Sinclair is a bit of a mixed bag. Innovative, but very careful to jump around like a butterfly before the shit hits the fan over *serious* design faults. -My family constructed two of his early 60s op-amp based home hifi amplifiers, and the instructions were rediculously bad, fried power transistors on the case, really noisy.

The 'tape cartridge' idea for the QL was neat, the same way that minox cameras were neat: neat, but entirely impractical. The flex keyboard has just re-surfaced in the OLPC, again an interesting idea and cheap to make, but also cheap-to-feel.

The calculators made it into the terence conran 'best of british design' but that was for looks: the battery life of the LED one was shite, and the forward/inverse trig functions did not equal up. Bad rounding in the math. Reverse-Polish Notation in a consumer device????

And don't get people started on the sinclair electric car: massively over-sold, released as a kiddycart toy, the law required a flag to make it visible to real cars. They all got bought up by a gym and used as on-road advertizing (presumably "feel as crap and run-down as a sinclair electronic car? come into our gym and feel worse...")

All his devices had to be super small, and black. Mailorder was notoriously late to deliver. Hence the 'Not the Nine O-Clock News' joke:

Q: Heard about the Sinclair Digital Penis?
A: Its black, 2 inches long, and takes 28 days to come...

All in all, I think his knighthood reflected marketing skills and a sharp beard more than reality.

-G

"fool experts"

um. if you make an "x" which identical to an "x" made in nature, in what sense is anyone 'fooled' ?

I have two books on my shelf on this, both at least 20 years old. How about http://www.amazon.co.uk/Diamond-Invention-aka-Death/dp/0091476909 "the death of the diamond" which discussed this is much detail. long long ago.

Oh, its about fooling the smithsonian. ok, I get it. the people who said Samuel Langley invented Flying. riiight. Experts.

-G

Ikey Mo is Isaac and Moses. Its not rhyming slang but its still cockney slang.

fot^H^H^Hfort.

bleedin' would be more appropriate on jewish, not crucified. And, a jewish person is colloquially an ikey-mo for some people, and even worse for others which I prefer not to repeat here, but use of the y- word for jews in cockey was routine for much of the 20th century, analogous to the modern-day re-acceptance of the n- word by african americans in recent times.

use of 'me' for 'my' is always typographically hard. its also a bit of a mixed bag with english accents when it is, or isn't used.

here should be 'ere in this here robe
and a wot I bin using would have gone well.

also alternatively: don't worry, the kill switch only works if you are 300ft underground, in a six-sigma secure disease laboratory, and one of your workers has undiagnosed epilepsy and you have a drunkard and a baby to work on

if banksy can be persuaded to paint it up in traditional wallpaper colours, we can then get PETA to demand the release of the abused urinal elephant.

having once had a run-in with a vehicle which turned the wrong way into a one-way street, this kind of humouristic street art would be giving me semi-constant heart attacks..

-G

by implication trans-gene mixes of treyf and non-treyf are treyf.

hmm.

Russell Hoban also refers to this in the childrens classic 'The Mouse and his Child' with the child-mouse musing on the last visible dog from a tin of recursively labelled dogfood.

-G

busted or not, viewing this kind of thing to make it animate is trivial: rotate the pot on a wheel, and look through a slit. you might need to rotate slits around the image, but not massively hard.

its persistence of vision stuff. zeotrope.

so, unlike the 'sound of the potter' urban myth, visualizing the animation is actually well within of-its-time capability. As to anyone working it OUT .. thats another matter.

unless I am mistook, that is not a WALL that is a DOOR. else, the grafitoid also stuck a lockplate and doorhandle onto the WALL.

I read that fighting back with steel posts masquerading as wood can lead to lawsuits. is this snopes-eable urban myth, or da truth?

I'm not disabled, but I am drawn to the disabled sticker on the toilet door.

I think there is a good chance this one has been taken out of general service and is for disabled use. If so, then it may be like public toilets down here (in oz), where if you are wheelchair bound, or have a recognized condition such as eg a colostomy sack, or major bowel surgery, they give you a key which opens disabled toilets so you can handle your problem in at least some privacy and decency.

When these loos came onstream in the 70s, they were indeed deployed as coin-op public toilets after the french got 'em first. They made "nationwide" and other 7pm newsadvertorial programmes, "tomorrows world" and the like, becauswe they were mechanistically self-cleaning and everyone wanted to know how they did it if you didn't get out in time.

A truly wonderful book to hunt for is "the good loo guide" By Jonathan Routh which pre-dates these machines but does discuss the pissoir, and other finer elements of toilet-dom. It also introduced the fine witticism "vertigo in london" being the princple question any non-english speaker asks a bobby..

This cray research image is a goatse ...

Victor Papanek and James Hennessy would be very pleased. nomadic furniture is one of my all-time favourite books, I built the H-module wooden shelves about 20 years ago and although they crumble, they remain in use.

I made a corrugated carboard comfy chair. It wasn't very comfy, but it was comforting to know I could.

its gurning. and old english tradition.

wikipedia is p*ss weak on this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurning

images.google.com.au comes up trumps.

http://images.google.com.au/images?hl=en&q=gurning&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2

I believe there is a cartoon like this by Bill Tidy, or Honeywell, or one of the other British Cartoonists. Maybe even Steinberg did one like this.

Charles Addams?

c'mon guys. cut the toonists some slack. standing on the shoulders of giants and/or standing on the toes.

And there is a SR71 on a stick in Balboa Park.

those crazy carts: Here's an AVI movie of the traffic cops handling them.. (6Mb)

http://www.algebras.org/~ggm/Tokyo-2007/Saturday/2007-06-23+08-43-16.avi

and here is the ice-machine (16M)

http://www.algebras.org/~ggm/Tokyo-2007/Saturday/2007-06-23+08-43-16.avi