via Damien Walter's Guardian column: "Ted Chiang's brilliant and insightful novella about the emergence of Artificial Intelligence was originally published in a beautiful limited edition from Subterranean Press. It is now available as a free read from the publisher's website. Chiang explores a terrifyingly plausible scenario for the arrival of a new form of life in our midst."

"Lost and Sound was simply crying out to be translated into english. Aside from the fact that English is the lingua franca of techno culture, the majority of the people that this book is about – producers, djs, tourists – hardly speak German. But these are the people responsible for the altogether more pleasant associations Berlin now triggers – after ‘Hitler’s city’ and ‘the walled city’ comes ‘the party city’."

"The visual work of Otto Neurath and his associates, now commonly known as Isotype, has been much discussed in recent years. This short book explains its essential principles: the work of ‘transforming’, or putting information into visual form."

'The paper, "Automatic Construction of Travel Itineraries using Social Breadcrumbs" (PDF), cleverly uses the data often embedded in Flickr photos (e.g. timestamp, tags, sometimes GPS) to produce trails of where people have been in their travels. Then, they combine all those past trails to generate high quality itineraries for future tourists that tell them what to see, where to go, how long to expect to spend at each sight, and how long to allow for travel times between the sights.'

"How did they do it before satellites and radar? It was a large scale coordinated effort involving telegraph messages sent from station to station across the country, used to compile a weather map." From the new site by Ironic Sans, looking at the most interesting stories from the weekend 100 years ago.

"If the Met Office is better than ever at predicting the weather, why has it stopped issuing seasonal forecasts?" An interesting article, or at least that's the way it looked on a skimreading. Amonst other reasons given: people don't understand probabilities.

Ian Jack reviews "When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies" and remarks that the decade has probably been unfairly maligned.

A transcript of Stephen Fry's speech to the Royal Geographical Society in April. I haven't read it yet, but I'd like to remember to do so. (Maybe it's time to look into Instapaper.)

Long, but it looks like it should be worth a read. It's always been a bit of a source of bafflement to me that women could not want rights; maybe this will help me understand some of the motivations.

"Last weekend, I decided to expand Coverflow to work with my entire photo album. This involved exploring the MusicLibrary and PhotoLibrary frameworks" Oddly, I want my album art in the photos app, but this should be worth a look.

Free PDFs of stories by Ken Macleod and Greg Egan, who, handily, are two of the people whose work I particularly enjoy. Hurrah!

candace's pocket review of The Red Men, a sci-fi novel set in Hackney that she just finished. I suspect I'll borrow this and finish it off; sounds good (if badly proof-read).

"I've been thinking a lot about visual language recently, and why interacting with it has more appeal to me than words."

"Matthew Brzezinski and Patrick Wright evoke the isolation of the Soviet Union with a pair of cold war studies, Red Moon Rising and Iron Curtain, says PD Smith"

Simon Wheatly on privacy, alienated youth and photography.

Could be a nice self-hosted alternative to Zimki. Or maybe not. Something to chase up, anyway.

I could really do with sorting out some method of getting SMSes to people that doesn't rely on broadcast like Twitter. It has to support the UK though.

An alternative storage engine for MySQL. Useful for big BLOBs?

"An attempt to improve text rasterization algorithms using only publicly available information" Follows on from the Safari 3 for Windows rendering debate, apparently.

Looks like a series on how to host your own photos (like I used to) but without sacrificing the community stuff that Flickr brought to the table. Not sure it's possible, but I reckon it might be worth returning to.

Despite the move to the MacBook Pro and the fact that I've got enough memory and diskspace to do so, I still haven't tried either of the heavyweight photo management apps. Maybe this will help me choose the right one.

This somehow doesn't look detailed enough for me to figure out how to do what I want with it. Oh well, maybe if I print it out...

Slides from the talks at RailsConf this year.

"Both Flickr and Twitter make it somewhat difficult to move through giant lists [while] the databases quietly running these services are wildly denormalized and indexed like crazy, making it possible to generate these lists" Have to read this properly.

Lots of good writeups from the MySQL conference; the Flickr, YouTube and Google ones are all interesting.

The stranding of the Napoli has focussed people's minds on container shipping. Overdue, really; most people don't understand the vast infrastructure that supports them.

"on those sites there was no such thing as a public photograph" I still think that's one of Flickr's great innovations. (Maybe working on CiG at the time skews me though.)

Unsurprisingly, no sequels.

What it says on the tin

I really hope that british TV doesn't die out, because there's been some great stuff in the past.

Not sure if this is going to be good or annoying.

I'd have thought so, but I should read this before jumping to conclusions, perhaps.

Australia and water. I gather there's a drought in Western Australia that's lasted for six years. I suspect that post-oil the country is in for a very tough ride.

I finally had a quick look at Aperture in the Regent Street store a couple of weeks ago. Quite daunting. I may need to read things like this.

more JavaScript libraries to check out

more JavaScript libraries to check out

Does what it says in the title. Could be fertile ground for wandering.

Saved unread so that davorg can see it.

A few years old now, but interesting nonetheless. Is it just me that thinks Zookeeper sounds like the Spotlight metadata store?

Gentoo, but hopefully it'll translate OK to debian

I've only skimread this, but it seems a fair summation of the blackface (as opposed to redtop, or once-broadsheet) tabloids.

candace has a telescope. I have a DSLR. The two can go together, but there's a bit of a learning curve. I hope this article helps a bit.

"All novels are collections of short stories" or somesuch. Hmm.

"Night Haunts - A nocturnal journal through 2006 by Sukhdev Sandhu. Visual design by Mind Unit, sound design by Scanner, commissioned by Artangel"

After Phil Gyford's Flickr integration, another site that uses it as a store and presents it locally; more so than Gyford, apparently

Hopefully this will be useful. Difficult to tell as it's audio.

Not read this yet, but came across it via letters in this week's review.