Just keep taking the pills. I found them in a Parisian pharmacy alongside these:
Which (at a quick glance) appeared to have remarkable powers – they could help with “baisse de moral” – low morals? (Actually low morale…)
It seems that while processor speeds are accellerating so are electrical power requirements – at least for servers. This is starting to worry one Google engineer. I had no idea that, for low-end servers, “If we assume a base energy cost of nine cents per kilowatt hour and a four-year server lifecycle, the energy costs of that system today would already be more than 40 percent of the hardware costs.” I had the impression thanks to EnergyStar and similar programmes that overall power consumption was going down on PCs. I guess/hope Google’s servers (which are on all the time, presumably working at full speed and not built to minimise power consumption like laptops) are unusually power-hungry.
New Scientist magazine – a weekly magazine of science news – a bit like The Economist or Prospect magazine for the scientifically-minded – has recently launched a weekly 12 minute Podcast – a great way to catch up on what’s going on in science while you are driving (or cycling!).
I used to be the magazine’s Net Editor ten years ago (!) and I am pleased to see that it is still keeping abreast of the latest Internet trends…
If you are curious about whether your favourite search engine really does work better or you just think it does because you are used to it you can check out a “blind taste test“. I haven’t done this myself though. For what it’s worth (unoriginally) I tend to use Google for nearly every search – in part because it integrates well with academic databases. Though perhaps Yahoo and MSN Search also do? Something I might try out the next time I do a difficult search…
P.S. in other news there has been a big jump in the proportion of time Internet users spend using search engines.
WordPress, an open source weblog engine, is what this website uses and from my experience it is every bit as powerful as Moveable Type – but free of charge. I noted earlier that a small organization, Blogsome, was offering free hosting of WordPress blogs. Now WordPress.com is offering the same and I hope (given the name) with substantial backing (though it’s not clear to me how it is that hosting is paid for).
Like others I have quickly started to find my iPod Nano’s screen is starting to be covered with hairline scratches – even though I left on the thin plastic cover it came with. Now (a little late) Apple is shipping Nanos with cases but since mine did not come with the case, Apple will not ship one to me retrospectively. If I want my iPod screen to be fixed I have to send it back (and it will presumably just get all scratched up again thereafter).
P.S. I am reluctant to write about my iPod further because every time I do I get annoying spam comments advertising pyramid schemes to get them free!
Just for fun and to give me an idea of who visits my site and why, I have put up a Frappr! map for this blog which I encourage you to visit and add yourself to (no registration required). Basically all this is is a really easy to use way of attaching a short note about yourself (and optional picture) to a map of the world. Use it to tell me about yourself, why you like (or don’t like) the site, and what kind of things you’d like me to write about more (or less). Or anything else you think I and the rest of the readers might find interesting!
PS if you are adding a URL just paste the address into the “shoutout” space – don’t try creating an HTML link as it doesn’t work.
PPS There are several web applications that let you annotate and share maps – I have started making an annotated list of these services using my favourite shared bookmark application, Netvouz.
I just finished watching a documentary about the rise and fall of the BBC’s Third Programme, an ambitious attempt to make an unashamedly ‘high culture’ music and speech programme on the radio after WWII. The documentary interestingly put it into a wider cultural context – it was part of a general feeling among politicians and cultural elites at the time that during and after the war the public needed access to the opportunity to ‘improve itself’ through appreciation and consumption of the best of what the arts could offer.
It’s a rather outmoded idea now but I can’t help admiring the idealism of those times. The programme argues that the Third Programme was killed off by both hostility towards elitism in the 50s and the general availability of more and more competing cultural products. This sounds to me reminiscent of what happened to high-minded dissident authors in Eastern Europe when their art was no longer suppressed and they found, ironically, their market and popular support collapsed.
The wheel seems to have come full circle here in the UK with the launch of BBC 4, a digital TV station with some of the same “no compromise” ethos. It has faced similar criticism because of its high budget per viewer but it has been generally agreed that in a massively multichannel world there is once again room for an island of highbrow-ness to exist.
P.S. I seem to be getting the Wikipedia habit – I found a halfway useful Wikipedia entry on the Third Programme (linked above) and couldn’t resist spending a half hour or so correcting it and adding the details I could…
P.P.S. In my search for web stuff relating to the Third Programme (there was disappointingly little) I came across this Third Programme magazine – an online site about broadcasting put out by the rather interesting Transdiffusion Broadcasting System, “a not-for-profit historical society dedicated to documenting and preserving broadcasting history” (which alas doesn’t seem to have an article dedicated to the Third Programme itself).
If you are or have been a long-term resident of the US or of China, please visit this survey by a student at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. It “focuses on different uses of weblogs in mainland China and the United States and is a first step to investigating the increasing political influences of the weblogs in Chinese civic lives.”
