Tangents

are streetlights in other countries different?

That building is Villa Nurbs. Cool as it is it’s the green streetlights that interest me. Hmm

Luigi Bocconi University Building by Grafton Architects

Grafton Architects have taken the top prize at the World Architecture Festival in Barcelona. How cool is that? World Building of the Year.

The project itself

The World Architecture Festival

The Guardian’s report

You know, Ralph Nader would still like people to take notice of him. So he’s reduced himself to talking to parrot. Sadly, it’s a good idea. As Reagan proved, animals make for effective ads.

I find the following piece of financial news weirdly funny:

NEW YORK (Sept. 15, 2008) ― Dow Jones Indexes, a leading global index provider, today announced component changes in the Dow Jones Financial Services Titans 30 Index.

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (United States, Financial Services, LEH) will be removed from the Dow Jones Financial Services Titans 30 Index and replaced by Mega Financial Holding Co. Ltd. (Taiwan, Financial Services, 2886.TW). Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. is being removed because it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The Titans Index? The Mega Financial Holding Co. Ltd? These corporate types are such a bunch of weirdos.
Vice President of East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming Jack Donaghy wouldn’t be out of place in this news item.

Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad-and considerably worse than most people recognise it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people. Creating new people is thus morally problematic.

From David Benatar’s book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. Noted at Crooked Timber. Interesting!

…if you account for the relative worth of medals won and the Gross National Income (purchasing power parity adjusted) of the countries. Puts Australian’s being “beaten” by Britain in context.

Unsurprisingly Jamaica does best of all. Here’s the table as cooked up by the number crunchers at Crooked Timber:

Here’s the Crooked Timber post.

If you haven’t watched it via bit torrents (like me) or on  the BBC (like my mum), then you should tune into RTÉ 2 at 11.30pm tonight for Mad Men. It’s an excellent drama set in the New York advertising industry in the early 60′s. Expect great production design, intricate character development, a wide ranging portrait of a ‘tribe’ of characters and to be totally engrossed.
The plots develop slowly, but that’s natural in a show of this type. Think of it in the same vein as The Sorprano’s or The Wire where the aim is to depict a complex group of people, their interactions and their place in the world. Season 2 is currently airing in the States.

The BBC Radio Labs team have been up to some very interesting stuff, as often they are. This time they’ve taken a novel approach to The Archers, a long running daily radio drama broadcast on Radio 4. Now while I’m not a fan of The Archers, in fact I never listen to it, I’m familiar enough with the format. It’s short and there are a number of scenes seperated by silence. What the Radio Labs folks have done is parse the structure of each episode into scenes with attached information on characters, location, weather, which storyline, and other tags. It means locating a scene is easy, reconfiguring them as segments is easy, concentrating only on one story line is simple etc. The effort is to create metadata for the development of a new dynamic page for the show. So you could click into a page about a character or storyline or relationship, and be presented with the scenes and info on other related facets. Very clever.

What I found really curious is the graphics. Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times have for some time had some pretty good blogs and quite a selection, such as Errol Morris‘s (which seemed like a series of really good essays rather than rattled off blog postings), and Freakonomics.

They are now straight linking to other people’s content at the Ideas blog. Basically like an old style blog they’re pointing you to the good stuff. The link economy is bedding in at the Grey Lady.

I’d love to see the Irish Times editors do something similar. What does Madam’s eyes scan as she sips her tea and stops thinking of new ways to fill August’s silly season pages I wonder. Do you think she reads xkcd?