C=Q/V -
October 28th, 2005
Capacitance.
Continuing to link to other peoples blog posts as fuel, I just need ot write this down quickly before I hit the north for the weekend and forget about it…
Tom A mentions the under-construction Dubai mega-complex. It makes me think; they’re storing their oil wealth. This grand construction project is a capacitor to store their capital and manpower in the lean times ahead. I wonder if this is the same as the giant monuments of older collapsing societies. Obvious example, the Easter Island statues, they got bigger and bigger as the society drove itself towards the end. These were spiritual capacitors trying desperately to convert the islands dwindling resources into holy goodwill. Moral of the story? I dunno.
Anyway, have a good weekend.
Sea Minerals -
October 28th, 2005
In response to Neils post about unintended ad features*. First up I totally agree with the sinister hoard-o-mechanics hallucination in the AA one, all you need is an unsettling ambient drone and that ad could be part of Dawn of the Dead, infact when I think of the scene I’m sure it does actually have an unsettling ambient drone.
Not so sure about the Heart FM commercial, that’s not sinister, just crap. I’ve not seen the Royal Mail ad.
My current favourite unintended ad feature is the bit in the Head and Shoulders commercial where the voice over person runs the words ’sea minerals’ together to hilarious and purile effect. Not the kind of salty goodness I’d want to rub into my scalp every morning. fnrk! (sorry)
*20six is asking me to type in some letters from one of those distorted .gifs but the link is broken so i can’t se the picture.
Fires in Distant Buildings -
October 25th, 2005
Nick T’s new record is out, you should buy it, it’s really good, his best yet. If you’re in the US go and see him, he arrives there on Thursday. INFO.
I’m at home, on the sofa -
October 25th, 2005
My house is flooded with 24megabit wireless internets. Now I’ll be able to update the world on what I’m doing all the time! Prepare for EXCITEMENT!!!
Watching: Scrubs on E4+1, it’s got Heather Graham on it. Now they’re using Death From Above in their interstitial graphics, it doesn’t really work, this makes me slightly happy.
Mood: Indifference
I’m using my Google talk account at home if anyone want to chat.
Gradius V Review -
October 21st, 2005
Here is a review of the PS2 game Gradius V:
The world is in danger! +5%
You, Vic Viper, are the only person who can stop the invading extraterrestrial hordes!! +5%
Fly right!!! +35%
Shoot Stuff!!!! +35%
Total 80% : Yay Treasure.
1. Fly right. 2. Shoot stuff
Do You… -
October 20th, 2005
…remember a time when The Register was a good up to date and reliable place to go for IT news? No? Then either a) you’re a normal person who doesn’t know or care what I’m babbling on about (congratulations!) or b) that was so long ago you really can’t rememeber.
Visiting the site for the first time in (literally) years today it was interesting to see how far they’ve fallen, being beaten to rehashing a 2 day old EFF press release by The Metro.
This is the The Register story, published 9:55 this morning.
Here’s a picture of today’s Metro, presumably published sometime last night.
If you’re interested, the story is:
Tiny Dots Show Where and When You Made Your Print
San Francisco - A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document.
Luckily I’m a traditionalist and tend to make my ransom notes out of bits of hacked up newsprint.
Londoners, Put These in Order -
October 18th, 2005
Doing a quick survey: Could you, the lovely visitors to/users/viewers/readers of this site, put these tubelines in order of hellishness…
Bakerloo
Central
Circle
District
East London
Hammersmith and City
Jubilee
Metropolitan
Northern
Piccadilly
Victoria
Waterloo and City
DLR
Basically which lines do you *really* not look forward to travelling on, or even actively avoid (if you feel like it please elaborate on the reasons for your choices).
Thank you. X
If you don’t want to write it on the web you could email me tom.g.pearson _at sign here_ gmail.com .
Resistance is Ornamental -
October 18th, 2005
This is a good article that was in the Observer the other day about Beijings transformation into something like Mega City One (or to be geeky(er) about it Sino-City One). The article is, in equal parts, frightening and awe inspiring (in the kind of Biblical sense). It paints the architects taking advantage of the city’s appetite for steel and concrete as egomaniac frontier capitalists using the government’s ability to demolish swathes of housing at will and draft in armies of impoverished workers to build their monuments.
Westerners such as the critic Ian Buruma question the propriety of designing a building that can be seen as endorsing the propaganda arm of a repressive state that tells a billion people what to think. It is criticism which Koolhaas dismisses with growing impatience. ‘Participation in China’s modernisation does not have a guaranteed outcome,’ he told one interviewer. ‘The future of China is the most compelling conundrum, its outcome affects all of us and a position of resistance seems somehow ornamental.’
The scale of the growth is pretty terrifying and Koolhaas is right that the future of China is a ‘compelling conundrum’, though that makes it sound like a tricky Advance Wars level rather than something to which all our fates are closely tied in a rather serious way. Basically if everyone in China starts to consume resources at the rate we do in the UK/US etc. we’re pretty much fucked, probably in a matter of hours*. Still the myths of capitalism, that the worlds resources are not finite and that economic growth will sort everything out, remain untouched. China’s ‘modernisation’ is viewed (with some concerns about fabric imports) as a triumph of the system. Surely part of the same short sightedness that means we still celebrate increased highstreet spending etc. as a sign that everything’s going OK with the economy, with no thought for the fact that really what it means is we’re moving increasingly quickly towards the point where we run out of stuff and the economy undergoes, euphemistically speaking, some fairly major adjustment. Happy Tuesday!
Also see :
Jim’s post on the uneven distribution of China’s economic growth. And,
this animation showing a massive ageing of China’s population over the next few decades is a surely cause for concern in a country with essentially no welfare provision.
*Not that I’ve done the maths or anything.
Pack Lunch Peril -
October 17th, 2005
I have a habit of eating my pack lunch at about 11 in the morning. Today I made two sandwiches so I could have one at 11 and one at actual lunch time. They were both eaten by 10:37. I am weak.
