That's How It Happened

Nike's Run London Routefinder is a great Gmaps implementation. You can plot, share, and find routes all over London, "tagged" by gradient, lighting, terrain, and distance. It left private beta, like 2 minutes ago, so it's fresher than fresh.

Wifi Hack
I discovered something fun today. At Victoria, and possibly at 200 UK locations, ReadyToSurf, operate pay-as-you-go wifi hotspots. If you try and connect you get redirected via your browser to a page requesting payment. Really unexpectedly though, the network will still allow Bittorrent and Skype calls, without paying a penny. ReadyToSurf is all over the place, including stations, Virgin Megastores, and Sainsbury's. Has anyone else tried this?

Rubik's solving robot, so humbling to be trumped by a machine.

Howto maximize your ROI at Pizza Hut: stacking vegetables real high, in order to plunder the salad bar. Great photos.

FIRST - The internet provided hospitals and government agencies with a new and powerfully effective method of exchanging important, potentially life-saving information at record speeds.
THEN - A bunch of people uploaded child pornography.
NOW - The internet has reached its third and most awesome phase to date...Werner Von Wallenrod's Humble, Little Hip Hop Site!!

Flying Thingz make the oddest objects into RC planes: lawnmowers, tanks, doghouses.

Peepee, an incredibly scary halloween costume. Un-unseeable.

That rarest and most auspicious of astrological events has come to pass. The celestial bodies of The Sun and Mars The Mirror, are in perfect alignment. My prediction is that an 80's celebrity will face more hours of community service. (See also the previous conjunction)

MP3 Blogging

Jack Johnson: so unfashionable, and yet so awesome:

My Doorbell (4.1Mb MP3), live on Radio 1 last week.

Walk Like An E-Jitz by the E-Jitz (Thanks, DJ-WF)

And finally a whole album by Aussie folk rockers Architecture in Helsinki.

Some additional Jack Johnson Vs White Stripes action: We're Going To Be Friends.(Thanks, Mike!)

Bloggers are the new...
Evil-doers, punks, stasi, paparazzi, media, neologists, public intellectuals, black, Minutemen of the future, CB Radio enthusiasts, pamphleteers, movers, shakers, journalists, less incompetent journalists, "frontier of credibility, honesty, transparency and personal accountability", hippies, fifth estate, fourth estate, kingmakers, mercenary media police, Defenders of America, US Enemy, handsellers, voices of the public, gay, rumour mills, terrorists, champions, elite, guerillas, Op-ed writers, Matt Drudge, copy cops, McCarthys, rockstars, Saddam Hussein, post-debate spinmeisters, roaches, hotness, ski bums, TV cooks, grass roots, rappers, holy men, celebrities, politicians, theologians, soccer moms, Pepys, victims, Ku Klux Klan, sexy, socialites, ink stained wretches.
I'm all of that and more. Don't try and categorise me, Google

Mystery Object

This monster industrial machine is parked at the back of the BBC. It is pictured with Mr Nixta, a 6' 3" male, for scale purposes.
I can't really begin to hazard a guess as to what is does. It has no wheels, and no obvious prehensile arm. It is parked on giant pilings, and festooned with huge cables. Any suggestions?

mobile GLU for 2.0 addicts who really need del.icio.us and flickr on their mobiles.

Howto choose good ice cream without tasting it.

Map the geographical distribution of a surname across the UK. Cartwr1ghts strangely are all clustered in the Midlands. I feel ashamed and sordid.

It is my 29th birthday on Monday, and all I really want in the world is some sodium alginate. (amazing online specialist ingredients shop).

There are so many AJAX-tastic web calendars these days, but none except myhomepoint let you set up a todo list and a tickler file for your cat.

Speaking of which: a contender for world's fattest moggy.

There is no band on earth quite like Schmoof. They have PVC costumes, and an 8-bit graphic sensibility, and rocked Fresh 2006 last night.

e-gold are like paypal for luddites, since they still adhere to the gold standard. I would guess their overheads are rather higher than payapal's.

The self-portrait, "a kind of folk art for the digital age".

Great photo of 10m wave soaking tourists in San Sebastian.

