromising intelligence sources and methods.” It was only months later that Defense Secretary Robert Gates admitted no such thing was true. We’re now seeing the same thing with the State...
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Following the instructions despite the absurdity:...
via nydailynews.com Sometimes a situationist worldview just leaps up slaps you around the face and starts singing My Favourite Things in your left ear. A can is being compelled to report for jury duty in Boston. Sal Esposito was entered as a pet on the 2010 census. It seems the pet bit got past the Massachusetts court and they sent Sal a notice to report for jury duty. When the Espositos...
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Data storage and consumption timeline from 2000 to...
via rackspacecloud.com The price drop is just stunning from more than $19.70 in 2001 to less than 6 cents per GB today. Cost has almost certainly been driven down by demand as an average US household consumes 3.6 zettabytes of data a year. That’s three trillion six hundred billion gigabytes. Which is quite a lot really. Posted via email from Mad With Glee | Comment »
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Deconstructing Disney characters: The forms that...
via rainbowmonkey.de In the project “The Rainbowmonkey - and the Gaps of Surprise” Markus Hofko breaks the faces of Disney characters down into their component parts. It’s a bit like looking at a flatpack version and fun to reconstruct them in your imagination. Posted via email from Mad With Glee | Comment »
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Starbucks new iced drink cup has a larger capacity...
via laughingsquid.com Is it possible that selling people sugary drinks in containers with a capacity greater than their stomachs might encourage obesity? Presumably there will be a companion size container in the Starbucks branded vomitorium too. Posted via email from Mad With Glee | Comment »
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Virtual ambulance chasing: Access to Google and a...
Boing Boing has been on the receiving end of one or two stupid legal threats in our day but this one from the firm of Lazar, Akiva & Yagoubzadeh takes the cake, the little cake topper, the frosting and all the candles, as well as the box and the cake-stand and the ornamental forks. Back in July, I posted about the research on the academic advantage some people with autism...
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Patrice Lumumba was assassinated 50 years ago...
Patrice Lumumba became the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1960, and was killed in 1961. Photograph: EPA Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was assassinated 50 years ago today, on 17 January, 1961. This heinous crime was a culmination of two inter-related...
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Make it better, a typographical animation
via vimeo.com I like typography and I quite like animation. I wonder if I’m turning into a cypto optimist too? Posted via email from Mad With Glee | Comment »
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What To Do When the Mic Goes Out: Lend a helping...
via neatorama.com I’m not generally into videos of cute kids, but this isn’t really about that. This young lady was doing a great job singing the US national anthem, which is no mean feat it’s a beast of a song to sing well, when the mic died on her. What happened next is charming. People are nice and that’s a good thing. Posted via email from Mad With...
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Clever, beautiful and fun: PrimoGraf Drawing...
via leafpdx.bigcartel.com This thing is wonderful. It’s not cheap but then a lot of work has gone into making it. It comes with seven prime number based gears and two sets of rods. They claim an infinite number of drawings can be made with it. I think that is probably not true, but I’d be happy to be proved wrong. Whatever the actual capabilities the results are lovely and the...
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Some artefacts of the old New York still poke...
via scoutingny.com Scouting New York tells a lovely story of this sign on the fringes of Times Square. The hotel still exists and is as seedy as ever. It seems time and money pile layers of glitz on the city but little bits of the framework still show through. Posted via email from Mad With Glee | Comment »