bobbiejohnson: Read it. Perfect. RT @jonronson: So I wrote a story about the cuts, which I've just published here, nowhere else: http://t.co/FbJXhc3C

Subtitled "in defence of a game that lasts five days", this article by Wright Thompson is a great read on cricket, its history and future, clock-time, attention and devices, meditation and mindfulness, and probably more that I've forgotten. I could pull half a dozen quotes from it but I think the point of the article is that it's worth taking the time to do something properly, so set aside half an hour and read this.

Preoccupations: Awake early. Trying to absorb 1st thing I read, "Thatcher government toyed with evacuating Liverpool after 1981 riots", http://t.co/qSYXPXp

pretentiousurl: The best movies of 2011 - http://t.co/BzJ91OD - Film & Television http://t.co/mYEXBlJ. I think this is fascinating

iamdanw: "we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things" - I got curious & tried to find the 'Other Things' http://t.co/yyc52Cbm

a technological innovation opens up the possibility for a new kind of more immediate, decentralized, less hierarchical media form. The people will be empowered! And sometimes, they are. (At least for a while.)

“Parents always ask, 'Who would marry my kid? They're so weird.' But, like, another weird person, that's who,” said Kirsten, with the therapist who helps her learn ways to live with Asperger's.

By choosing images over links, and by restricting markup, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are hostile to HTML. This is leading to the plague of infographics crowding out text, and of video used to convey minimal information.

Kake: Great post from @nestoria on their move from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap, impressive chain and tech involved: http://t.co/R5dqX1X9

"The object of the game is to hit the pig with the bird.
"Bird over the pig means the project is at risk of losing money.
"Bird past the pig means it’s at risk of being late."

simonw: Five Years After Banning Outdoor Ads, Brazil's Largest City Is More Vibrant Than Ever http://t.co/5ZYioAw6

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately watching this kind of watching: a (relatively) new online genre called reaction videos — one of the more fascinating entries in America’s ongoing anthropology of itself.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was generally considered the most boring lecturer around, teaching the most boring subject known to man, Anglo-Saxon philology and literature, in the most boring way imaginable.

Not "Last Christmas" or "Wonderful Christmas Time." It's the smug and egomaniacal "Do They Know It's Christmas?"

A bunch of 'humorous provocateurs' are reinventing the protest poster in an effort to bring us revolution with LOLs. But who are the Deterritorial Support Group?

A monument to 'high-tech', the Lloyd's of London building marries the capitalism of gentlemen with that of the industrialists

Ellen Willis and Courtney E. Smith are both women who have written about being women and loving music and being women who love music. In this, they are rarities together, two female voices calling out in a field still, though less and less, dominated by male writers. They are also both fond of The Beatles. And that is just about where the similarities end.

infovore: I have a new Kill Screen column out! It's about game design and landscape gardening: http://t.co/e2t9bTK

That both this sculpture and the Dr Salter statue in Rotherhithe have been stolen in the last few months is very, very saddening.

"My question is: why does this approach not extend to the devices themselves? Why not make a wooden case for the iMac, like those hideous Sony TVs from my childhood? Or why not a case that makes the computer look like a typewriter? And why, when we have these beautiful, clean, efficient devices, do we put up with this horrific, dishonest and childish crap?"

Dan Hill on Pimlico. When I worked just over the Lambeth Bridge I got to wander through the area a bit, and I was lucky enough to do a walking tour looking at the various social housing with Owen Hatherley. There's a good section on second housing, too.

Nokia N9 (and Lumia, although that's not the real focus) reviewed by Dan Hill in Domus. It's a long read and occasionally there's the restatement of a point, but it's definitely worth the time, and it makes me want to actually play with one. There's also some good shots over the bow of Apple's interface design. Perhaps the best short summary is one of the subheadings: "The N9 as sketch of an alternative future".

"We made a walkshop! At sunset on Tuesday, undeterred by George Osborne, high winds and torrential rain, 17 of Yorkshire’s finest designers, technologists and geographers gathered to walk and talk, to see Leeds in a new light." Sounds good.

Henry Porter in the Observer on the care Gilbert Adair received from the NHS in his final year.

"For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new."

I'm not quite sure I want to actually have this lot in my inbox (the extracts are a little verbose for my liking, although I'm well aware I can be too, and I follow other long-description types, but then I'm human and we're allowed to be inconsistent) but if you want tomorrow's links today, you might want to have a look.

"what Delicious is doing doesn't quite mirror what we want out of it - which is a piece of plumbing where we can store our bookmarks and then extract a subset daily. Plumbing is dull. Plumbing is also essential. That's why you pay money when you get it done. Pinboard, it turns out, isn't into "social news", but it is in to taking our money."

"In an interview in Germany’s Der Spiegel, Dominik Schwarzinger and Matthias Kramer, who are researching the entrepreneurial personality, say that borderline personality disorders can actually be crucial elements behind startup success."

