Skip to main contentTag: Politics
- Google Android Personal Thoughts – “Uniformity is not a word you’ll find in Android’s dictionary. How about the fact that the application icons aren’t the same size. Uh, why? Since there’s no transparent padding around the icons … there’s no uniformity in the touch areas when you go to tap on an icon.” These things probably don’t seem important to Google but the attention to detail is what makes the iPhone (usually) a pleasure to use. I’ve not used an Android handset but these things would bug me pretty quickly.
- Japanese Photographer Bends Electricity to His Will – Beautiful.
- The Cost of Care – Nice graphic showing the relationship between the cost of healthcare and life-expectancy.
- exactly – “What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?” Looks like we’re not going to find out because of a few hold-outs…
- A Typeface for the Underground – Design and typography on the London Underground. Fascinating stuff.
- Britain to Levy a One-Time Tax on Banker Bonuses – “To a large extent the levy underpins a quite broad understanding here — even among those generally sympathetic to the industry — that bank profits this year were largely subsidized by the government due to historically low interest rates.” The best discussion I’ve seen of today’s pre-Budget speech is, bizarrely, in a US paper.
- News Corp to Offer Plaid Stamps! – “Giving Murdoch the benefit of the doubt, then, I’m guessing he simply doesn’t mean what he said. Perhaps he just wanted to sow a little confusion, get some publicity and maybe a concession or two from Google.”
- The night the Berlin Wall fell – “For me it was that rare occasion when a story was unqualified good news. After years watching the way communism was practised, I felt no need to mourn its collapse. Whatever came next had to be better.” Twenty years since the fall of the Berlin wall.
- OMG Ponies!!! (Aka Humanity: Epic Fail) – “The real world has failed us. It has concentrated on local simplicity, leading to global complexity. It’s easy to organise a meeting if everyone is in the same time zone – but once you get different continents involved, invariably people get confused. It’s easy to get writing to work uniformly left to right or uniformly right to left – but if you’ve got a mixture, it becomes really hard to keep track of. The diversity which makes humanity such an interesting species is the curse of computing.”
- “The Government” – “Try something. Every time somebody complains about the evils or failings of ’the government,’ strike out ’the government’ and see what results.” (via @marcoarment)
- People get red-dy – “The idea of a ginger festival may sound like little more than a bit of fun, but when 3,000 redheads came together for a recent gathering it became a bonding experience.”
- Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why. – “It’s not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It’s as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.”
- Life after Humph – “The show is such a fixture, such a massive part of the radio landscape, I think British radio would be the poorer without it so they made a great decision.” Couldn’t have said it better myself. Welcome back I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue
- Iran election: state moves to end ‘Facebook revolution’ – At best this is very suspicious. And changes are we’re not talking about a best case scenario here. Let’s hope that those in power see sense.
- I stole your images, put them back or I will call a lawyer? – When people steal my images I’m never sure whether I should be flattered or offended. If I ever get an email like this I’ll know which way to think…
- Apple drawing 3.0 line in the sand for iPhone developers – This can only mean that the release is getting pretty close. And, significantly, that the APIs are stabilising — I had to rewrite almost everything I did with the first beta when the latest version of the developer kit came out.
- DNA Database Doublecross – “Yet again this government shows its deep contempt for international courts, and demonstrates its profoundly cynical belief that the innocent simply haven’t been proved guilty yet.”
- Jacqui Smith enlists high street help for ID cards scheme – Doesn’t using high street shops to make ID cards make it substantially less secure? Wasn’t the whole point that ID cards were an unbreakable scheme? This just gets worse and worse.