No man is an island, but here's a list of places with less than 10 people.

Airtroductions looks like the worst idea ever. For a nominal fee they let you arrange a blind date with someone in the next seat to you on a flight. Imagine making a clumsy pass over a stale bread roll, and then being trapped next to your "date" until touch-down.

The Crip sign language. Not just for deaf gang bangers apparently.

Awesome job description for a pro manhunter:

"Individual will research and incorporate current manhunting experiences and procedures in order to provide an educational forum for manhunting issues. Education: Bachelors Degree in related field of study. Must possess a SECRET level clearance and be able to obtain a TOP SECRET/SCI security clearance."

I don't expect they are looking for marketing, or media studies for the related Bachelors Degree.

I bought myself a nitrous oxide whipped cream maker from Cream Supplies, in order to make El Bulli style foams. Here's what Harold McGee says on the subject:

"...cooks nowadays make foams from all kinds of water based liquids and semi-solids that contain dissolved or suspended or structure stabilizing molecules of some kind. The Catalan chef Ferran Adria pioneered this development with foams of- among other ingredients- cod, shellfish, foie gras, asparagus, potatoes, raspberries, and cheese."

Pictured is my attempt at Coconut Foam. In order from bottom to top: caramelised bananas, strawberries in balsamic, lemon gelatine with crushed pink peppercorns, and finally the coconut foam. I've also had a crack at Parmesan Ice Cream Sandwiches, Frozen Caipirinha Cubes, and A Spoonful of Pina Colada, which are pictured in my Flickr set. If anyone knows of any other public domain Adria recipes, drop a link in the comments.

Play this, then watch this. Killer combination.

Digital Retro is a book documenting the evolution of computer design. Really beautiful nerd-porn.

The Jack Bauer kill counter. I had no idea he did so much stabbing and shooting, having lost track of his antics at about 2pm in series 1.

The Viennese Vegetable Orchestra play with instruments made of vegetables.

I think this is a fake, composited from different sources, but it's great anyway: dial scan of NYC radio from the night John Lennon died.

If anyone has the Mythbusters episode with Ricky Jay, could you forward me a link/file. I'm keen for some card throwing footage to hone my technique, but the torrent has ground to a halt.

And speaking of technique: unbelievable 3 ball juggling video.

This might be slightly late notice, but there's about 1 hour until Sunset Gun hit the stage for their second ever gig. Betsy Trotwood 8pm, be there or more likely, be elsewhere, if you didn't hear about it until now.

Howto hack a baby (toy).

The history of CamelCase.

Don't shoot the puppy.

My favourite skate movie ever was Rodney Mullen Vs Daewon Song. The movie above is basically Rodney Vs Daewon Volume 3, as found on Google Video.

I have a lot of work to get done today, and none of it involves blogging. In order to motivate myself, I have set up a webcam. It will upload a picture of me, hard at work, once per minute until approx 9pm. You can refresh this image, anytime you want to keep an eye on how I'm doing. If you catch me away from my desk, feel free to send abusive IM/email.

Tiny Russians playing with food, remind me of the banned Sisley posters from way back when.

This is the greatest thing in the history of machinima: Rube Goldberg Device in Half Life 2 (via here and there)

Dumbest burglar ever: checks his email and forgets to log out of Yahoo! Mail during a break-in.

Does anyone else find it ironic that the Unabomber, a man who plainly abhors modern technology, has his letter to the NY Review of Books on the internet?

Howto: properly pronounce "Ahoy Hoy" when answering the telephone, as mooted by Alexander Graham Bell.