Reviews of Otto Neurath, Symbols and Ex Libris, a collection of bookplates. Useful if your coffee table needs a refresh, probably.

"For those of us who occupy that metaphysical middle ground between the in-flight magazine and the barf bag, there’s the airline safety card." "A [1960s] Air France card directs passengers to the closest axe—no further directions are given." A delightful piece about safety instructions, how they've changed, and their parallels with art.

"The ballot measure for the project required that the L.A.-to-San Francisco trip take no more than two hours, 40 minutes. Achieving that would mean building more viaducts and tunnels, which are costly."

ben_patio: A must read: Quentin Letts gives play a bad review then tries to shut the theatre down, then gets DESTROYED by blogger http://t.co/aE4K6yHQ

"Focusing on boys saved the toymaker in 2005. Now the company is launching Lego Friends for “the other 50 percent of the world’s children.” Will girls buy in?" This seems to be causing a minor kerfuffle on Twitter, but I can see what Lego are trying to do, and why. The 1980s style of relatively gender-neutral Town stuff has gone, and nowadays the line is, well, stereotypically male. Also: "The Lego Friends team is aware of the paradox at the heart of its work: To break down old stereotypes about how girls play, it risks reinforcing others. “If it takes color-coding or ponies and hairdressers to get girls playing with Lego, I’ll put up with it, at least for now, because it’s just so good for little girls’ brains,” says Lise Eliot", a neuroscientist and author.

paulpod: Ding - this crystallised a bunch of social thinking i'd be having into a singular idea. uh oh. The end of social http://t.co/DI2EUQrb

bookn3rd: <In London: injuries to pedestrians caused by jumping red lights: 95% motor vehicles, 5% bicycles http://t.co/uv4VEFg2 FACT! > RT @HGJohn

I've heard bits of this from people inside the tech-does-music industry, but it's good to see someone come over the parapet and properly talk about the craziness of licencing.

"Last year, Mississippi-based Spread Networks opened a shorter connection between New York and Chicago that saved about three milliseconds and was estimated to have cost $300 million to develop. Huawei is working with another company, Hibernia Atlantic, to lay the first transatlantic fiber-optic submarine cable in a decade, a $400-million-plus project that will save traders five milliseconds. To do this, Hibernia is laying nearly 3,000 miles of cable across the Grand Banks off Canada and the North Atlantic."

Aditya Chakrabortty: "Both the evidence and the voters are against investment bankers. So why do the politicians cling on to them? Part of the answer is financial. ... the City now provides half of all Tory party funds. That is up from just 25% only five years ago." "Running this government are two sons of bankers. Cameron's father was a stockbroker, Clegg's is still chairman of United Trust Bank."

(Side note: the picture is of Canary Wharf, part of the City-as-finance but not City-as-geography or City-as-government. It's arguably more photogenic, though.)

Raina Lipsitz: [[ "This movie would never get made today," sighed one of the panelists, and the audience members murmured their assent. It's shocking enough that it was distributed in 1991, but at least back then American women were experiencing something like momentum ]]

"the impact of humans on the earth since the early 19th century has been so great, and so irreversible, that it has created a new era similar to the Pleistocene or Holocene. Nobel Prize winner Paul J. Crutzen even proposed the name Anthropocene, and it’s begun to catch on."

"It's a tool that has shaped modern civilisation, but is the map as we know it redundant? Samuel Muston wonders if it's now more valuedfor decoration than for navigation"

"Like the passing of distinguished individuals, the passing of great corporations should prompt us to ponder the transience of earthly glory. So let's pay our respects to Eastman Kodak, which at this writing appears to be a shutter-click from extinction."

"Upon moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2007," [Leigh Merrill] writes, "I began looking at the complexity of its urban environment. The Bay Area presents a unique blend of residential living that sits between urban and suburban in a way that never quite reconciles one with the other."

"I don’t own those other recordings. I don’t own the masters. Those are owned by A&M Records and Blue Note, and I’m not with them anymore. I wanted to own a physical copy of my own back catalog. In this economy it’s important to own what you make. If I tour for the next 20 years I have recordings I can sell at concerts and people can buy them directly."

"On Cameron, the EU, the City of London, and historical context". It's short but well worth the read.

"Remix culture is the new Prohibition, with massive media companies as the lone voices calling for temperance. You can criminalize commonplace activities from law-abiding people, but eventually, something has to give."

"I’d wager that all third-party clients will be forced to display the trends and ads within a year, and what we know as Twitter today — or at least what we knew until yesterday morning — will be a distant, quaint memory: Remember when it was just people you followed?"

"An API is a valuable cure to the stagnation of growth." Thoughts on large service API design.

