English things

A set of brand-name English food product illustrations.

See also the set of two Scottish things.

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.

A Newbie's Guide to Publishing: Confident or Delusional?

“Confident writers believe in persistence. Delusional writers believe in talent.”

If I want this in 96pt Rockwell Std Bold, taped to the wall over my monitor, does that make me a delusional writer?

Yeah, I thought so.

Is the Crime Mapping initiative failing UK communities?

A Cimex study looked at a bunch of police-operated crime maps in the UK and found them confusing and difficult to use, even when compared to the tabular crime data presented on UpMyStreet, a non-governmental website offering information for people planning a move within or to the UK.

The police websites mentioned in the article include:

West Yorkshire Police Authority
Greater Manchester Police
West Midlands Police
Metropolitan Police

How accurate was Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" about the future?

Martin Belam compares the present with Kubrick’s vision of it. While Kubrick got plenty right, he failed to predict that meetings of the future might become less humane.

No PowerPoint

Part of the reason that Dr Floyd has been sent to Clavius Base is to deliver a morale-boosting speech to a crew bemused by what they have unearthed on the moon.

Frankly, there is no way that this would have been done in the real 2001 without the judicious use of PowerPoint featuring Excel charts and inspiring pictures of puppies, and probably some free branded goodies to take away and cheer everybody up.

Taliban leader “addicted” to his iPhone

Al Jazeera correspondent Hamish MacDonald asks Mullah Zaif, a former Taliban official, about his iPhone:

“I’m addicted,” he said, “the internet is great on this, very fast.”

Originally on this page [scroll down to the 7 February post].

Trees, cabs and crime in San Francisco (part deux)

Urban tree locations come courtesy of Friends of the Urban Forest, one day’s worth of taxi cab locations from Yellow Cab (via Cabspotting), and a week’s worth of reported crime incidents from Crime Reports.

Originally uploaded by shawnbot

X Ways to Ride a Bike in the City

A typoology typology of riding mentalities; some of these may be used in combination.

Risk vs. Reward: … A straight shot through a light without slowing is statistical suicide, but a measured glide based on time of day, knowledge of territory, and exposure to all of the sensory information around can be a reasonable response to certain situations. The exaggerated articulation of this internal math, in pointed deep glances left and right, can be a useful cue to drivers that you’re aware of the danger and acting anyway.

25 Famous Librarians Who Changed History

Were he alive today, Philip Larkin might have taken offense to his name being so close to that of Laura Bush.

The section listing political figures is worth reading; Mao Zedong, Golda Meir, and J. Edgar Hoover were all librarians before embarking on the careers for which we remember them today.

Pseudoscientific submission slips into science journal, Swedish stealth ships not suspected

Creationism Slips Into a Peer-Reviewed Journal
[via nielsen]
The submission was a review paper of some of the recent literature on mitochondrial interactions but the paragraph that gave it away was just a hodgepodge of lyrics from DC Talk’s Jesus Freak album.

Swedish Visby-Class Corvette Is First Operational Stealth Ship in the World

[via hawktrainer]
The ship looks really, really cool. Except for that protrusion at the top. It’s probably called a radar cone but I can’t help but think of a dunce cap, which might be a good thing. Dunce caps are named for John Duns Scotus, a 13th-century Scottish philosopher, who accepted

the wearing of conical hats to increase learning. He noted that wizards supposedly wore such things; an apex was considered a symbol of knowledge and the hats were thought to “funnel” knowledge to the wearer.

The ships are also said to be equipped with a particularly sharp version of Occam’s razor.

Charles Avery’s altermodern island
[via rodcorp]

8. When The Guardian wrote about Avery they put one of their little Bluffer’s Guide quizzes at the end, which said: “Move over YBA: He is part of a new generation of artists practicing under the banner of Altermodern. Alter what?: A term coined by the French theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, meaning art made now in response to a global society and as a reaction against standardisation and commercialism.” (The Altermodern was covered on Click Opera here.)

I carried over the links in the original post; both are worth a visit.

Preoccupations
[via jbushnell]

A blog, just added to my NetNewsWire. See also: delicious.com/Preoccupations.