The kids are alright

On London’s absurd anti-anti-social behavior zones.

There’s a curfew for unsupervised under-16s, from 9pm to 6am. Any group of 2 or more people can be broken up and/or that the member of the group have to leave the designated area (if they do not live there). Crucially, police do not have to see actual anti-social behaviour, but a constable in uniform has reasonable grounds for believing that the presence or behaviour of a group of two or more persons in any public place in the relevant locality has resulted, or is likely to result, in any members of the public being intimidated, harassed, alarmed or distressed.

When I checked to see who had bookmarked this, all but one of the seven were already in my network (I’ve since added the outlier, dotx3).

This link is a perfect candidate for becoming a shibboleth (shibbolink?) by which I identify people I might add to my network. If somebody saves this link, there’s a good chance they’re interested in any number of things that also interest me (e.g., geography, mapping, London, and the rights of marginalized groups).

I’ve begun keeping track of similarly distinguishing bookmarks using the shibbolink tag. We’ll see how it goes.

The green way to cross the Thames: by cable car

A recent report comparing six alternatives for crossing the Thames found cable cars the most sustainable option.

Cable cars are increasingly used for mass transit in world cities and across rivers because they need little space, have virtually no waiting time, can run at over 20mph, and have very low emissions. They are already used in New York, Istanbul, Vancouver, Madrid, Caracas and Hamburg, and other cities are planning systems. A cable car has crossed the Rhine in Cologne since 1957.

Conan O’Brien rode on the Rhine cable car during his 1997 visit to Cologne (fast forward to about 1:21).

VAT cut as court rules that video and light art is sculpture

The UK’s VAT and Duties Tribunal recently ruled that works by electric-light installation artist Dan Flavin and video artist Bill Viola are not subject to the same customs duties as ordinary “image projectors [or] photographic enlargers and reducers” or “chandeliers and electrical ceiling or wall light fittings.”

It’s a good ruling. The article points out the American precedent: in 1928 a US court ruled that Brancusi’s Bird in Space was not actually a kitchen utensil.

Art from remote sensing

Data for decision

[via TomC]
The video’s about how they did GIS in the punchcard era.

Sensity by Stanza
[via anne]

This artwork visualizes the dynamic data around my environment as an audio visual artwork. I set up a wireless sensor network around my house in London. I live nearby a railway line, a factory, some trees and a mobile phone mast. (This is using real data).

The city is made up of bits of data that change. This artwork captures this change to try to understand the underlying fabric of city space. The artwork monitors the environment for change and relays these changes via the sensors.

Terminus, the god
[via blackbeltjones]

In Roman religion, Terminus was the god who protected boundary markers; his name was the Latin word for such a marker.

Ancient writers believed that the worship of Terminus had been introduced to Rome during the reign of the first king Romulus (traditionally 753–717 BC) or his successor Numa (717–673 BC). Modern scholars have variously seen it as the survival of an early animistic reverence for the power inherent in the boundary marker, or as the Roman development of proto-Indo-European belief in a god concerned with the division of property.

Incidentally, Terminus was the first name for the settlement now known as Atlanta.

Torque Control
[via jbushnell]
“This is the blog of the editorial staff of Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association.”