My Interpretation Of Michael Haneke's Hidden / Caché
The film world is buzzing with rave reviews for Hidden. Time Out London liked it so much, that for the first time ever, they added an extra star to their rating system to give it 6 stars. It is a film with multiple layers of meaning, and no definite conclusions. It plays almost like a thriller, but ends up as a meditation on historical and current racism within France. To explain my interpretation, I'm giving away the entire plot, and the so-called "twist", so I'm writing in white text below. Highlight the rest of the entry, only if you are happy to have major spoilers.
To briefly summarise: The opening shot, during the credits, shows the exterior of a house. It is revealed to be a static shot from a surveillance camera. Georges is a arts TV presenter, who receives a series of these surveillance tapes showing his house. The tapes are deeply unsettling. They cause and reveal, disharmony and unrest within his family life. He begins to suspect they are from Majid, a Algerian man, whom he knew as a small child. Majid's parents worked for Georges' parents, but were killed by police, while on a political march. At the time Georges' mother had planned to adopt Majid, but through lies and manipulation, Georges persuades his parents to send Majid away to the orphanage instead. Denied his education, Majid has led a life of poverty in the Paris projects as a result. Georges however has prospered as part of the chattering classes. When Georges confronts Majid, Majid plausibly denies sending the tapes. Georges lies about this encounter to his wife, as he still feels deeply guilty about what he did to Majid. A subsequent tape, sent to his wife Anne, however shows the encounter between Georges and Majid, implicating either Majid or his son as the "stalkers". When Georges' son, Pierrot goes missing, he suspects Majid. Majid and his son are arrested overnight by racist police, and Pierrot is discovered to have been staying with a friend all along. Majid invites Georges to visit him again, and in front of Georges, commits suicide by slitting his throat. Georges finally explains to his wife, why Majid resented him so much. Some time later, Majid's son confronts Georges at work, and he too denies sending the tapes. Georges dreams of the moment when Majid was dragged away screaming to the orphanage. The final shot plays over the credits, showing the exterior of Pierrot's school. Briefly Pierrot is seen meeting and chatting aimiably with Majid's son.
The events in the film serve as a microcosm of the racism endemic in French society, and the disparity between Algerians and the white middle class French. To me the only satisfying reading of the mystery of who sends the tapes, is a post-modern one. The tapes are "sent" by Haneke the director, and the audience. We, the audience, see the surveillance tapes full screen, integrated into the film, and it is our intrusion into Georges' life that disturbs it so thoroughly. The message is that deeply awful things lie hidden in the past, both for French society, and for individuals. If there were an audience to see our secrets, and feel our guilt, our own lives too would collapse. Denial and repression are the mechanisms that protect Georges and France from their past. The final shot suggests that reconciliation and acceptance would be better for France, whereas sadly it is too late for Majid and Georges.
I do not think that is the only possible interpretation, but it is the only one that makes sense to me, given that the last shot, again appears as a static surveillance video. I hope other people have other ideas. Feel free to add as many spoilers as you like in the comments. If you have not seen it yet, then you should, because it is truly one of the most interesting, provocative, and meticulously well-made films, that I have ever seen.

Top Ten Most Widespread Simpsons Neologisms As Judged By Google
1. Doh 7 Million
2. Jebus 396k
3. Cromulent 311k
4. Craptacular 219k
5. "I for one welcome our X overlords" 111k
6. Yoink 94k
7. Ahoy hoy 94k
8. Cheese eating surrender monkeys 81k
9. Sacrilicious 42k
10. Tomacco 31k

Highly commended: Embiggen 21k

NB There is no way of searching for "Worst. X. Ever.", and the results for "Y'ello" are contaminated by its popularity in Africa, so they are excluded. Other suggestions via the comments, please.

Amazing home made light-sabers, using actual laser.

Remixed films/trailers seems to be the new hotness: Sleepless in Seattle the thriller, Brokeback to the Future, and The Shining Remarketed (Thanks, DJ WF)

Feel like being psychoanalysed by a RoboSapien? Take a seat in Eliza Redux's online waiting room. (Explanation here)

Two RC blimps for £15? Bargain!

Viral Billiards a clever flash game that reminds me of 3-D chess, because of the fiendish complexity of the shot-making required.

Wikipedia rules: The list of strange units of measurement, and The list of problems solved by MacGyver.

You might, or might not have noticed that I've added my del.icio.us feed in the sidebar. I make no guarantee as to the quality of links posted there. I reserve the right to double post, both to the feed and this main column. I use it sort of as a dumping ground for unwanted links.

Howto: account for suspicious search activity when Google shop you to the feds.

