British art stalwart D'Israeli take a look at the architectual and design history of one of the greatest of all the future cities: Mega City One.

He starts out spelling how we're fucked on an economic and environmental level. And then he gets in to what we're doing about it. Some of this shit is fascinating – a set of tools for a completely new system of economics.

By the end of the 21st century, there are predicted to be 19 cities with a population of over 20 million. London is one of them, currently has a population of around 7-8 million, and large parts of it's infrastructure are creaking at the seams. We urgently need more thinking on how we will cope with the supercities of the near future, and I'll watch this project with interest.

100 quid. For the kind of computer you can shove in a corner, hook to a network, and hack to do lots and lots of different things. And it'll do it silently, and without eating power. This may be handy at some point in the near-ish future.

Steve Albini's breakdown of exactly how much a band can expect now to earn in a normal record industry contact. Figures would need to be adjusted for inflation, but I bet they're still proportionally the same. I've seen this a few times over the years, I just wanted to log it in case I need to refer to it again.

Some notes about the practicalities of nanomachinery in the body – both the propulsion/navigation, and the means by which they might operate on us.

Good to know that my future cybernetic implants aren't likely to need batteries.

After the links the other week, here's a talk about how they newspapers might yet be kept alive: by making them beautiful objects.

A fascinating talk on the some of the possible neuroscientific explanations for some of the more remarkable and ill-understood operations of the brain.

I shall be sending these in future. Well, maybe not, but there are a few things in here that made me laugh.)

This could be a really useful little learning tool.

I've got a few different quotes I'd consider having put on me, and this place might provide inspiration for design/context for them.

I don't have time to read this in full right now, so I'm bookmarking it so I remember to read it at some point over the weekend.

Mac App to lock email/internet away for periods of time. Killer feature: once started, it cannot be undone, unlike most other, similar apps. Handy for those days when you really have to just dig in and get something done.

Alan Moore's Big Numbers #3, made available on-line with his blessing. To say this is a big unexpected would be understating things a bit, but well done that man.

Alan Moore's Big Numbers #3, made available on-line with his blessing. To say this is a big unexpected would be understating things a bit, but well done that man.

Ironically, the police state that we're increasingly living in "for out own saftey" is what's moving toward to the belief that armed insurrection is the only answer.

My former colleague Phil has recently won a well deserved award for a very clever means of producing a viral music video.

Be Afraid! Your Neighbour Is Not Like You, And You Should Fear Them! If Someone Deviates From The Norm, They Must Be Investigated. Do Not Watch The Cameras, The Cameras Are For Watching You. Be Afraid! (fucksake)

This may or may not be the real deal, but the fact that at this stage they're just saying "look we found this" rather than claiming 100% certainty now makes them a bit more plausible than the previous bunch. Here's hoping, eh?

This is simultaneously a massively nerdy book, a notion of staggering genius, and an instant must-read.

"Yes, halfway through this project we'll discover the impossible, but we know how to build through the impossible. Impossible is when we do our best work."

About bloody time. There is no reason why any cultural artefact produced since we started using computers should be ever be out of print.

I say again: fuck your jet pack. One of the (many) reasons that I would not move to the countryside is that I would be obliged to own a car. If this comes off as planned, and appears in the UK, this will remove my major objection to owning a car. I'm still not likely to buy one, what with living in a civilised place, but it's still impressive.

I knew that JSON wasn't ideal for large data blocks, but I'd never have guessed that something as simple as a custom data format and a split() function would be so much faster.

This one's worth circulating far and wide – police using the various powers they've been given over the last while to suppress a peaceful protest.

There's plenty of non-geek stuff in today's pile of links. Just skip past this one.

Highlight " Because as software becomes a medium through which the city is accessed and made social, the paired need for both open software and hardware is clear. The design of the open public space is dependent on the design of the open software which is, increasingly, dependent on the design of open cities."

Might be handy in future projects – one of the first things I almost invariable do it set up a user class to handle logins and similar rubbish, and it'd be nice to have a handy boxed-up model to do all that with.

Matt Jones identifies the really interesting thing about yesterday's Iphone 3.0 announcement, and it's not copy-and-paste.

This looks like a fairly decent starting point, anyway. Of course, that's probably just what the government wants me to think.

Today is "everything you didn't need to know about intelligence, and weren't afraid to ask" day.

Fascinating espionage-related stuff I had never heard of before now.

I probably don't need the little finger on my left hand, you know…