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• Commented on Hope is fading
  Who owns Freshjive? Are they big Republican donors like Urban Outfitters? I'd like to see an Obama "Still The Lesser Evil" T-shirt....
• Commented on Visualizing the decline of empires
  @16: To my knowledge, those countries do not have any more colonies. Britain still has a handful: the Falklands, Gibraltar, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands and a few islands in the south Atlantic (Tristan Da Cunha and Saint Helena come...
• Commented on Comic on the joy of online reading
  Lucy Knisley is awesome....
• Commented on H1N1: It's Pronounced "Hiney"
  Wouldn't the hiney virus be one which causes uncontrollable diarrhoea? (Perhaps it'd be the norovirus, i.e., the uncontrollable vomiting flu, in reverse.)...
• Commented on Conservative children's book vilifies Nancy Pelosi
  The political right, as a rule, generally don't have a sense of aesthetics, and in fact regard paying attention to how things look as suspicious; the mark of someone who has spent too much time in art galleries and universities...
• Commented on Apple patents anti-user attention-complianceware
  The next thing after DRM is ARM (Attention Rights Management), increasingly sophisticated ways of enforcing the social contract between consumers and advertisers. (What, you say that there is no such contract? They said the same thing about the idea of...
• Commented on Stupid, draw back your bow
  Wow! Those spammers must be good if they have a pill more than twice as good as Viagra......
• Commented on Graph compares rock music quality with US oil production 1949-2007
  There's no great mystery there; both rock'n'roll (in the classic sense venerated by Rolling Stone and such) and the age of cheap oil were correlated with the time of the Baby Boomers, from the aftermath of World War 2 to...
• Commented on Glittergeddon!
  The term "celebrity" doesn't mean what it used to; once a celebrity was someone who was regarded with admiration; nowadays, that has turned to a prurient contempt, gawping at every detail of their sex lives and jeering and hooting when...
• Commented on Glittergeddon!
  The populist right (meaning the UKIP, the BNP, papers such as the Sun and Daily Mail, and parts of the Conservative Party) in the UK is clamouring loudly to leave the EU. The more mainstream parts of it don't mention...
• Commented on Try the beef in "Wikipedia flavor"
  Wikipedia seems to be a recurring ingredient in Chinese cuisine; here it appears to be some kind of fungus used in a restaurant in Beijing, and in Taiwan, it's apparently a type of cheesecake....
• Commented on 20-year old Iraqi woman dies; father ran her over for being too Westernized
  The fact that he planned to flee to the UK worries me. Now, I'd hope that if the UK can extradite a borderline-autistic hacker and make Roman Polanski think twice about crossing its borders, it'd hand him over to the...
• Commented on British couple who blogged sailing trip around the world feared captured by Somali pirates
  @hallpass: The pirates don't need decent internet access in the middle of the seas to do their recon; it is documented that they have intelligence spotters in places like London, checking out shipping info they can publicly obtain and sending...
• Commented on Demented woodsy woodcuts from Dan Hillier
  Dan Hillier's brilliant. I have four of his prints here....
• Commented on Wearable hummingbird feeder: they'll think your eyes are juicy, delicious flowers!
  I once heard somewhere (the details escape me) that someone was killed whilst walking in his garden when a hummingbird flew into his ear and pierced his brain with its beak. If this is possible, attracting hummingbirds to one's face...
• Commented on European Internet sinking fast under 3-strikes proposals
  Of course, if the disconnected can sign up with another service or go to a net café, this will be ineffectual. They will have to introduce a Copyright Offenders' Register, and make it a criminal offence to provide internet access...
• Commented on Report on a revival meeting for the creepy Process Church
  Wasn't the Process Church big among the more freaky goths a while ago? Apparently industrial band Skinny Puppy named an album after it....
• Commented on Type design experts, browser makers, take another crack at webfonts
  The problem seems to be how to allow web-quality scalable fonts to be made available without allowing print-quality fonts to be downloaded (and thus cutting into sales revenue for typefaces for print, which will become increasingly a luxury product). I...
• Commented on Olympic Committee Member to Chicago bid team: US Customs is "harrowing experience"
  I've entered the US twice over the past few years, and have never had to wait for more than about 15 minutes (which is less than returning at Heathrow), and the staff have been friendly and polite. Mind you, on...
• Commented on Thoughts for Polanski apologists, by another woman raped at 13.
  If Polanski breathes another breath as a free man, it will be a grievious injustice. He needs to die in prison to send a message that, no, it's not OK to rape if you have power and status behind you....
• Commented on Wisconsin Tourism Federation loses to WTF, changes name
  Notice how the typography in the (undoubtedly hastily thrown together) new logo is off ("FEDERATION OF" is squashed together somewhat awkwardly). Not quite for the win there......
• Commented on How Islamist gangs use chat rooms to lure, torture and kill Iraqi gays
  I'll bet that there's a lot of closet cases among the killers. Think about it: trolling gay chat rooms, flirting and talking dirty, and then repudiating their suppressed gay desires with extreme brutality....
• Commented on Britain's postal-code database online at Wikileaks: produced at public expense, not owned by the public
  That seems to be par for the course in Britain; there is still a residual assumption that the public are subjects rather than citizens, and should know their place, which isn't to tinker with and mash up data that their...
• Commented on The Planet of Storms - 1962 Russian science fiction movie
  At some point, the robot is required to piggy-back two or three cosmonauts through a lava flow. As the molten lava eats at his feet, the robot decides that the extra weight (the cosmonauts) degrades his ability to forge the...
• Commented on The Masonic Myth, by Jay Kinney -- a no B.S. history of Freemasonry
  The rituals of Freemasonry seem like they could be fun; especially the direction they took in the US in the early 20th century, where it seemed to be less about mystical mumbo-jumbo than about ingenious japes and pranks (witness, for...
• Commented on Normalcy is the future
  How about: She poured a space-coffee, then touched the breakfast astrotable. "Where are my robo-shoes?" "Your sister borrowed them." "Again? Where is Susan?" "She's downtown now." "Susan! Why did you swipe my favorite shoes again?" "Look at this cyberdress." "Oooh,...
• Commented on Normalcy is the future
  The future will have Whitney Houston in it. She'll be a genetically rejuvenated cyborg, of course, and will have an enhanced vocal range with built-in AutoTune, but we won't notice. She'll still be Whitney Houston, belting out The Greatest Love...
• Commented on Damien Hirst installation owner charges teen art-rival with theft of £500,000 for removing box of pencils from installation
  An article on Cartrain, with an example of his work. (I have seen other examples in Shoreditch, and the quality is representative.)...
• Commented on Damien Hirst installation owner charges teen art-rival with theft of £500,000 for removing box of pencils from installation
  I think they're both in the wrong, though Hirst is the wronger party. A look at Cartrain's work will reveal that he's a mediocre and unimaginative "artist" whose work doesn't extend beyond spouting clumsily-executed juxtapositions of hot-button concepts (Ronald McDonald...
• Commented on Meat tenderizing ring
  Alternate title: Hand models becoming increasingly rare commodity. On the contrary: I think they chose the hand model quite well; I wonder how many handsome, well-moisturised corporate alpha-male hands they had to go through to find someone whose hands give...