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  1. The Technium: The Futurist’s Dilemma

    “Any believable prediction will be wrong. Any correct prediction will be unbelievable. … the sweet spot that science fiction authors aim for” is the point on the cusp of “plausibility and fantasy”.

  2. Three different definitions of retirement and the resulting confusion Early Retirement Extreme: — when more time > more money

    I’m not sure how accurate or generalisable this is, but I like the suggested generational distinctions between what “retirement” means.

  3. Scott Chacon on the Interwebs - GitHub Flow

    How GitHub manage their own git workflow. Sounds good to me. (via Tom Taylor)

  4. Pret A Manger, With New Fast-Food Ideas, Gains a Foothold in United States - NYTimes.com

    That Taco Bell article reminded me of this one about Pret A Manger from a month ago, about how they motivate their staff.

  5. Taco Bell and the Golden Age of Drive-Thru - BusinessWeek

    On the processes and efficiencies in fast food restaurant kitchens. I had no idea 70% of US fast-food business was drive-thrus. (via Tom Taylor)

  6. Charlie’s Diary: The High Frontier, Redux

    Charles Stross on why space colonisation is a ridiculous idea. Colonising our own deserts and oceans is much, much easier but we’re in no rush to do that. (via Tom Taylor)

  7. Wa-ben - The Wallet

    William Gibson’s wallet, made of Cuben Fiber CT9K.5. (via @GreatDismal)

  8. Jezdez/django_compressor - GitHub

    “Combines and compresses linked and inline Javascript or CSS in a Django templates into cacheable static files by using the compress template tag.” Can work with Sass CSS I believe.

  9. Compass Home | Compass Documentation

    “An open-source CSS Authoring Framework” which uses Sass. There’s always more to learn.

  10. Sass - Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets

    “Sass is an extension of CSS3, adding nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance, and more.” Compiles sass files into CSS files.

  11. Populations: End of history and the last woman | The Economist

    Taking projections of declining birth rates literally results in Hong Kong’s population dying out in 2798, Brazil by year 5000.

  12. Ulmon Offline Maps and Tourist Travel City Maps & Guides

    Meant to link to this a while back. CityMaps2Go was a really nice offline map viewer for iPhone while I was on holiday. Vector-based, so good detail, and no roaming charges.

  13. Red Maps

    Some nice looking (printed, not electronic) city maps. (via @antimega)

  14. Making the Perfect Listing - Gidsy

    A very nice guide to how to list something on this “community marketplace”. Scroll down and things move… (via @mattb)

  15. The Grim Threat to British Universities by Simon Head | The New York Review of Books

    A description of the business-derived practices now standard in UK universities, alluded to in the previously-linked LRB article, including the Balanced Scorecard, Key Performance Indicators and Research Assessment Exercise.

  16. Stefan Collini · From Robbins to McKinsey: The Dismantling of the Universities · LRB 25 August 2011

    On the higher education White Paper: The gradual movement of responsibility for higher education within government towards business departments; the tortuous attempts to balance a free market and a command economy; the odd language (“the mission-statement present”, “the dogmatic future tense”); that studying something often isn’t wholly enjoyable; that choosing a university “cannot primarily be price-sensitive, adaptive, feedback-governed consumer behaviour”; the 1963 Robbins Report’s emphasis on intellectual inquiry rather than “meeting the needs of employers.”

  17. Xdissent/ievms - GitHub

    “Automated installation of the Microsoft IE App Compat virtual machines.” So you can test web stuff in IE on your Mac. (via Tom Taylor)

  18. How can safety at advanced stop zones be improved for cyclists? | Jorren Knibbe | Environment | guardian.co.uk

    Interesting if you’re a little too obsessed with cars and cyclists who break the law at junctions. I hadn’t realised cars are allowed to stop in ASZs if they’re already there when the light turns red.

  19. Vincent van Gogh The Letters

    When the (£450) book of letters came out I thought “that’d make a great website.” I didn’t imagine anything as good as this. Amazing, beautiful stuff. (via @holgate)

  20. What was daily life like before almost everyone had cell phones? - Quora

    I love the responses to this question. I remember it all of course, and it’s not that long ago, but it still seems like another world. (via @tomcoates)

  21. Voices Of East Anglia: Inside the Oxford Street HMV Store in the Sixties

    Lots of great photos of what it used to look like. I love that sweeping staircase. (via @antimega)

  22. First Watch: The Decemberists, ‘Calamity Song’ : All Songs Considered Blog : NPR

    Music video based on the Eschaton tennis scene from David Foster Wallace’s novel ‘Infinite Jest’. Totally. Awe. Some. My insides have been touched all over.

  23. Camelbak Urban Assault Pack Preview

    For future reference. Looks like a nice backpack that’s thankfully less military than its silly name suggests.

  24. Golden Grid System

    This looks very nice. Making a stretchable grid for web pages, that changes the number of columns depending on the page width. I want to play with this. (via Waxy)

  25. Rentzsch.tumblr.com: HOWTO Use UTF-8 Throughout Your Web Stack

    A couple of things for future reference. (via Daring Fireball)

  26. Scripting Languages: PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby - Hyperpolyglot

    Handy comparison of features of Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby, for when my brain has trouble switching. (via Kottke)

  27. Fleet street fox: 43 and never been spanked.

    Other people have made similar points, but it bears repeating over and over. That Gove and co can get away with stealing taxpayers’ money while normal people get months in prison for doing very little is obscene. (via @megpickard)

  28. The Living City (1970) - YouTube

    I haven’t watched it all yet, but looks interesting: a 1970 half hour film about the post-war rebuilding of the City of London, from the London Metropolitan Archives.

  29. Martin Woodhouse - Telegraph

    “Martin Woodhouse, who has died aged 78, was a psychologist and medic, but worked variously as a novelist, scriptwriter, engineer, programmer, government planner, artificial intelligence researcher and perfumer.” That’s a life.  (via Infovore)

  30. Stop Coddling the Super-Rich - NYTimes.com

    Billionaire Jim Andrews in ‘Doonesbury’ won’t be pleased when he reads Warren Buffett’s latest article.