Gulfstream: 2007

New versions of Adobe Acrobat apparently support adwords-style context-sensitive ads (!), and so Kevin Kelly has released a version of his book True Films as a free download as an experiment. This method of paying producers for content may work for some content, if the ads are either difficult to get rid of, or very well-targetted (if you only see ads you’re genuinely interested in, you don’d need to opt-out of anything).

New Batman looks pretty fine! (Surprisingly deep, helpful analysis of the trailer.)

Tony Blair officially converts to Catholicism.

There’s a lot to like about Barack Obama. (Long Larissa MacFarquhar profile.)

NYPD officers together fired about a bullet a day in 2007, a number that’s an order of magnitude or so less than I would have guessed.

Almost 5 minutes of quality baby panda wrestling, baby panda shoving and baby panda oops losing balance and falling over.

(video) “Trajan is the movie font.” Trajan is used on a whole bunch of movie posters. The piece also observes that big red fonts have become associated with comedies, similar to the way in which Neuland and Lithos are often used on the covers of novels by African American authors.

Stats for your photos, on Flickr. Pro (paid) users only. The FAQ.

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. I’m a bit trouble that I find it very much impossible to read these the way the signwriters intended, whatever that may be.

President Eisenhower (Republican, and former General) on the opportunity cost of defense spending: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” (Note that this is not a case of “even a Republican thinks spending money on defense is a bad idea”—at the time the Democrats were the foreign policy hawks, and even JFK was guilty of exaggerating the military threat from Russia. (See Fred Kaplan’s Wizards of Armageddon.)

Some proper Aussies in this (fake?) market research video for Drambuie Australia.

Random stupid comment, from a corpus of comments collected by the StupidFilter project, who are attempting (good luck!) to write some software that will detect stupid comments.

Bruce Schneier answers some questions on security. Not as paranoid as you might think: he uses the same password for low security sites, buys stuff from Amazon, and runs an open, un-encrypted wireless network at home (“Honestly, I think it’s just polite”).

Philip Greenspun has donated $20,000 to Wikipedia to pay for “key illustrations.” The iconoclastic Greenspun: “In comparing the Web versions to the print versions, I noticed that the publishers’s main contribution to the quality of the books was in adding professionally drawn illustrations … It occurred to me that when the dust settled on the Wikipedia versus Britannica question, the likely conclusion would be ‘Wikipedia is more up to date; Britannica has better illustrations.’ ”

Very NYC: young Guyanese and Trinidadian who kit their bicycles out with thousand-dollar stereos. The slide show is also nice.

How the Japanese refuel and plane, and how the Chinese refuel a plane. “At the moment, I am feeling positive toward both approaches. The emphasis on the right way of doing things is re-surprising on each encounter with Japan. And the determination to do things in China, no matter what, commands respect, despite the obvious complications and problems it creates.”

The evolution of Mario gameplay via an interview with Super Mario Galaxy game director Yoshiaki Koizumi (surprisingly interesting): “There are issues with 3D action, including problematic depth perception, getting lost, and even getting motion sickness. Those phrases, Koizumi said, are the keys the team worries the most about when creating a game in a 3D world.”

Experimental Google feature: digg/reddit-like vote up/vote down buttons in search results.

New Zealand tax department slights Dave Henderson, so he buys their building, evicts them, and turns it into a boutique hotel.

Aircraft comparison: a Singapore Airlines 747 and A380 in the same photograph. Despite dwarfing the 747, the A380 manages to look almost chubby and cute in this shot.

Nice post outlining some of the UI changes being suggested for Firefox 3, together with a good overview of browser UI challenges and issues in general.

If 24 were set in 1994. “The schematics file is too big to email—” “How big?” “Three floppies.”

The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. Includes sections on The Bible (the handwriting on the wall), proverbs (he who laughs last, laughs best), idioms (in vino veritas).

Malcolm Gladwell calls bullshit on crimanal profilers. Are they really any better than psychics?

