Why are so many people disillusioned with the web: either desperately seeking a ‘less technical’ life, or making practical steps towards reducing the amount of web/technology in their life? Here’s my theory for why it’s happening. The Gartner Hype Cycle is a well-known (and surprisingly accurate) model for the adoption of specific technologies. First...
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Canada = USA + UK + “eh?”
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For a given nostalgic item, such as a Sony Walkman or Star Wars Action Figure: Vn = (A x C)S Where: Vn is the Value of Nostalgia A is Age C is Cultural Impact S is Scarcity
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Tomorrow I start a two-week trip to mid-Canada, taking in Calgary, Banff, the long drive to Regina, and Toronto. These are the places nearby I’d also like to see, purely for their names: Vulcan Medicine Hat Moose Jaw Foam Lake Pilot Butte Climax (which, ironically, doesn’t look very interesting) Earl Grey Success Wartime And...
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Following on from the previous Transport for London error, Amy pointed out these posters for their latest campaign to promote cycling, which unfortunately don’t depict the happy cyclists wearing helmets.
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Golden Hour: In photography, the golden hour (also known as magic hour, especially in cinematography) is the first and last hour of sunlight during the day when a specific photographic effect is achieved with the quality of the light during these hours. Typically, lighting will be softer (more diffuse) and warmer in hue, and shadows will be quite pronounced as a result of the...
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The Comics Code Authority was created in 1954 to regulate the content of US comics. Read ‘regulate’ as ‘censor’, which is what it did astonishingly-well for almost thirty years. Its Comic Book Code of 1954 - though clearly a puritan tragedy that set the format back by at least a decade – contains some interesting...
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A defective orthography is a writing system that doesn’t have a one-to-one correspondence between the letters and the phonemes in the language, such as the use of the letters ‘t’ and ‘h’ to make the th sound in English. Many languages exhibit this property. The languages of the web, CSS and HTML in particular, suffer from...
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Robert Recorde is as famous for being a Welshman who actually invented something useful, as he is for his invention. His greatest gift appears to have been the equals sign: …to avoid the tedious repetition of these words: “is equal to”, I will set (as I do often in work use) a pair of...
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I don’t want to be purposefully controversial, but I find it incredible (though totally believable) how sexism must still be rife in science and research. We’re still asking what – these days – are very basic questions about female physiology. Why? Because men still rule in science. “The dispute raises an intriguing question. In...
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