Links
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Fume Finder
Can’t remember where I read it recently, but I noticed that Katie Puckrik, once awesome on ‘The Word’, now blogs and YouTubes (that’s a verb now, right?) about perfume. This is her tool to help you choose fragrances.
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Disquiet about confidentiality clauses - Portas Pilots
If having a TV celebrity manage the regeneration of a handfull of high streets didn’t sound like a dumb enough way of implementing government policy, it’s sounding like turning the process into a reality TV show — with all the secrecy, fakery and manufactured conflict that involves — is even worse. Also, #portaspilots on Twitter.
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Killing Our Citizens Without Trial by David Cole | The New York Review of Books
On drone killings: “As long as the Obama administration insists on the power to kill the people it was elected to represent — and to do so in secret, on the basis of secret legal memos — can we really claim that we live in a democracy ruled by law?”
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Escape into Whiteness by Brent Staples | The New York Review of Books
Some of the details of 19th and early 20th century courts etc deciding whether specific mixed-race individuals count as white or coloured are bizarre, as if part of some kind of epic theatre piece.
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The Brilliant Music of Ravel by Charles Rosen | The New York Review of Books
As someone who’s only awareness of Ravel is what I think of as the flouncy Torville & Dean ‘Bolero’, I love the descriptions here (especially in section 3) of exactly why Ravel’s music was avant-garde. Unfortunately, subscribers only.
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Predators and Robots at War by Christian Caryl | The New York Review of Books
“The US Air Force now trains more UAV operators each year than traditional pilots.” “There are already more [military] robots operating on the ground (15,000) than in the air (7,000).” “…a pilotless aircraft … ‘has the same rights as if a person were inside it, … official policy.’”
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The Court: A Talk with Judge Richard Posner by Eric J. Segall | The New York Review of Books
Interesting (and subscribers only) but saving it for this quote: “We have a political system in which the definition of a gaffe is telling the truth.” Also, for some reason I love reading about the American judicial system.
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What Happened at the Macondo Well? by Peter Maass | The New York Review of Books
I like the parallels drawn between the oil and banking industries: “lax government regulation, corporate profits despite the risks, a fawning press”, disasters blamed on rogue companies rather than industry-wide problems.
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School ‘Reform’: A Failing Grade by Diane Ravitch | The New York Review of Books
I suspect much of this angry-making article applies to UK education too. Surely anyone working on, or funding, policies for education really should spend at least a few weeks with a variety of teachers and children.
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Elif Batuman · Diary: Pamuk’s Museum · LRB 7 June 2012
I hadn’t heard of this. Orhan Pamuk made a museum of objects belonging to characters from his novel ‘The Museum of Innocence’, which he’d originally intended to be written as a museum catalogue. Now he’s writing the catalogue for this museum.
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Timoni.org - Why I wear the same thing every day, and what I wear.
Great stuff. And yet I still found myself thinking “this is so complicated!” (via Stellar)
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qTranslate | www.qianqin.de
Translation plugin for WordPress (maybe simpler than WPML?).
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76 Premium WordPress Themes With Over 100k Customers
Some more shiny happy themes.
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Themes | Kriesi.at - Wordpress Themes and HTML Templates
Look alright. For future reference.
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Timeless Modern Tactile Functional
Cos - some nice simple, not too expensive clothes. (via @joroach)
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The guide to implementing 2D platformers | Higher-Order Fun
I enjoyed this understandable description of different basic ways of constructing the basic physics of platform games. (via CreativeJS)
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ifttt / Log tweets to a Dropbox file
Nice idea for making a backup of your tweets and @replies. (via Stellar)
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FIRECalc: A different kind of retirement calculator
It amazes me someone could go to this much effort to create a very complex tool (scroll down…) but leave the interface so bafflingly impenetrable. (via Mr Money Mustache)
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Soul Sides / Sliced: Breaking Down: The Emotions’ “Blind Alley” (Stax, 1972)
I like this way of discussing a song, displaying annotations while it plays.
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About HTML semantics and front-end architecture – Nicolas Gallagher
Really good in-depth thoughts about writing HTML/CSS. Reminds me a bit of that SMACSS style guide (which I can *never* remember the name/acronym for). (via Dotcode)
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Twitter / SeaContainers: The largest ever picture o
100m wide photo of the royal family on the south bank of the Thames. As Londonist put it, “reminiscent of Pyongyang leader worship.” Horrific. Tag “jubilympics”. (via Londonist)
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Cash in the attic: short-term home letting | Life and style | The Guardian
Couple appear in national newspaper showing off their Barbican flat which they let out to strangers, against the terms of their lease. What fun.
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Instagram as an island economy (11 Apr., 2012, at Interconnected)
The same with Matt Webb’s thoughts on Lanchester’s piece. Belatedly adding it to my link memory.
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John Lanchester · Marx at 193 · LRB 5 April 2012
Just realised I never Pinboarded this at the time, only wrote about it. For completion’s sake.
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Ian Bogost - What should we do for a living?
An interesting addition to that stuff about the value of Instagram etc coming from the activity of its users (or not): Do those users only have time for this activity because of the “leisure time bought by jobs in the non-Internet economy”?
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Liking :: Mission Workshop Arkiv Field Pack
Nice non-military modular backpack system.
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Ice-blog » Blog Archive » Lords of Midnight – Video Footage
‘Lords of Midnight’ adapted for the iPad. Looks very nicely done.
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Wysihtml5 - A better approach to rich text editing
Looks nice. IE8+ (and other modernish browsers). (via @dotcode)
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Roll Call. Say hello! (Pepys’ Diary)
This is the why. Well, one of the whys.