Collection of over 5,000 posters that have appeared over the years on London’s Underground. e.g. “Many or few it’s better to queue”; “England v. Germany: Sign on at once for the Grand International Final.”

John Siracusa’s definitive review of OS X 10.5.

A Vice DON’T: “You realize people who aren't into soccer see a black man on your back with two cannons pointing at his head, right?”

“Scientists dredge up longest-lived creature, a 400-year-old clam.” Another way of looking at this is that scientists have just killed the world’s longest-lived creature, a 400-year-old clam.

Explanation of the Chinese system of writing, by way of imagining that English were constructed in the same way. (Something similar: the documentation for Locale::Maketext includes an intriguing section on cross-language difficulties encountered in translating seemingly simple bits of text like “Your query matched 10 files in 4 directories.”)

Nice series by Tim Wu on some categories of laws that are not actively enforced (including copyright laws, immigration laws), and why.

 google.com, as if it were optimised for Google.

The advice columnists for both Slate and Salon (Salon’s version) answer the exact same question—what do you do when your 13-year-old daughter from a previous marriage thinks you’re going to hell?

Steven Pinker: Linguistic, historial and sociological aspects of swearing. Many good points in here, e.g. “To hear nigger is to try on, however briefly, the thought that there is something contemptible about African Americans and thus to be complicit in a community that standardized that judgment into a word.”

Authentic Chinese sneakers, soon to be subject to a Lomo-like marketing campaign. They are kinda captivating though.

Lonely Planet—the Australian publisher of travel guides—has been sold to BBC Worldwide, the publishing arm of the BBC.

“Beleaguered bear in bridge rescue.”

Worth trying if you aren’t having much luck with Google. Notable recent successes: giving lower priority to bug tracking tickets on technical sites (especially MySQL), "irina ungureanu", wordpress make_clickable.

A nice idea: using the cents column of credit card bills to convey information to yourself about your meal.

The O2 shop (UK carrier of the iPhone), doesn’t work in Camino or Safari...

Astute essay on the state of web apps, and what might happen next, with comparisons to the place ofLotus 1-2-3 3.0 and Windows in computing history.

The trouble with the second stage was that there were no clear UI standards… the programmers almost had too much flexibility, so everybody did things in different ways, which made it hard, if you knew how to use program X, to also use program Y. WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 had completely different menu systems, keyboard interfaces, and command structures. And copying data between them was out of the question.

And that’s exactly where we are with Ajax development today. Sure, yeah, the usability is much better than the first generation DOS apps, because we’ve learned some things since then. But Ajax apps can be inconsistent, and have a lot of trouble working together — you can’t really cut and paste objects from one Ajax app to another, for example, so I’m not sure how you get a picture from Gmail to Flickr. Come on guys, Cut and Paste was invented 25 years ago.

Loving piece on the Leica. “Ralph Gibson once went to a meeting of the Leica Historical Society of America and, he claims, listened to a retired Marine Corps general give a scholarly paper on certain discrepancies in the serial numbers of Leica lens caps.”

Great piece on Toronto’s subway signage, and public signage in general.

Some exceptionally beautiful shots in this trailer for Heima, some sort of Sigur Rós tour documentary. (Hard to tell if Sigur Rós are pretentious, or just foreign.)

Portfolio site of the designer of Shopsin’s website, the legendary Greenwich village restaurant profiled by Calvin Trillin in the New Yorker.

“Bump chart” showing the movement of riders over the 2007 Tour de France. The rankings are pretty stable over a majority of the stages; some stages result in a small amount of movement, and still others (e.g. stage 4) result in an enormous amount of movement.

TV show invites five Pacific tribesman to the UK. What they find strange: homelessness, artificial insemination of pigs, the time spent cleaning and washing up. What they don’t: nightclubs. (The five are from the tribe that considers Prince Philip to be the son of God.)

Nice analysis of the Republican candidates and their debate. (By Peggy Noonan.)

A pleasant ginger cat and its “firstgoatse”.

