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Monday Links from the Treadmill vol. LXXXVIII

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    Monday Links from the Treadmill vol. LXXXVIII

    What a mad weekend: drove home Friday evening, worked from home on Saturday till about 22:30, drove back to London Sunday morning and worked in the office or studio or whatever it's called until gone 23:00

    Luckily, I just had time to compile these:
    • Overdone: Why are restaurant websites so horrifically bad? - "The first thing that pops up when you visit the website of the San Francisco restaurant Fleur de Lys is a nearly full-screen animation of celebrity chef Hubert Keller's autograph. That makes sense—when I'm choosing a restaurant, the first thing I want to know is, Can the chef sign his name?" It is remarkable that, in this day and age, it's still so uncommon to find a restaurant website that leads with things like when they open and what's on the menu

    • Out on a limb - "The latest revelations of dirty tricks at the News of the World have brought it all flooding back: Fleet Street as it was, newsrooms clouded in cigarette smoke, pounding typewriters, thundering presses shaking the whole building *– and Stuart Kuttner." Jack Lundin remembers his dealings with the former managing editor of the News of the Screws.

    • Approximately 3 minutes inside the head of my 2 year old - "Each of these 'emotions' lasts about 3 seconds." Comedian Jason Good promotes the joys of parenting, or possibly birth control.

    • 12 Types of Bad Tech Names - Carol Pinchefsky considers some of the more unfortunate names given to technology products: "I.Beat Blaxx. It’s an MP3 player. It’s black. It’s…horrific."

    • How Programmers Get Rich - Time magazine article from 1982 on the nascent microcomputer software industry: "By having the wit to develop programs that enable the machines to do a variety of tasks that users particularly want or need, stay-at-home software experts, many of them kids, are getting rich."

    • The Framing of al-Megrahi - "It is, of course, now all about oil. Only a simpleton could believe that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted of responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, was not recently returned to his home in Libya because it suited Britain. The political furore is very obviously contrived, since both the British and American governments know perfectly well how and for what reasons he came to be prosecuted." Gareth Peirce on the supposed Lockerbie bomber; it will be interesting to see if more information relating to this case emerges from the ruins of Gathafi's state.

    • When universes collide, how will we know when it happens? - "We don't know how many bubbles of inflationary universes might have seeded in some sort of over-arching background called a "false vacuum." This is a part of a larger string theory problem: it is so generic that the number of universes and the values of fundamental constants in those universes are largely unconstrained. One way to narrow the field is to look for evidence of these other bubbles. This is exactly what a group of researchers has done." There is almost certainly an alternative universe in which Chris Lee's article has a less clumsily-phrased title.

    • Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? - "Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price." It probably took John Tierney several months to decide to write this article for the New York Times.

    • Escaping the Digital Dark Age - "Due to the relentless obsolescence of digital formats and platforms, along with the ten-year life spans of digital storage media such as magnetic tape and CD-ROMs, there has never been a time of such drastic and irretrievable information loss as right now." Ironically, Stewart Brand's important article on this subject has to be found on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine

    • The Art of Clean Up: Sorting and Stacking Everyday Objects - "Swiss artist Ursus Wehrli is releasing a new book on The Art of Clean Up, where he takes everyday scenes of disorder and rearranges them into neat rows, sorted by different attributes such as color, size, shape, and type, etc." Jolly good:



    Happy invoicing!

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