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Good wired interview with Ridley Scott about the final version of Bladerunner. Seminal film for me the interview highlights the impact it has had on the world since from fashion to product design, to architecture. I'm looking forward to the release.
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Rules based set manager for flickr, think smart sets.
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the possible overuse of the expression "a novel" on fiction work
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At least 1.5% of the US energy bill goes on data servers, more than on colour tvs.
September 2007 Archives
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Interesting idea about using long pipes in sea water to move cold water and nutrients upwards in the oceans
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Saving the interaction design for where there is a problem to solve...
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I'm speaking at this on Science and identity etc
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I'm guilty of this from time to time, bringing a laptop with the meeting agenda means it is open and temping, must try harder.
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Some of these are excellent
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The basis for company wide environmental monitoring
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It must be fun to be able to sponsor efforts like this one.
On a recent trip to the USA I was struck by the absence of lamb on restaurant menus. This PDF on meat consumption trends underscores my point. The amount of lamb eaten in the USA is vanishingly small. Given the mixed nationalities who migrated west in the 1800 and 1900s this seems curious. Lamb is still popular in the UK, even if we traditionally have it with mint sauce. The French and Italians both treat lamb well and the eastern Mediterranean countries all cook lamb regularly. It is even a staple in Irish stew. All of these nationalities contributed to the country that is now the USA, yet lamb has gone missing.
After a quick serendipitous chat with Thomas Vander Wal, it seems lamb is commonly available in upstate New York and in California, but beef is the main elsewhere. So what happened that beef, chicken and even pork and turkey dominate so much in the USA. Lamb is a lovely meat.
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Biting analysis of the $100 laptop.
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Conference on AI and the singularity, not coming next year, but I think in my lifetime. Food for thought.
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My graduation pens, a pair of Parker 88 pens, a fountain pen and a ballpoint, both in need of a bit of care, but nice to have found both of them. Reading this article reminds me of the importance of a bit of heft in a pen, too many plastic pens.
I've been looking at the relationship between time, content and the flow of history over the past year or so. I've spoken or run sessions about it at eurofoo06, barcamp london 2 and xtech07.
I've been worried about our ability to understand our present after it becomes the past tense. Much of what we read makes sense for a limited timeframe. Time moves on and our context shifts to new current events. So heading back to try to understand the past becomes much harder. The analogy with well commented code springs to mind, maybe my desire is for comments on history. We understand much less of the humour in Shakespeare for this reason. Even moving five years into the past and it can be difficult.
The problem can widen out from here and I'll extend briefly, my context is different to your one, so I want different events and people related together. My family, my work and my friends and interests differ, so unlike code there is not one set of reference points. This is a substantially harder problem, so with that excursion, back to public news content.
I've been researching a proposed microformat hEpoch to deal with time based reference in news stories and I'll admit I've given up. The problem has becomes one of exactitude, stories are written to be read not used as code. Adrian Holovaty has written about this before in his essay on data as journalism. Stories reference past events using terms like "nearby" or "last month", an example story from the BBC. This means that it is currently impossible to make a microformat for linking these stories together. Yet if the data was there then all we need to solve is the time base reference, probably via a bit of POSH.
A good example of this is timelines, they are the pretty, but doomed product I've watched being made many times over. People work hard producing a nice interface and sometimes even separate content from presentation. Then the timeline is often left abandoned once the project or programme finishes. A small bit of care in terms of tags and time formats for news stories and they could auto update.
Time and geographic accuracy need to be flexible, with time we can be somewhat flexible, the hCalendar microformat allows just a year for dstart, which means fixing to a single year is possible, but a approximate date eg 1760s is impossible. I'm not knocking the hCalendar spec, just pointing out a space for new developments. the microformat principles are well defined and do deliver a workable product.
Geographic data is hard too, the geo microformat is superb for specific realtively modern locations, where there is enough context to determine the latitude and longitude for the place. However we frequently need to reference a region, like a city, but cities change over time. The centre of London is now Charing Cross, but it has shifted over time.
