Roblog

Recent posts

  • Filed under: communication

    Edward Tufte on PowerPoint

    Edward Tufte at his searing best, dismantling the cult of PowerPoint. PowerPoint is, to Tufte, a singularly useless form of communication: slow, shallow, and thought-corrupting. He uses the tragic example of the Columbia space shuttle disaster to demonstrate the real dangers of reducing complex issues to bullet points.

    “Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that claimed to make us beautiful but didn’t. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: making us stupid, degrading the quality and credibility of our communication, turning us into bores, wasting our colleagues’ time. These side effects, and the resulting unsatisfactory cost/benefit ratio, would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.”

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  • Filed under: brands

    Amazon, aggregators, and the death of brands

    What happens if Amazon goes the way of Uber and Airbnb, and becomes an "aggregator" – with unlimited product selection, a frictionless service, and an incredible user experience? Should food and drink brands be rubbing their hands with glee – or fearing for their lives?

  • Filed under: coronavirus

    In Search of Lost Time - The American Interest

    Peter Pomerantsev writes perfectly on how the disorienting, time-warping feel of coronavirus is actually just the latest in a slow melting away of the significance of time:

    “We live in a “flat world” where different eras have become squashed together in a mental space where they can’t by definition all fit at the same time, and where there is no History to order them in terms of their level of “development.” Everything is contemporaneous, but with no model of common communication, a synchronization of the incompatible: ISIS and Putin, Trudeau, Kim Kardashian, and Duterte all jostling against each other with no way of saying which represents the past and which the future.”

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  • Filed under: music

    Video game soundtracks, and a format for adaptive long music

    Matt Webb has really been knocking it out of the park lately. His latest is on adaptive long music, with video game music as inspiration:

    Although this gives the impression of a formless improvisational process, because of the way the music reacts in real-time to the player’s actions, the underlying structure had to be meticulously planned. If a dramatic sequence suddenly kicks off, the soundtrack switches to something with greater intensity, while a more foreboding sound is required during moments of suspense.

    …

    I wonder, when I listen to these soundscapes, whether it would be possible to make an album that is intended to be listened to over a full 24 hours, as a kind of live soundtrack to your life?

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  • Filed under: coronavirus

    Epidemic Calculator

    A beautiful and informative data visualisation from Gabriel Goh. It lets you plum in different knowledge about the Coronavirus, and then examine the effect of different interventions at different times. Thanks to the compounding effect of the virus’s transmission, it becomes suddenly clear how quickly even the most powerful interventions can become useless – or how effective early decisions can be. #

  • Filed under: internet

    Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet | WIRED

    A beautiful paean to Wikipedia, one of the few unqualified success stories of the web, one of the last remaining bastions of the anarchic, decentralised spirit of the early internet, and the home of facts about Afghanistan’s only pig. #

  • Filed under: geography

    Khanzir - Wikipedia

    Today I learned that there is – was? – only one, solitary pig in Afghanistan, and his name is Khanzir. #

  • Filed under: crime

    The Great Buenos Aires Bank Heist

    How thieves disgruntled at the financial system pulled off an almost-perfect robbery – a real work of art. #

  • Filed under: security

    The Spatial Politics of Geofencing

    Interesting thoughts about Code of Conscience, a project that geo-fences heavy duty vehicles, restricting their usage within protected wilderness areas, and what that technology might mean for policymaking. For example:

    You can easily imagine… a dystopian scenario in which geofenced medical prostheses cease to operate when they cross an invisible GPS boundary into an unserviced region—perhaps as a way to protect the host company from the illegal installation of black-market, security-compromised firmware updates, but with immediate and perhaps fatal health effects on the user. Or, say, regions of a metropolis—perhaps near centers of governance or military installations—where civilian vehicles or unregistered photographic equipment of a particular resolution can no longer physically function.

    Just as easily, you could imagine something like the spatial opposite of Code of Conscience, where, for example, future GPS-tagged hunting rifles only work when they are located inside permitted wilderness areas. The instant you step outside the field or forest, your gun goes dead.

