Links for Friday October 28th 2011

  • ASHES: A graphic novel by Alex de Campi & Jimmy Broxton
    Been meaning to link to this all week. Old chum Alex de Campi, who you may recall did the rather excellent comic SMOKE some years back, is looking for backing to produce a sequel, with art by the superb Jimmy Broxton. I can confidently predict that this will be absolutely brilliant, and you should fork over your cash at once. (I would have already done so, but Kickstarter hates me, and will not let me pledge. So I encourage you all to do so instead, because I really want to read this.)

Links for Wednesday October 12th 2011

  • notes.variogr.am – Why music ID resolution matters to every music fan on Facebook
    A bit techy, but a good read, and an insight into the problems that Spotify and last.fm have to work hard to solve. I'm not posting this because it's hard on Facebook – they've stepped into a difficult arena, and have some catching up to do, but that's not a crime – but because it's an insight in how complex technical problems have very simple, very direct real-world impacts.

On Folksonomies

These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled ‘Celestial Empire of benevolent Knowledge’. In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies. — Jorge Luis Borges, The Analytical Language Of John Wilkins

(via Pasta & Vinegar)

How do you categorise things?