This post is entitled "a lament", but really there is a call to action in the tail. We can make this better, all the data exists, it just never makes it out of the editorial process. Similarly when blogging we omit lots of the specifics, as they make it easier to read. eg 06/07/07, how do you unpack that date? It is impossible to know for sure which year, month or day it is.
If you are a publisher then think of the value of being able to automate connecting story threads and managing content by time and location. If you are a tool provider, MarsEdit and MT or WordPress, then offer support for microformats. The same for the more corporate tool providers. If you are an author then think of being able to return to the item of content in months or years and understand the context. This is not easy, but it is possible. Next up, I'll be looking at search, then main user of this data.
Technorati Tags: history, microformat, provenance, time, semantic, journalism, story-telling
I've been designing Nature Network over the past year or so and through it we've created social software for scientists. This is a different type of social software to the more general platforms like Facebook or MySpace or Vox. We have designed it to fit the needs of scientists, it has captured some of the professional aspects of scientific life.
I'm keen to find more examples of this, I spoke to some people at foocamp and discovered ModelMayhem and SchoolLoop. Both of these are good examples of the kind of vertical market social software I'm after. Each of them presents reasonable (fair) barriers to entry and has a language of its own, mirroring the existing phraseology used within each subject area.
ModelMayem is a site for fashion models, makeup artists and photographers. You need to show work and be approved to properly join the site. SchoolLoop is aimed a teachers and parents of pupils in schools in the USA. You need to have a pupil at a school in the USA. Sermo and LinkedIn also spring to mind, LinkedIn less so, as it is quite generic. Sermo is for registered doctors in the USA
Can you tell me of other examples you found on the internet, thanks.
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I learnt something new today and figured out what Jeremy keeps talking about, via Dan. I might even try one before reverting to simple black espresso.
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Customised storage and charging for multiple sets of laptops for educational or training settings. Nice looking product, not one I'll be needing soon, but hopefuly of use for a friend.
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A good write up of the AMEE project on climate change. AMEE, the avoiding mass extniction engine is an excellent thorough project, that is arguably pretty core to our survival, taking action on the basis of the data contained inside it seems the only way
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My review of the superb Gridenstein coffee knock box. This is what you need to get the coffee grounds from the espresso machine basket neatly and quickly.
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Humble set of comments prompted by John Nack admiting the real truth most pictures suck, mine too. Do read the comments, they really add to the piece.
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Fine china and mainly chinese statues dropped in darkness, the sound triggers a flash and the fragmentary moment of destruction, via plasticbag
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a Microformats workshop held in Brighton last weekend, I was in France, but wished I could have attended, looks like it was a good session
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Thought provoking microformat case study, exploring the positives and negatives of the process towards creating microformats and their strong and weak points
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100% solar hosting provider, so in theory entirely green, aside from the prior machinery, building costs.
A weekly farmers market is coming to Walthamstow, starting on the 30th September and thereafter every Sunday. I'm really excited, not that Walthamstow doesn't have a good regular market, but this one will have wet fish, shellfish, honey, free range poultry and eggs, fresh vegetables, flowers, soft fruit, bread, organic meat and much more. Plus hopefully some good cheese. Two things Walthamstow lacks are a good bakers and a good place to get French cheese or other soft cheese.
The market is run by the main people for farmers' markets in London, the appropriately named London Farmers' Markets. They've been running them for years in all areas of London and now they are out east. If you live nearby, please come and make it a success.
Over the past month or so I've been quietly posting on a new site of mine, iveswitched.co.uk. It is a microcampaign site encouraging people to replace their power strips
The power supplies that so many of us use to support our digital lives all drain power when they are plugged in, even if their device is not actually switched on. You can feel the warmth of them if you put your hand on them. Much more detail on iveswitched.co.uk, but the take away message is to assess the things you plug in and consider turning them off at the socket. A power strip with switches can help you do this more easily.
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A story about water, farming, cats and tourism and the EU
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Just competely awesome
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Echidna that wants to become a photographer
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As thoughtful as I remember him.
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Twenty six definitions of terms for web analytics, a useful starting point