Wrestle your eyes from the f*cking screen: Johansson naked on the cover of Vanity Fair. (via)

Hurt You Bad are linking a ton of awesome graffiti bombing videos.

The official BAPE website has a link to download a flash application. It opens fullscreen, in its own camo bape version of an OS X skin. There's a little OS X dock of BAPE icons, and an apple-like menu. It plays awful musak from the Bapesounds record label, and pulls RSS feeds to give you updated news about BAPE product launches worldwide. You'd have to be a serious BAPE otaku to look at this daily, but it makes a refreshing change from most streetwear websites. As broadband becomes more universal, I suppose there will be more stuff like this, and cliquenmove. (via (much missed))

How to: Use del.icio.us to manage your academic references.
If you have ever written an academic paper, particularly in a scientific discipline, you know how tough it is to cope with the abstracts and papers that need to be referenced at the end of your piece. If you are anything like me, your desk ends up buried under a pile of indistinguishable print-outs from Medline. Worse still comes the moment when you submit the paper, and realise that you have cited your references incorrectly. Harvard instead of Vancouver format, or some other obscure house style. There is professional software to help you cope with this nightmare. End Note is quite good at what it does, but it costs £125 just as a download. You can gain all the important functionality, with a little extra Web2.0 goodness on top, for free, thanks to the wonder of del.icio.us

Step 1 Download a desktop del.icio.us client. I happen to like Cocoalicious. There are lots of different tools to choose from. If you are paranoid about colleagues or competitors stealing your work, you might want to use private bookmarking.

Step 2 Register a new del.icio.us username. It's not like Yahoo! can't afford it, and you don't want your references getting mixed up with your scheisse porn, or your knitting patterns.

Step 3 When you find an abstract or reference you think might be interesting or relevant, bookmark it. If you are away from your desk, in the library perhaps, you just add it to the same del.icio.us account.

Step 4 Discipline, discipline, discipline. If this is going to save you time, you have to be rigorous here. For the description of the URL, choose the exact title of the paper, plus possibly the authors, if that will help you remember it.

Step 5 For the extended description, copy across the complete reference. Journal, authors (including their first names), volume, date, and pages. You never know how much of this you'll be required to cite, so get it all down now.

Step 6 Tagging. This is where the 2.0-ness comes good. Tag the URL with all the MeSH keywords from Medline. In addition tag it with a term that identifies it as relevant to your paper. If you're writing a thesis on scheisse, be sure to add a "scheisse" tag, so you can find all the abstracts you need at once.

Step 7 More tagging. Devise your own todo system of tags. If you have the abstract but need the full text, tag it to remind you of that. If you have only glanced at the abstract, and need to read it in full, tag that too. You could use "tododownload" and "todoread".

Step 8 Get writing, searching and citing. The Webclips feature in Cocoalicious, is indispensible here. Don't forget to use the proper endnote options in Word. As you finalise the references that will be included in your paper, either add an additional tag, perhaps "final", or give them a high rating (not possible in all del.icio.us clients). Drag the references as required, directly from Cocoalicious to Word, and amend them to the chosen citation style. All the information you need will be there at your fingertips, less than two clicks away.

Step 9 Bask in academic glory.

I hope this is helpful to other lowly research fellows like myself, and maybe even to the odd web-literate professor. If you have any other hints, hacks, or tweaks, leave them in the comments and I'll incorporate them.

Dave Chappelle is back and he's having a block party (directed by Michael Gondry).

WOTD: utonagan (not in SOWPODS, yet)

Big Game make all this incredibly nice stuff, including plywood meese/roe deer heads for your wall, and bling gold accents for your iPod headphones, bic lighter and Swatch.

Bunchball are taking flash gaming into a collaborative 2.0 direction. They haven't got the depth of games yet, but it looks cool.

Painstaking toothpick sculptures.

MySeasonPass help you organise your torrent rss feeds, so you never miss an episode of Lost.

Howto eat your way around the world's top 50 restaurants.

Howto hack your server for complete .mac emulation. Way too hardcore for me.

For the man who has everything: moose nuggets. Dried varnished samples of moose poop, just $20 for 10.

Qwerky is my blog find of the day. They explore the etymology of stupid web2.0 startup names.