“Enough: Is it Enough?” (More fun: Custody Fight Thrown.)

120 calories’ worth of different foods.

The design similarities between Braun and Apple products. (The Braun calculator and iPhone calculator are distressingly similar.)

Have I posted this before? Small story on Sao Paolo’s near-complete eradication of outdoor advertising.

Three reworkings (some quite radical) of the Bloomberg Terminal.

“Well hung 60s block bites the dust.” Unusually-constructed 60s office building is being demolished from the bottom up—the floors are hung from the roof and apparently this makes a big difference.

Christopher Hitchens: “Why are we so scared of offending Muslims?” This may not be precisely right, but I think he’s saying that there’s no necessary moral distinction between “bad” Muslims (the destructive ones) and “good” ones: they’re both following their faith as they believe it.

Michael Ignatieff on his failure of judgement over Iraq, and what he’s learnt and the difference between being a political philosopher (as he was once) and a polician (as he is now).

Economic journal experiments with a “no revisions” option, meaning that the paper will either be accepted or rejected—there’s no accept-with-revisions category. (Discussion of why this is a bad thing, from Freakonomics.)

Pilot Patrick Smith on the A320 crash at São Paulo’s Congonhas Airport airport, including a link to a nice photo of the aiport sitting tightly in the middle of a city.

Photographs of trees, by Myoung Ho Lee.

Weirdly long, eloquent, and informative Craiglist post about friends and the Australian concept of “mateship” that I somewhat endorse.

Chinese sportswear companies without distributors in the US are, among other unexpected marketing moves, sponsoring US athletes (and North Korea).

Not saying this is a bad thing, but is the Tour de France the biggest/highest-profile sporting event without an equivalent womens version (or women being able to compete)? (The Women’s World Cup is fairly high profile, and is also run by FIFA.)

How life expectancies are calculated, and why Michael Moore’s and CNN’s figures are (slightly) different.

Lightly-amended first chapters from Jane Austen’s are rejected and unidentified by publishers. (Rejected a big deal? Constable wouldn’t get much respect today either.)

The NOW watch: “The most accurate time piece ever invented!”

The Avatar Machine: a frame holds a camera behind your body, and you “see” through goggles that display the image seen by the camera. (Other projects.)

Real-life Tetris game!

Prize-winning commercial: “I think I was er, always misunderstood. People just didn’t seem to like me... I think I annoyed them, I got on their nerves. I don’t know why...” (More information—watch the video first!)

Nicely-written Review of Günter Grass’s memoir. “This lifelong silence, and the manner of his breaking it, have hurt Grass’s reputation in ways from which it will never recover, and which, depressingly, he seems not even to have understood.”

“A guide to [London’s] free bus routes.” a.k.a. an official-looking map of the bendy bus routes, where tickets aren’t checked on entry.

Apple’s ads—and the artists and commercials they ripped off to get them.

Improbable news from the IHT: Google handles just 1.7% of Korean web searches—a search engine called naver.com (which apparently delivers Google Answers-style hand-written answers first) handles almost 80% of all queries. Also, Mauritanian women with money eat to get fat. “Selma's sisters, now 20 and 14, were less fortunate. Mohamed said that she spared them the ‘old-fashioned’ techniques that made girls she grew up with scream in pain. ‘But to tell the truth, I did take them to the cows and made them overdrink,’ she acknowledged. ‘I did overfeed them, just a little bit, just so they could look like real Mauritanian girls. Forty days was enough to get them in the shape I wanted.’ ”

Really cute teeny cardboard models of synthesisers.

Good iPhone FAQ.

Legendary speed-eater Takeru Kobayashi, who recently lost his hot dog-eating world record, has an arthritic jaw, and can only open it a little way without pain.

Whole Foods in Manhattan uses a bank-style single line checkout queue that feeds into as many as 30 cashiers. (My problem with single line systems is that you continually need to shuffle along, which is especially if you need to move luggage or packages, such as at airports.)

