Alasdair – Page 64 – Alasdair Watson

Links for Wednesday February 16th 2011

Notes From The Zeitgeist: Get Your Sugar
Some absolutely beautiful prints of unlikely chracters done as calaveras. Particularly like the Pacman and Spy vs Spy ones.

Ben Bashford – Notebook of Things
Shotnote – notepaper design to be photographed with an iphone camera using a special app, for organisation/archive purposes. If my beloved Fieldnotes were to do this, I would be fucking ecstatic.

Nerd saves entire BBC archive for $3.99, you can help for free – bengoldacre – secondary blog
Well, this is pleasing. Although I'm still boggled at the BBC's decision.
The Best Questions For A First Date « OkTrends
Another bunch of interesting statistical slice-and-dices from OKC. I really hope they keep doing this, even through they've been acquired by match.com

Why second-hand bookshops smell good
File under: interesting trivia I never knew. Also: "Why yes, given enough time, science *can* explain everything."

Adactio: Journal—Erase and rewind
The BBC it seems, refuse to learn lessons from their own history. I'm usually one to defend the BBC against a lot of the flak it gets, but this is just plain stupid. Archiving these sites should be a matter of maybe an hour's work each, at most.
Isotope
Tech bollocks. JS (specifically, jQuery, my new best friend) library for doing all sorts of very nice layout/sorting tricks. Bound to be handy.
Woke Up, Got Out of Bed, Dragged a Comb Across My Head – morning routine food | Ask MetaFilter
I have been reflecting of late that I could do with adjusting my morning routine a bit. A lot of what's in here is moderately standard hippy crap, but the annoying thing is that I know quite a lot of it works, if one sticks to it. So I should probably get on that.
To us, it’s an obscure shift of tax law. To the City, it’s the heist of the century
If you live in the UK, stop what you're doing and read this, assuming you haven't already. This is somewhere between absurd and terrifying, and I simply don't understand how anyone in Cameron's position can contemplate it. Well, I do, but the only way it makes sense to me is active malice and contempt for other people, which is a motivation I find hard to ascribe to any human being.

NoteSlate /// intuitively simple monochrome paper alike tablet device
If this isn't vapourware, then I am at least interested in having a play with one. I've never been happy with scribbling handwritten noted on the ipad, but I do want to stop carrying paper for scribbling on.

Curveship: Interactive Fiction + Interactive Narrating
Potentially interesting, if a bit ahead of me right now.

V&A Victoria Albert Museum > ‘Pause and Wonder’ by Aardvark (Print)
Not by my employers, but by a Hastings-based operation, selling this particular object through the V&A shop. I like their work (you may recall that I linked/purchased their 2010 manifesto last year), and think this is particularly lovely. I'm bookmarking it as a memo to self, so that I remember to try and pick this up next time I'm in the V&A.

This is the Big Society, you see. It must be big, to contain so many volunteers. | openDemocracy
Philip Pullman, speaking in defence of libraries, neatly skewers the problem with Dangerous Dave's beloved Big Society, where we will all help each other and and volunteer to keep public services going: who do you know has the spare time, energy and ability to go without earning a living or looking after the kids in order to volunteer?
YouTube – "Premakes" Up! (1965)
A trailer for Pixar's Up! reimagined as a 1965 live-action Disney movie. Nice work.

Ten Obscure Factoids Concerning Albert Einstein
Reading this made me smile. I have no other reason to link it.