Warren Ellis » GUEST INFORMANT: Jess Nevins Jess Nevins does a guest stint on Warren's site, and, in the process, teaches us all something about the history of fandom. I imagine a good number of you will have seen this already, but if you're someone with a connection to fandom who doesn't read Warren's blog in some format, I commend this particular post to your attention. Don't you want to know what Byron thought of about fandom?
Home – Readmill I've just signed up for the beta of this service. Will dump books across to it in the next day or so, and give it a go. The app certainly looks nice, just as a shame apple don't expose an API to pull books out of the iBooks app, meaning I'm going to wind up with (quite a lot of) duplicate data on my iPad.
What Does Google Mean By “Evil?” (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought) This has been on my mind lately, and it's an interesting perspective. Swartz is suggesting that Google's definition of "evil" is "not making things worse for users in order to make more money". It's not a bad suggestion, and if it's accurate, it's still more than many companies even attempt, but (as is probably obvious if you've listened to me bang on for a while) I think it's perfectly possible to be "evil" and still hew to that definition. (I also don't agree that the G+/real names nonsense passes that definition of "evil", but that's another thing.)
Scripting Languages: PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby – Hyperpolyglot Likely of no interest to non-webdev-nerds, but potentially of enormous value to me, in terms of learning new languages. I sort of vaguely know Ruby, but this direct translation from PHP to Ruby would speed what little ruby hacking I do.
It’s Sexy A-Levels! A blog exploring the hypothesis that UK newspapers believe that only attractive girls in low cut tops do A-Levels.
fleet street fox: More pictures like this, please. A counter-argument: it is excellent that at A-level results time, the papers fill up with photos of attractive young women. Less sexist that you think.
Special ed student raped by classmate, forced by school to apologize to him, then raped again, lawsuit claims (UPDATED) – Boing Boing I wanted to link to this not because it's directly relevant to me (other than, y'know, as a human being with an ounce of compassion somewhere under a rock in here), or even because it's an exceptionally horrible story (it is, but the plain truth is that worse things happen every day, and I don't link to news about them), but just because it strikes me as a very, very stark reminder of how, even in the "developed" world, we still have such a very very long way to go before we can call ourselves civilised.
Your awful dates, in 140 characters – storify.com Rhodri Marsden has been collecting people's dreadful 1st date stories. Read them if you want to feel better about your dating life (no matter how bad you think it's been, I promise you, it isn't as bad as these stories) or even if you just want a few cheap laughs.
The Magistrate’s Blog: Contempt This one is worth flagging up, for those of my friends who are shocked and appalled at the actions of Wandsworth (and other councils) in their attempts to evict the families of those who are convicted in connection with the riots. Broadly speaking the message is this: don't worry, it isn't going to happen. The courts quite literally cannot allow it to happen. So: spread the word about that, because the only think this tactic is for is bullying and scaremongeriing, and that's easy to stop with information. But other than that, expend your energy on other matters, because this one's sorted.