Caught whale found with fragments of a 19th-Century weapon buried in its blubber.

Surprisingly thoughtful and introspective piece from F1 driver Heikki Kovalainen on what goes on before and during a F1 race. Also: not having a drinks bottle in the car is calculated to save four seconds over the race, so if it’s not hot he doesn’t bother.

Google on identifiable people appearing in Street View images: “Street View only features imagery taken on public property and is not real time. This imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street.” Well yes, but a difference in quality is a difference in kind… I’m guessing this problem will sort of fix itself eventually when their image stitching software improves to the point that it can merge together multiple images of the same scene taken on different days, automatically eliminating non-permanent features like people and traffic.

Overview of recycling, from which countries recycling the most to where the recycled materials are used. (1) In most places, kerbside recycling isn’t self-financing (i.e. it costs more to recycle material than to dump it; absent full-lifecycle (environmental) arguments there would be no point to it). (2) A large amount of automated sorted is now possible. (Surely won’t be long until the techniques used are able to separate recylables from non-recyclables—?)

“Mad Mother Psychoshower Curtain.”

Music video: Fujiya & Miyagi’s “Ankle Injuries” in dice-style pixellation.

Pretty morph through a few dozen famous portraits of women.

Some interesting UI research projects. e.g. a way to increase speed and accuracy when using a finger on a touch-screen UI (YouTube video).

Review of photographer Andreas Gursky’s showing at Matthew Marks Gallery. “The biggest picture at 22nd Street is F1 Boxenstopp III … They’re reportedly priced at $750,000 per imate (the gallery won’t confirm that figure). Maybe it doesn’t matter, but that’s $18 million altogether.

Movable Type 4 will be GPL’d, right about the time no-one uses Perl anymore. Once upon a time I tried Movable Type (I even contributed a small patch), but the fact that it wasn’t free was a deal breaker for some reason. (It’s not like I don’t use commercial software.)

“He is a principled dissolute, with the courage of his dissolution: he enjoys smoking and drinking, and not just the reputation for smoking and drinking although he enjoys that, too.” One of my favourite writers on another of my favourite writers: Michael Kinsley on Christopher Hitchens.

vi in Javascript! It includes spell-checking!

Writers name their favourite fonts. “Obsessing about fonts is a form of procrastination, so of course I have indulged in it ever since I graduated from a TRS-80 Model III to a Macintosh.”

Nice graph prepared by a bride and groom showing the relationship between guests at their wedding. (more info)

African wildlife do their thing: herd of buffalo come across some lions and get set upon, baby buffalo gets knocked into a water-hole and gets fought over by lions and a crocodile, the buffalo return in numbers, mess with the lions a bit, and get the baby back. (Though very fearfully, and without attempting revenge.)

Hard hat in the shape of a cowboy hat!

Pretty & interesting photographs of commercial aircraft. (e.g. aircraft taking off at the ends of runways, unusual angles, luxury interiors.) See also the most viewed photographs taken at Princess Juliana airport for some tight landings over beaches.

Pizza Hut’s New Pizza-Lover’s Pizza Topped With Smaller Pizzas (audio).

“It takes a special kind of incompetence to create a restaurant with dysfunctional tables.” I love the British press’s negative reviews! Suka is run by Jeffrey Chodorow, of the Frank Bruni/Jeffrey Chodorow spat.

Managua, in Nicaragua, a city of 2 million people, has functioned without formal street addresses since an earthquake over 30 years ago. (Old story, but this still seems to be the case.)

I like this: when Google employee #23, creator of Gmail, suggester of the phrase “Don’t Be Evil,” can’t get to sleep at night, he writes webservers in bash, and then posts them to his blog!

Megaton ratings of various nuclear bombs. This partly answers the question of why, if nuclear weapons are so bad, does Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only still exist, but people still live there?

