"I never thought it would happen, but England’s football team is becoming middle-class."

"Debunking the social stigma around late risers"

Good overview of the practical problems of opening the skies up to drones. File the term "lost-link event" away for future news panics.

"Double Shyamalan"

"Sooner or later, his advisers will surely find a way for him to dispense with the actual objects altogether and he will package concepts in tranches, like mortgage securities, some good stuff with some trash, to be traded on the bourse in Miami-Basel."

"We use it to make our voices go squeaky for a laugh. It is very, very stupid. It makes me really angry."

"The current de facto scoreboard of the internet has done its baleful calculations and announced that a spambot is more influential on Twitter than the very creator of Twitter itself. Clearly this is outlandish! ... In case I didn't foreshadow this enough, here comes the smug contrarian argument: Klout, at least in this instance, is right."

"It is precisely because I value my writing that I want it to be online and free. I don't write merely to rub two pennies together; I write because I want to have an impact in the world. I want to work with my community to break stories and tell jokes, to highlight injustice and find better ways of solving problems... The Internet is where the action is: it's where all the elegant, dirty, pretty, lowbrow, brilliant ideas come together to commingle and evolve."

"If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems? Or to propose only the simplest of solutions?"

"...a study of a bunch of vain and ignorant young people who can think and feel only in cliches and appear to be laboring under the notion that Mark Zuckerberg invented both compassion and democracy for them sometime around 2004."

"(59) Tell her how you feel while you stand at the foot of the huge bed and look upon her sleeping body, while cursing yourself for being a ghost whose words cannot be heard by the living."

Yep.

"The last known Rabb’s fringe-limbed tree frog now lives by himself at Zoo Atlanta in Georgia after the zoo euthanized the only other member of its species." :-(

"Cats-make-you-crazy stories are hard to scale, while commodity content is much easier to replicate." (I'm not convinced you can't do both of these things simultaneously.)

"The genre conventions of blogging are changing. Few old-style linkblogs exist and a whole culture has developed around the longread... This is the Radiolab effect extended: expect less pretension to authority, greater understanding of one's nodeness, but greater respect for the production culture of the pre-web era."

"Use a video of a cat. Doesn't matter what type, just use a cat."

Not only does it turn rats into risk-addicted death-cult sex robots, it turns them into HOT risk-addicted death-cult sex robots.

"As a sporting chorus, banter has something close to a built-in obsolescence. The native tone of the football fan is in reality something closer to boredom, frustration and quiet loathing. Banter is still an intrusion into these closely guarded places. It is a forced marriage, the sound of people who don't really like sport talking about sport. This is the secret sadness of banter."

<p>Can't wait for the first time a city gets the Blue Street of Death.</p>

"Nothing Horse_ebooks had been or even remotely intended to create could have matched this response: smart people debating, condemning and mourning the loss of a vaguely defined artificial voice and sincerely declaring that they preferred the early work of a spam bot better than its compromised new stuff."

Well that's not good.

It remains to have been seen whether he will be regretting going to have said that previously.

3D printed aerial drones for £1,200, targeting the "civil market", courtesy of Southampton Uni.

Emphasises that the case is about risk communication, not earthquake prediction. Scientists come out of it looking fine; government official, much less so.

The question is, I guess, why, when it could have been so potent a target. (Obvious answers: no clear goals; high barrier to participation; bad timing; twats.)

Interesting!

"Philadelphia Media Network Inc., owners of The Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News... said last week that they would begin the "soft launch" Tuesday of a new digital product: a deeply discounted Android tablet loaded with discounted subscriptions to replica editions of The Inquirer and Daily News and a new multimedia Inquirer tablet app."

"We can bitch about it, but Facebook, Twitter, Google and all the rest are, in many ways the very definition of modern life in the democratic west. For many, a functioning internet with freedom of speech, and a good connection to the social networks of our choice is a sign not just of modernity, but of civilisation itself... It is the central platform for business, culture, and personal relationships. There’s not much else left. To misunderstand the centrality of these services to today’s society is to make a fundamental error. The internet isn’t a luxury addition to life; for most people, knowingly or not, it is life."

“It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.”

"A better example that these streets are not our streets won’t be found in Britain today."

Detailed portrait of Assange that strikes me as somewhat less flattering than either the author or Wikileaks seem to think.

Vast haul of useful links, tools, examples and more about data journalism and visualisation.

Creating new lifeforms by using a genegun to fire gold dust coated in DNA from William Burroughs' preserved faeces into a load of sperm.

Gadget recursions.

"This website is dedicate to the postal activities of W. Reginald Bray... His lifelong passion was to send items through the post that, in one form or other, challenged the Postal system. He even had himself 'delivered' on more than one occasion having paid the requisite postage."

Elegant demolition of most of the main arguments for regulating Google on net neutrality-style grounds. (Shorter version: the whole point of search engines is that they aren't neutral.)

On the first day that the Brighton Argus operated without local subs thanks to cost-cutting measures, they managed to spell "Brighton" wrong. Twice. In the same article.

"Delicious may or may not have a future as a service, but regardless we can still 'save it' by extracting and preserving its collective memories." Interesting stuff from a former Delicious worker.