Alasdair Watson

Nice summary of why I still prefer buying music, and using iTunes to using Spotify. (Although saying that, I have spent quite a chunk of this week using Spotify, to listen to something specific that I don't happen to own yet.)

You shitehawk motherfucker, Johnson. You lying little shitweasel. The obfuscations your spokefuckwits come out with aren't even tying to be convincing any more. Why are you comparing the year 2000, when the buses were quite badly fucked, with this year? Could it be because if we compare last year's figures, when the buses work pretty bloody well, it will become apparent that your argument is arrant toss? Why, yes, I think it is. And the fact that you think we won't notice is a mark of your filthy dimwitted arrogance. (In case anyone's wondering why I seem so exercised by this, it's partly because I am reminded of the fact that this man who I genuinely believe to be evil is running my city, and that always winds me up, and partly that as someone who has commuted by bus for most of the last ten years, I am in a position to know how much better the buses are now than they were, and I dread them going back to the way they were.)

I was slighly horrified to read Nick Davies (a journalist I normally have a lot of respect for, and consider his book Dark Heart to be mandatory reading) article in the Graudiad yesterday, which contained the elemetary error that just because a six month operation had failed to successfully prosecute anyone for sex trafficking in the UK, the problem wasn't that bad. Here is an excellent rebuttal to that piece, also from the Grauniad (which itself contains a link to Mr Davies original piece at the top, which is why I haven't linked it here.)

Wish I'd been at this talk. Still, filed for later reference.

I shall work on this. I'm pretty relaxed, but I'm not as observant as I could perhaps be. Still, it's nice to know that "Be Lucky!" can be taken as an instruction, rather than just generic good wishes…

Absolutely superb hexagonal tiled map of London boroughs.

Once every seven yeats, Sagmeister closes his studio completely for one year. Here, he gives a talk at TED on what he gets from that year, and it's a fascinating and compelling idea. I wonder if I could arrange to take a sabbatical somehow – I've been at this for ten years, and I know my general level of enthusiasm for hacking about with the next is not what it was…

"I can just about forgive the tendency of these programs to hit the reset switch at the end of every episode, returning the universe to pristine un-played-with shape in time for the next dramatic interlude; even though it's the opposite of real SF (a disruptive literature that focusses intently on revolutionary change), I recognize the limits of the TV series as a medium."

Mr Stross hits the nail on the head of why I don't get on with televised SF – I'm less willing to forgive the reset switch for exactly that reason.

Ever wondered what your oystercard really looks like? The Ghost In The Field shows us the hidden signals underneath fabric of our cities – the invisible maps of data and super-frequency chattering that increasingly underpin our daily lives. What is your data ghost like?

"Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again." This is not just a rule for getting web traffic, it is the single simplest rule for a happy life.