In 1960, a suspicious President Eisenhower sent an envoy to the SAC’s headquarters in Omaha to check out their remoured-to-be-excessive targetting plans. A city that closely resembled Hiroshima in size and industrial concentration was slated to be hit by one 4.5 megaton bomb, plus three more 1.1 megaton bombs in case the first bomb didn’t go off. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was just 12.5 kilotons. (From Fred Kaplan’s The Wizards of Armageddon.)

Google search of all the pages you’ve ever visited. You need to have the Google Toolbar installed. Must require a really nasty amount of computing power to do a custom search for every user.

Human being can apparently run further and faster than any other animal. “All together, Lieberman said, these adaptations allowed us to relentlessly pursue game in the hottest part of the day when most animals rest. Lieberman said humans likely practiced persistence hunting, chasing a game animal during the heat of the day, making it run faster than it could maintain, tracking and flushing it if it tried to rest, and repeating the process until the animal literally overheated and collapsed. … Most animals would develop hyperthermia — heat stroke in humans — after about 10 to 15 kilometers, he said.”

Some nice small-living-space design ideas in this profile of an architect’s 550-square-foot apartment. (See the photographs.)

CIA account of two CIA operatives shot down over China on their first mission in 1952, and held captive for 20 years.

Account of the deadly crash between two Boeing 747s on the runway at Tenerife, 30 years on.

Sports writer Bill Simmons’s list of white professional sports players with black-sounding names. (A few other amusing lists above and below.)

“Heroic Secret Service Agent Takes Question Intended For Bush.”

Review of the very interesting and very cheap Motorola MOTOFONE F3. It’s designed for developing markets, and has a mostly sealed case, long battery life, an unusual black-and-white screen (calculator-style capitals-only font; the display is retained even when the battery is removed), and minimal SMS functions. It also is very thin, and looks really cool.

The Buddha Machine’s loops, in .wav format. (Not as good as the real thing, but …)

Launching the PS3 in Europe and Australia: “In Sydney Sony and retailer Myer staged a [midnight] launch event at which customers were also outnumbered by the media. Danny Zarka, the first Australian PS3 owner, was at the front of the queue despite only turning up after 9pm.” Uh-oh!

Awesome hair!

Impressive continuously-shot fight sequence.

Kevin Federline-branded search engine. Geekologie comments: “Apparently he felt Google just wasn’t doing it well enough and thought he’d throw his hat into the ring.”

Pages that have been deleted, and then protected to prevent re-creation. Unusual assortment.

Oh, internet, how I love your eccentricities so: pictures drawn with ketchup.

Okkervil River, “For Real.” (more)

Reflections on the importance of race in your choice of online gaming character.

Glowing account of Apple’s retail stores. “The interiors, too, have been distilled to a minimum of elements. ‘We’ve gotten it down so there’s only three materials we’re using: glass, stainless steel, and wood …’”

The New Yorker has redesigned! Some notes:

• overall, much cleaner, nicer and more modern (though it does feel a lot like New York Magazine)
• cartoons are incorporated in stories
• there’s a search by author
• and official RSS feeds (going by the URL, the very first feed seems to include everything, though this isn’t obvious from the description)
• it’s designed for a wide screen: the site itself if 1024 pixels wide (there ’s no gutter to take into account dock, etc.)
• the only ads appear to be for various bits of New Yorker merchandise
• the special “online only” section has animated cartoons—did these exist before? (And is this one appropriate for the New Yorker?!)
• most of the links are broken; of the 91 newyorker.com pages I’ve linked to in my blog, 79 now 404.

Warren Buffet’s entertaining 2006 Chairman’s Letter. Chattily discusses the future of the newspaper business (not good), his search for a successor (the main problem is finding someone who’ll stick around), CEO compensation (he’s somewhat puzzled that as a board member of other companies, he always gets outvoted when he tries to limit executive compensation, even though in the 42-year history of Berkshire Hathaway, not one CEO of his companies has left because they thought they were compensated poorly), the declining fortunes of Blue Chip Stamps (from sales of $170 million in 1970, to $25,920 in revenues last year—“Ever hopeful, Charlie and I soldier on”), his favourite foods (“It’s amazing what Cherry Coke and hamburgers will do for a fellow”), his strategy for beating an 11-year-old girl at ping pong, and finally a few pages of advice and information about the annual meeting, which he describes as “Woodstock for Capitalists.”