The Uberman Sleep Schedule, a method of sleeping less. (At the risk of psychosis and assorted other organic disorders.)

I have never ever used IRC, but I think bash.org is a collection of hilariously good IRC quotes, one liners, and put-downs.

The Fight Club trailer remixed into a Rom-com. This actually says something profound about the way movies are mismarketed.

30boxes, a neato web calendar, is overflowing with AJAXy goodness.

Traps, Mines and a Sheep: german flash gaming goodness.

Flipping Uncle Kimono, an insane documentary about the launch of John Malkovich's fashion line: "Rather then using regular models, Mr. Malkovich plans to have 20 Judo fighters beat each other up while wearing his designs. Along the way, we learn of his mother's agorophobia; that his children think he's a loser, and the voracious eating habits of his wife. This one hour 'documentary' also features Mr. Malkovich's thoughts on life as a celebrity; examples of his superior driving skills, and the ongoing mystery of the 'lost pants'."

Domino Pressure is the most innovative game you'll play all week. A race against the clock to collapse lines of dominoes to crush a tomato. Fantastically Japanese, and fantastically good.

Enryu, (first blogged about here) Japan's awesomest mechabot, is almost ready for emergency search and rescue service.Now they just need to work on the street legal version, so I can drive to work in style.

F*ck the State of the Union. Best rant ever. "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the problem isn’t the “defeatism,” it’s the fucking defeat."

Quiet Revolution is a wind turbine that contains a rotating LED display (a bit like the Nokia 3220). The artist's rendering are stunning. l'll take one to go with my Enryu.

Power-Napping, a collection of futuristic napping prototypes.

If you combine the Daily Monkey with a subscription to MonkeyWire (as I do), all your simian-media needs will be sated.

Backgammon by Odesys, for phones, connects to FIBS (first internet backgammon server). Dopeness

Magnetism, an excellent flash variant on gravity/orbit games. There are two varieties, both of which are amusing if impossibly hard.

I started this blog during some downtime, in the middle of a labour ward night-shift in October 2003. In fact until April last year, I wrote most of it during quiet moments between deliveries. For the last 9 months I've been doing a research job, with lots of clinical work, but no emergencies. The job has a 9-5ish routine and I've been loving it. During the last 9 months I'd persuaded myself that I didn't enjoy labour ward anymore. Tonight by chance I got offered a labour ward shift, following on immediately from my day-shift. Somehow I'd forgotten how much I love labour ward too. It feels great to be up in the middle of the night, eating greasy takeaway food, posting rubbish on the internet, and delivering the occasional baby. I'm happier knowing that I'm not entirely a 9-5 kind of guy.

In conversation today, someone used the Siege of Mafeking, as the archetype of an event that happened at the far limit of human memory. Perhaps a direct quote clarifies that; what was said was, "his flat was such a mess, he had newspapers scattered everywhere, as far back as the Siege of Mafeking." Strangely, the Siege of Mafeking is sometimes cited in that context in our household too, but I had always assumed that was because the pater familias is South African. Mafeking was very much within living memory of my great grandfather, as it happened in 1899-1900. So in the spirit of the excellent Balderdash and Piffle (Victoria Coren, so clearly the thinking man's Nigella Lawson), my questions are (a) Does anyone else use Mafeking in this strange anachronistic sense? and (b) If so, when and how did Mafeking acquire this bizarre connotation, and will it persist when the event itself has faded entirely from the collective memory?

Ch-ch-check it out: what the OED says about Mullets and the Beastie Boys.

Wikipedia entry for mad scientists.

Amazing animated Nike commercial, that to me a least, seems to have ripped off the visual style of Katamari.

Black Widow spiders are dangerous, but never actually kill anyone. Brown Recluse spiders, on the other hand, produce horrific necrotising bites that can eventually cause DIC. Terrifying.

Rockbox is opensource firmware for MP3 players, that is on the verge of being fully ported to iPod. I've always thought iPod software was a buggy bunch of rubbish, so this might nudge me to get a new one.

While we're mac-noodling here's a great list of applications that enhance the functionality of iSight.