I don’t like sitting in a smoky restaurant or pub and intensely dislike having smoking in my house. So you might think I’d be upset at the “smoker’s victory” being reported by the local and international press. The constitutional court has ruled that the law in some German states, prohibiting smoking in one-room establishments, . . . → Read More: A smoker’s “victory” in Germany?
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Following up on the last posting I made here, I see that Cory Doctorow has written an article in today’s Guardian, about how the music industry is slowly commiting suicide: This month’s announcement of a back-room deal between ISPs (internet service providers) and the big record companies to spy on suspected copyright infringers and . . . → Read More: Cory Doctorow: A suicide note from the music industry I can’t recall having seen such an idiotic idea for a long time: Internet users could face an annual charge of up to £30 to download music, under plans to be unveiled today that aim to tackle illegal file-sharing. [British] Ministers are backing proposals that would enable millions of broadband users to pay an . . . → Read More: Harebrained scheme Jean-Philippe Bouchaud and staff at Capital Fund Management in Paris studied the news feeds from Dow Jones and Reuters that provide real-time reports of items of potential interest to investors. Looking at over 90,000 news items in a two-year period, they investigated how sudden movements in stock prices were linked to the ticker reports. . . . → Read More: Why the economy keeps crashing Antonio Torralba, Rob Fergus and William T. Freeman have come up with a novel visual dictionary of the English language. Using nearly 8 million images from Google Images, they have created a pictorial dictionary of some 53 thousand nouns: We present a visualization of all the nouns in the English language arranged by . . . → Read More: 80 million tiny images (Photo from English Russia) When I see photos of machines like these, I am extremely glad that I haven’t ever had to fight in a war: During the WW2 Russian Army was using a ‘Fire Hedgehog’ – the set of 88 Tommy-gun alike machine guns loaded into a plane. It was used at . . . → Read More: The Russian Hedgehog Short video illustrating some of Otlet’s ideas Paul Otlet (1868 – 1944) proposed many of the ideas which have been implemented in the world wide web – including the idea of a library of information much like Wikipedia – and actually implemented his ideas in the form of the Mundaneum, back in 1910. The . . . → Read More: The Mundaneum – the forgotten precursor to the internet Reading the newspapers at the moment, you could be excused for thinking the prices for everything have been climbing steeply – oil by 50% in 2008, and in the last 12 months it has doubled in price, all manner of foodstuffs and other raw materials such as steel. So I was surprised, today, . . . → Read More: Stay off the bleeding edge |
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