The unfortunately named “(RED)” campaign for the Global Fund has raised just $18 million; up to $100 million is estimated to have been spent advertising it.

Loving review of Zidane a documentary that follows Zinedine Zine over a single football match. (Lots of stills.)

Steven Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics, argues against tenure. “What does tenure do? It distorts people’s effort so that they face strong incentives early in their career (and presumably work very hard early on as a consequence) and very weak incentives forever after (and presumably work much less hard on average as a consequence).”

Links to snippets of YouTube’d Simpsons episodes in various different languages.

More Oxbridge institutional naming shenanigans: the rowing club of Trinity College is called the “First and Third Trinity Boat Club.” As this page explains, the name came about after second boat club folded, and the first and third decided to merge, resulting in a screw-up of a name rivalling that of New College, Oxford (founded 1379).

Restauranteur Jeffrey Chodorow, upset at a poor Frank Bruni review of his restaurant in the Times, took out a full-page ad defending himself. (He’s apparently offering a trip to Seattle to any employee who simply prevents Bruni entering his next venture, a restaurant with a Pacific Northwest theme.)

Snickers ad involving a rumble between the little green men and the little red men of pedestrian traffic lights.

Perfect for internet dating! Computer scientists developer an image enhancement program that turn portraits into portraits that look like the original, only slightly more attractive.

Nice timeline (associated with this story) showing the fall of stockmarkets world-wide in response to the crash in Shanghai.

Good news that a brave Somali man has defied convention and familial censure to marry a woman of lower caste? Or bad, because his reason was that: “She is beautiful, polite, obedient to me, pious and God-fearing, so there was no reason not to marry her.” (Also: three separate mobile phone companies do business in Somalia, even though different areas are controlled by rival warlords, and (since there’s no functioning government) no real way to enforce contracts.)

Good overview of possible applications of OpenId, a promising approach to single sign on.

Wikipedia for conservatives! Seems like a lot of effort to go to; of their six commandments, the spelling problem (they want American spelling) and the date problem (they want B.C. and A.D. instead of B.C.E. and C.E.) have a fairly reliable technical fix (run everything through a filter), and the remaining four issues aren’t very controversial. Is the problem really that they don’t want to be associated with the Wikipedia at all? Also, the Wikipedia does permit both British and American spelling and both date styles. (Conservapedia’s Examples of Bias in Wikipedia.)

“assorted strange buttons i own.”

Real box, fake product: Salt of the Month Club. Also available: USB Toaster and Make-Your-Own-Umbrella Kit.

Profile of Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist. He really is married, too, and not in a only-recently-legal kind of way!

“ Nobody in New York Knows the Difference between At-Home and Outside Conversations.”

5195 pieces in this Lego Millennium Falcon!

The psychology of house pricing. According to one realtor, a price like $433,779 “would be a real turnoff ... you’re talking about someone who’s going to be arguing about leaving a curtain rod.”

Some include “exposures.” (Good discussion of the pros and cons.)

Fun interview/profile of Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, who is frequently described as the happiest man alive.

Good laconic Aussie tells a BBC reporter about his drunken efforts to catch a 4.5" bronze whaler shark by hand. “Have any of yous got a knife, eh? ... this bloke comes out with little a pocket knife and the pocket knife was about the size of, yeah, half a match ...” (More Australian speech.)

Former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson returns temporarily to dole out insults to manufacturers, consumers, and current Gizmodo editors.

Overview of time-sensitive road tolls. Economics prof: “Everyone accepts that if your car is stationary, it’s fine to pay for parking. But if you tell people they need to pay to move their car between two points, they think it’s crazy.”

