Category: Misc
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Book Sculptures
In Cambridge at the Cambrige University Press bookshop, there’s an amazing 12 Days of Christmas window display. An artist named Justin Rowe has fashioned these, and they’re amazing. They’re all winnable in a charity raffle, but I went in and while I was tempted by How to Fold It: The Mathematics of Linkages, Origami and…
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Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990
Any exhibition that includes a heavy dose of Blade Runner (one of my favourite films of all time), and ends with the video of New Order’s Bizarre Love Triange (one of my favourite songs of all time), is going to be very popular with me. And Postmodernism at the V&A is definitely a worthwhile exhibition.…
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Passports Don’t Like Washing Machines
That’s the sad news that I learnt this week following an unfortunate incident that essentially involved me not checking the pockets of a pair of trousers. Interestingly, if you need a replacement in a rush and you check the relevant section of the Direct.gov website, you are told that the Premium one-day service is not…
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All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace
I am very excited about this: It starts on Monday 23rd May at 9pm on BBC2.
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The Dangers of the Cloud
Putting all your worldly goods into the “cloud” is brilliant isn’t it? You simply upload, documents, music, files, pictures, movies, whatever… onto one of the many cloud based hosting sites. After all, it’s fiddly, time-consuming, and often expensive to sort out your own hosting solutions. And putting your documents in the cloud brings with it…
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Where’s The Gambling Commission When You Need It?
We learn that Swoopo has filed for bankruptcy. Good riddance. In case you’re unaware, Swoopo and similar “penny auction” websites work on the basis of selling so-called “bids” to their “auctions.” Say there’s a laptop on offer worth £1000. Bidding might start at £0.01, but prospective bidders must first buy their bids for – say…
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Queuing
We’re told that queuing is a very British thing, although as much as anything, that might be because other countries use their own words like “line” in the US. But what’s clear to me is that it’s not something I enjoy doing. I do it only when I need to. That might be paying for…
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The Most Incredible Thing
There seems to be a lot of ballet around at the moment. We’ve just had the awesome Black Swan, and on BBC Four at the moment, we’re two thirds of the way into a great behind the scenes documentary about English National Ballet (“Unprecedented access” and all). Sky Arts has been showing a series of…
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1000 Cranes
My brother teaches ethics, and he also spent a year teaching in Japan some years ago. If you’re involved in education, you might want to read a great suggestion he has for how school children might respond to the Japanese tsunami. It is linked with the story of Sadako Sasaki, the girl who wanted to…
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Empty Shop Fronts
My local council has an initiative called “Dressing Vacant Shops” which I only noticed today. Of course it’s somewhat ironic that the photos they’re using are of shops of the sort that have basically been driven out of business by supermarkets and large chains that make too many of our High Streets look identical.
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Click and Reserve
How does the High Street compete with the Internet? Recently there’s been a lot of talk about how unfair it is that the high street retailers have to compete with the £18 VAT avoidance that online retailers can work around if they sell their products from the Channel Islands. That’s been especially useful for CD…
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Snow Chaos
Read any paper, or turn on any television at the moment, and you’ll see nothing but stories of chaos caused by the snow. Heathrow is still a mess, several days after the last snow. It’s all the fault of the Spanish owned BAA (I’m not quite sure why the fact that it’s Spanish owned is…
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What’s An Ad In Your Social Media Stream Worth?
It’s a Friday today, and for a few of my colleagues here at work, that means free coffee. Let me explain. Vida e Caffé is part of a chain of coffee shops, one of whose branches is placed right opposite the front door to our office. People here are as addicted to coffee as people…