Black Ink

This one's done the rounds like a bastard over the last few days, but just in case you haven't seen it. Stuff on systems, American healthcare, and Project Cybersyn, all of which are worth learning about.

Alan Moore pays tribute to Robert Anton Wilson. The sound isn't perfect, but it's still, well, it's Alan Moore, talking about Robert Anton Wilson. It is therefore very good for you.

Nice article. Also worth noting that I'd never seen the accompanying photo before, the Olympic logo suddenly makes much more sense when it is seen pained on brick walls like graffiti. Really, *much* more sense. I really hope I'll start see it thrown up like tags all over London in the run-up to the games, because then it'll do it's job so much better…

It is exactly what it says on the tin. It even has a couple of five-star reviews. I really don't know what else to say.

Let us play a fun game, in the name of encouraging clear thinking, and making us all better and more functional human beings. The above website is a list of five basic errors of thinking that geeks often make in regard of social situations. So: go, read, then cam back and tell me: which of these do *you* suffer from, and what can you do about it? I for example, suffer from a bit of #2, which tends to manifest itself as a bloody minded tendency to be a bit "this is who I am, and if you don't like me then kindly fuck off". And what I do about it is to periodically remind myself that I am not actually perfect, whatever I might think, and that it is possible to like flawed people.

Or something like that, anyway. I've probably linked this before, but I don't care, it's worth linking again, if only for the Lovecraftian horror of "Aleph and Tentacles".

I know I get more done if I am permitted to multi-task. Not all those tasks are work, but I do a lot of my best thinking as a background process. Plus it should be screamingly obvious that happier, more relaxed and most o fall better informed people are just plain more useful in a wider variety of contexts.

Shit, I may have to investiagte getting a copy of this. I've managed to avoid potatoshop for a couple of years now, and just work in Lightroom, but this could be really useful.

Just go and look. A blog of total beauty. Keep scrolling down for more visual gems. Haven't seen anything this visually exciting in ages.

Absolutely fascinating thinking. Cognitively speaking, there are only two scarce resources – bandwidth and attention and the economies of a post-scarcity future (if we can get there without blowing ourselves up of fucking the environment beyond recovery) are going to have to be mediated by those factors, rather than traditional supply-and-demand, so I love to read thinking that brings them into play.

Internet friend Ariana Osborne on the magic of the present. If you're annoyed with your lack of jetpack, I suggest this as a dose of perspective.

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the 'rat race' — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing."

"The morning question, what good shall I do today?" "Evening question, What good have I done today?"

This is where you live. Go and look.

Interesting piece on the design of objects, and the effect it can have on perceptions of their use.

My brain is a bit fried right now, and even though I'm mainlining coffee, I'm not in a state to really retain serious information. So I'm marking this as one to come back to, as it looks interesting.

I cut my teeth building systems for a local newspaper company – one, in fact, that I had delivered as a teenager, for pocket money. It's very easy to dismiss local papers as lacking in real news content, and full instead of trivial local rubbish, but the reality is that they provide local-community level news that really is important to the daily lives of many people. There is a very real need to find alternative infrastructure to distribute this information, ideally in a non-digital form.

I think I could have fun with some of this shit. Need to go LED shopping soon.