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  • Filed under: security

    The intelligence coup of the century

    For half a century, the CIA secretly controlled one of the world’s most widely used cryptography companies, using that control to backdoor allies and enemies alike and eavesdrop on their most sensitive communications. This perhaps explains their concern about Huawei. #

  • Filed under: journalism

    The high school students who uncovered a toxic waste scandal

    Geoff Manaugh on a remarkable story of teen journalists in the 1990s uncovering what the “real” press was unable or unwilling to. An example of just what teens are capable of if given a project with meaning, import, and autonomy. #

  • Filed under: psychology

    The hidden biases that drive anti-vegan hatred

    Why do vegans provoke such ire in non-vegans? This interesting article looks at the cognitive biases that might lead to such strong feelings. #

  • Filed under: technology

    Artificial Morality

    Bruce Sterling on AI ethics:

    In the hermetic world of AI ethics, it’s a given that self-driven cars will kill fewer people than we humans do. Why believe that? There’s no evidence for it. It’s merely a cranky aspiration. Life is cheap on traffic-choked American roads — that social bargain is already a hundred years old. If self-driven vehicles doubled the road-fatality rate, and yet cut shipping costs by 90 percent, of course those cars would be deployed.

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    Technological proliferation is not a list of principles. It is a deep, multivalent historical process with many radically different stakeholders over many different time-scales. People who invent technology never get to set the rules for what is done with it.

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  • Filed under: politics

    Sayre's law

    Related to the last link is Sayre’s law, which states that “in any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake”. We’re distracted by trivialities and are powerless to effect meaningful change. #

  • Filed under: politics

    #distracted – BLDGBLOG

    A piercing view of modern outrage culture, which sees the opposition to fascism distracted by low-stakes nonsense while society is slowly dismantled. #

  • Filed under: sport

    The Unhappy King of Snooker

    From five years ago, but still beautiful and resonant: a profile of Ronnie O’Sullivan, the haunted and preternaturally gifted snooker player. #

  • Filed under: writing

    Elizabeth Wurtzel and the Illusion of Gen-X Success

    A poignant piece on the passing of Elizabeth Wurtzel (author of Prozac Nation) and the precariousness and vapidity of the modern creative industries. #

  • Filed under: politics

    Sn*wflakes and F*ggots

    A wonderfully thoughtful and thought-provoking article about the growing culture war in the UK, as we slowly circle the drain. #

  • Filed under: statistics

    Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers

    A useful name for an intuitive fallacy. #

  • Filed under: knowledge

    How to Make A Memex

    I discovered this after writing up my post about Roam Research and, inevitably, it says much of what I wanted to say more effectively than I was able to say it. #

  • Filed under: publishing

    How a cabal of romance writers cashed in on Amazon Kindle Unlimited

    It turns out the world of self-published, Kindle Unlimited romance novels is cuthroat and scammy. Algorithm-gaming, fake readers, fake content, all generating millions in revenue. Kindle Unlimited is particularly susceptible because of the way it calculates and shares revenue. #

  • Filed under: knowledge

    A fortnight with Roam Research

    I’ve been using Roam Research for a couple of a weeks now, and I have some thoughts about it.

  • Filed under: management

    The Evolution of Socio-Technical Systems

    A fabulous paper from the early 1980s. Taking examples from coal-mining, it explains the interactions between people and technology and the evolution and emergence of productive relationships between the two. There are so many lessons here for modern technical teams. #

  • Filed under: ruby

    Ruby’s $_ variable

    Ruby has many cryptic variables, but one of them is particularly useful – especially if you’re processing text from the command line.

  • Filed under: talks

    Mini Munging, Brighton Ruby conference, July 2015

    The slides and summary from my talk at Brighton Ruby 2015.

  • Command-line purging of Varnish caches

    Varnish, the HTTP proxy, is a fantastic tool. Here’s a way to purge cached pages from the command line, a task I find myself wanting to do frequently.