"The Twitter service I signed up for is one where people tweet 140-character posts, you follow those people whose tweets you tend to enjoy, and that’s it. The Twitter service this new UI presents is about a whole lot more — mass-market spoonfed “trending topics” and sponsored content. It’s trying to make Twitter work for people who don’t see the appeal of what Twitter was supposed to be."

"I signed up for this product because it made mass-texting people when I was in town easy, and led to lots of serendipitous drinking and hanging out when I was in the city. On the radio last year, I heard someone explain Twitter as “a tool for following famous people and seeing what they’re up to“. It’s interesting how the product described in the new app feels like the product described by that radio pundit: a consumption tool."

With all of this experience and insight, why wouldn’t we want to know how he reads the news?

Those edges, as John Updike pointed out not long before he died, manifest themselves in the physical form of bound books - "some are rough-cut, some are smooth-cut, and a few, at least at my extravagant publishing house, are even top-stained" - but they are also there aesthetically and even metaphysically, giving each book integrity as a work in itself.

Two years after the Airbus 330 plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, Air France 447's flight-data recorders finally turned up. The revelations from the pilot transcript paint a surprising picture of chaos in the cockpit, and confusion between the pilots that led to the crash.

Inequality has risen faster in the UK than in any other rich country.

Power is fast shifting from end users and software developers to operating system vendors.
By Jonathan Zittrain

fantasticlife: "Teach not coding, but architecture" RT @zittrain To learn how the Internet works is to learn civics. http://t.co/2Rqnu0vH

"Ever thought what the tube network would look like if you took out the expensive Zone 1? Me neither, until this morning, when I was wondering if it was possible to utilise my current “Boris Bike” bikeshare 24-hour membership to save a bit of money on commuting in to work."

"If we don't change the way ICT is thought about and taught, we're shutting the door on our children's futures." John Naughton on why people shouldn't just be learning programming, but learning why software is so important.

"I had wanted to do some thinking about why I so often prefer to stay in a hotel room when travelling – even to cities where I have many friends with room to spare." On the varied (and hard to get right) charms of hotels.

A fine suggestion for recommendations based on similarity of taste, not on who you know.

"In the spring of 1980, I began to photograph the New York subway system." A great read from the photographer of the amazing Subway series.

An interesting read on high speed rail and the development it spurs. "What this suggests is that HSR does not create centralization so much as reinforces it when it already exists. The Shinkansen made the rest of Japan more dependent on Tokyo, and the TGV has made most of France more dependent on Paris." The author considers the US, but surely the UK would go the way of France and Japan also.

Ian Vince: "Modern highway building, and its representation on maps, has conspired to make us view landscapes as the interstitial blocks between roads, the white spaces in the road atlas. The dominant feature in the Stonehenge landscape, as revealed by a glance at any route map of the area, is that of a pennant pointing east formed by the A303 and two other major roads; it is only the neolithic and bronze age remains, spattered like grapeshot across the white spaces of an Ordnance Survey sheet, that break this uncompromising geometry."

On The Shard, at London Bridge, and simulating load. "We use sophisticated finite element analysis and advanced nonlinear dynamic analysis. It's the same software car designers use except we're modeling steel and concrete, and how they interact."

"A total of 36,371 people were killed on Britain's roads between 1999 and 2010."

"At the end of the project someone should've been commissioned to write a book, "What This Goddamn Plant Is: And, How It Works". That book is effectively being written now, only by archaeologists."

joemoransblog: FT's Tim Harford demolishes notion that public sector spends the wealth that private sector creates http://t.co/JLw95NBA ht @seumasmilne

One of the pleasures of being involved with Webstock is the opportunity to meet people like Rob Malda and Matt Haughey. And the chance to get the founder of MetaFilter to interview the founder of Slashdot just seemed too good to pass up!

In the U.K., we are seeing the results of monumental policy blunders that could well be repeated here if Republican budget hawks seize power next November.

On calculators in school: [[ [Truss] had an example of a question set for 11-year-olds in which a calculator was allowed: "These are some prices in a flower shop. Tulips: £1.20 for a bunch; roses: 40p each; daffodils, 55p for a bunch. How many roses can you buy for exactly £2?" ]] Lest you think she's a luddite: [[ "I was a mainstay of my school computer club, and I was happy to spend time programming in BASIC." ]]

"What Britain is living through now is worse than the decade that gave us the three-day week and winter of discontent."

"Plan A then was based on three, linked, wrong premises: that Britain could quickly switch to a private, export led model; that the economy is bigger than it actually is; and that consumption could survive the inflation surge imported by the Bank of England."

"What does seven billion look like? Dencity is a map of global population density as the world reaches this important milestone."

[[ These new technologies are "challenging our Constitutional categories in really dramatic ways," says George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen. "And what's so striking is that none of the existing amendments give clear answers to the most basic questions we're having today." ]]