January 2008
31 posts
Name of the day: Yinka Adegoke →
UK to make kids learn to cook →
Something very traditionally British about this. I imagine it will be utter chaos. Highpoints of the article: Photo of a legume arrangement, captioned “Some children are said to have trouble identifying vegetables” — which makes the pedant in me giggle at the idea of a child being presented with said arrangement and not being able to identify it as, well, vegetables. And the fact...
Prosthetic-limbed runner disqualified from... →
How cool is it that someone who once would have been termed “handicapped” can be disqualified for being faster, better, than the “normals”? The day comes closer when “normal” is the term used to describe the disadvantaged and augmentation is the norm?
I swear
that yesterday evening, waiting to turn right at the Nishi-Azabu junction, I saw a man cross the road in front of me walking a sizeable black Persian cat on a lead. It wasn’t a dog; it had that unwilling, slightly bent-kneed walk that cats do when they’re on full alert.
Jobs enthuses about MacBook Air to NYT →
Jobs looks like a disembodied head and hand floating in space. I do want one of these.
Cover It Live →
Blog-embeddable liveblogging app. Doesn’t seem to work with tumblr, unfortunately; anything in an iframe tag either gets blitzed or displayed as plain text, as far as I can tell.
Abe: My ass made an ass of me →
One shouldn’t mock, given that the ulcerative colitis from which he suffers sounds particularly nasty. Still, there are a couple of fishy points here, principally that his count of a movement every 30 minutes would seem to put him in the “fulminant” category, which “[u]nless treated…will soon lead to death”. (Via TokyoMango)
The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the... →
The section on how Jobs had software engineers working on hardware hidden in wooden boxes reminds me vaguely of YT’s coder mother in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.
From flux to form: The finest gadgets you can...
It’s partly the fault of CES, I know, but there are a crop of tasty if not quite solid gadgets floating around, a few of which seemed worthy of a roundup. Forgive me cribbing massively from the usual sources. First is the Pacemaker. What is it? A DJ iPod with a 120GB hard disk in a form factor smaller than a PSP. Includes effects, pitch-shifting, and touchpad and crossfader controls....
The Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2007 →
Some more under-the-radar than others. Anyone reading tech blogs will have seen the fuss made about armed robots (the story on which we link to here), for example. Saying that they raise “ethical and technological issues about the future of intelligent machines in war” seems early, though; they’re remote-controlled weapons rather than robots. Putting something on a battlefield...