“That’s how easy love can be.” Aw.

Talk of the Town profile of designer Marc Newson. (His idea of a perfect object is an egg.) The Talby mobile phone he designed for Japanese network KDDI is lovely.

“A Braniff International hostess is a beautiful person. She is alive for her interest in people for themselves. She is a daughter to the middle aged; security to the confused; a friend to everyone who boards her plane; a heroine to little girls; a source of pride and joy to her parents.” (From Braniff International Airway’s Hostess recruitment brochure.)

How ad agencies would market tap water. (Some silly ideas, but largely provocative.) I don’t think it’s inherently difficult to sell tap water—the reason it doesn’t happen is that there’s no incentive to do so because the only people who directly benefit are water companies, and their profits wouldn’t change even if people drank 10 times as much tap water as they do now. (Fruit and vegetables have a similar problem.)

URL design, and why the same piece of content should never be reachable by more than one URL. (See also Jacob Neilsen’s 1999 piece on the URL as UI.)

(Listing the raw URL in blog posts has been my small contribution to the URL awareness effort.)

Interview with the designer of the pre-Euro Dutch bank notes, complete with revelations of secret embedded features.

“Get a First Life.”

Terrific picture: small ginger cat looks up at a black bear perched high in a tree after scaring it there. (Although … Google is suspiciously ignorant of stories of Donna DIckey and her pet cat.)

Sort of meadering piece on nutrition, the food we eat, and the food we should eat. (Long; though there’s nine point-form tips at the end.) “Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best. … Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.”

Amazon on why they encourage the use of real names: “In general, we believe that a community in which people use their Real Name™ attributions will ultimately have higher quality content, since an author willing to sign his or her real-world name on a piece of content is essentially saying "With my real-world identity, I stand by what I have written here."” Makes sense, but why does the same not apply to eBay? eBay would seem to have a similar requirements, but pretty much no-one uses their real name on eBay.

Profile of Malcolm Gladwell. Whilst working at the Washington Post, he won a competition with a fellow reporter over who would be first to get the phrase “perverse and often baffling” into the paper.

Profile of Bernie Sanders, the only socialist in the Senate. (Another nice, feel-good story in the Times: a piece about a soccer team of refugee kids and their volunteer coach.)

What Japanese tourists to NYC want. (“Masafumi Tomoshige, from Saga, was disappointed that he hadn’t seen a car chase.”) Eccentricities aside, travelling anywhere outside Japan must be a very disheartening experience for Japanese tourists: everywhere else is (much) dirtier, there’s few (or no) public toilets, you’re treated like a thief (security tags in stores), trains don’t run on time, you aren’t given a wet paper towel to wipe your hands before meals…

The ATM (cash machine) at the DNA Lounge gives out receipts which are headed “SHOPPING IS NOT CREATING / YOU ARE NOT WHAT YOU OWN”.

Decent short profile of Angela Merkel. (Like Thatcher, she was once a chemist.)

On the increasing popularity of Japanese-style “raw” jeans. Buying (and using) “selvedge” jeans is not straightforward!: I bought a pair at A.P.C. in New York last month and they’ve worked out fine, but at point of purchase you’re buying something which: (1) doesn’t fit right (you’re supposed to buy a size or two too small); (2) doesn’t feel right (the fabric is still very stiff); and (3) doesn’t look right (the denim will fade over time). This all adds up to an unsettling retail experience!

The aesthetic qualities of image spam.

Banky”s on-line shop: “Everything in the shop is free. All the images can be downloaded to print or use as a desktop.” (decent anti-Banksy rant)

A BBC TV show locks nine volunteers into a zoo and feeds them the sort of food our ape-like ancestors once ate, to healthy results. I wonder if a caveman diet (meat okay, but no processed foods such as bread) would give similar results.

Is there anywhere in London that hosts the sort of random burlesque acts that the DNA Lounge regularly gets?

Designer Thomas Heatherwick’s Christmas Card.

Apple’s 1983 gift catalog.