The Writing on the Wall
Originally uploaded by caterina.

S.H.I.E.L.D. gets support in Edinburgh
Originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

On the Grassmarket in Edinburgh, where I was staying last week, some wag had been chalking slogans of support for S.H.I.E.L.D. – the UNCLE/NATO-alike global security organisation in the Marvel Universe.

More curiously, they also seemed to have a thing for Solomon Kane, the dour puritan-swordsman hero of Robert E. Howard‘s pen.

On visiting wikipedia to find that REH link, I spy that today is the anniversary of Virginia Dare’s birthday and hence also the disappearance of the Roanoke colony…

The panelists

I’ve said it before, but I can’t recommend Radio 4’s “In our time” and the accompanying weekly newsletter by Melvyn Bragg highly enough:

“After the programme it was difficult to prise apart the guests. I think that what they had found was such a community of interest in what each other had to say, that they would have been very happy to have continued what I thought was a tremendous seminar for the rest of the morning. Perhaps they did. I had to push off and get on with dull work, ie: not talking about Renaissance magic and the association of the Cabbala, neo-Platonism and Hermes Trismegistus.”

» R4: In Our Time

» Wikipedia: Hermes Trismegistus

Dan is trying out the new version of Urban Tapestries, but finding it hard to fit in some serious digital flaneur action:

“I haven’t been able to spend much time Urban Tapestrying … I haven’t wound it into my daily life of objects; I just haven’t had urge to use it much. I guess I’m struggling with the device’s mixture of latent utility and idle browsing pleasure. The ‘drift’ alluded to (presumably drawn from the Situationist notion of derive) generally doesn’t fit into a busy multitasked life as a plausible activity – the real drift is more of a side effect of activity than an activity in its own right. Given that we can’t all be Guy Debord. Thankfully.”

Reminds me a little of the quote Rodney Brooks made at Nextfest on what robots could be usefully relied on to do was anything that was a by-product of their semi-random movement through an environment.

Aside from actively annotating space, there are passive ways emerging such as Christian Nold’s Biomapping project; which use our biological robot reactions to paint a map of the city.

by RSS.

Matt Webb has started an RSS re-publication of Milo Rambaldi‘s Leonardo DaVinci’s notebooks, which we can read along with him starting today, every day for 4 years.

Very very cool.

» Interconnected.org: The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci
» Matt’s weblog entry about the inception of the project

A full(ish) CeBIT round-up on the way, but first, vanity!

Here’s a picture of me obviously making my “I can’t work my digital camera at this angle” face while trying to get a snap of me and Sony’s QRIO robot, which was just about the most mindblowing thing I have seen inside a giant noisy exhibition hall ever.

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* forgive me, livejournallers

• Don Park (via Scripting News):
  

  “UI design is hard and insanely tedious, even for the professionals.”

  I would prefix this with “good”, or even “great”. It would be nice if this meme spread a bit further through the coding community…

• Elizabeth on sufficiently-advanced Familiars
• Apple site profiles Dave McKean
• Michael Ironside and Christian Bale in The Machinist: ideal Joker and Batman casting?

—
* Link (1986)

• Good, passionate Julius Schwarz obituary
• Neville Brody revisited
• Dean Kamen, Richard Saul Wurman, Brenda Laurel, James Dyson and Ricky “Cards as weapons” Jay – TOGETHER AT LAST!!!
• Cards as weapons: check out that cover-art
• Via Sunpig.com: Benford’s Law
  

  “Dr. Benford concluded that it was unlikely that physicists and engineers had some special preference for logarithms starting with 1. He therefore embarked on a mathematical analysis of 20,229 sets of numbers, including such wildly disparate categories as the areas of rivers, baseball statistics, numbers in magazine articles and the street addresses of the first 342 people listed in the book “American Men of Science.” All these seemingly unrelated sets of numbers followed the same first-digit probability pattern as the worn pages of logarithm tables suggested. In all cases, the number 1 turned up as the first digit about 30 percent of the time, more often than any other.”

• Animals on the underground [via Aevil]

and nonsense:

• Apple announces “AtticAuthor”
• Howard Dean = The Grateful Dead
• Strictly Kev’s “raiding the 20th century” mix must be listened to in order to believe it.
• The Helsinki Zoo International Open Ice Sculpture Competition
• Fastcompany: If He’s So Smart…Steve Jobs, Apple, and the Limits of Innovation
• Ben Hyde: Friends of Moore’s Law
• “I Like!”
• SPEECH ACTS: Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
• “Design in a VC [Virtual Community] can actually be performed using speech acts that in-real-life wouldn’t perform any design. We call these acts `design speech acts’.”
• Lee Smolin and Loop Quantum gravity: “Nature is a unity. This pen is made of atoms and it falls in the earth’s gravitational field.”
• Foe’s books arrived from the shipping company – time to reread Walter Benjamin “Unpacking my library”