Well, lists of links and commentary are almost as good as opinion and life-stories, right?
For many years now the ultimate question has, contrary to Adams, been known: What is beer? Curiously, it falls to an American marketing campaign to tell us.
I have recently upgraded my mobile phone. Well, what I actually did was dither about between my two choices (The HTC One X and the Samsung Galaxy S II) and then eventually click on box to get them to send me the latter. The HTC One X is, without doubt, a ridiculous powerhouse of a device, and a very cunningly designed one. It is also, without doubt, exactly the sort of direction I'd rather phones stopped taking - as with the iPhone, there are essentially no user servicable parts. Storage is capped at the default 32GB, and the battery can't be changed. Sure, it's a better OS and a more interesting toy than the iPhone, but that sort of bollocks should be discouraged. Not, really, that I think that my decision will have any real weight on its own, but hopefully enough people with manage to resist the lure of simple/shiny in favour of real ownership of their phones and utility. That said, I can see why teenagers might be lured, hormones in hand as it were, to the iPhone.
On the rather different subject of the British in Wartime(tm), I recently came across a review of war-story too unbelievable to publish but which nevertheless filled the brains of Brits young and old - The Falklands Conflict. As our reviewer takes great pains to point out, the mere fact that this tripe actually happened is no reason for such stupendously unbelievable codswallop to allowed into print.
Continuing the theme of distances being a long way, we must consider that to define out end-points for a journey we either require a useful coordinate system for referring to the surface of what might charitably be called a deformed oblate sphere, or named destinations. The Atlas of True Names attempts to make this timeless by listing locations not by their mundane, workaday labels but by their eternal essences. Specifically, it lists places not by their modern handles, but by what those noms de guerre mean. Some of the results are really rather lovely.
I have recently upgraded my mobile phone. Well, what I actually did was dither about between my two choices (The HTC One X and the Samsung Galaxy S II) and then eventually click on box to get them to send me the latter. The HTC One X is, without doubt, a ridiculous powerhouse of a device, and a very cunningly designed one. It is also, without doubt, exactly the sort of direction I'd rather phones stopped taking - as with the iPhone, there are essentially no user servicable parts. Storage is capped at the default 32GB, and the battery can't be changed. Sure, it's a better OS and a more interesting toy than the iPhone, but that sort of bollocks should be discouraged. Not, really, that I think that my decision will have any real weight on its own, but hopefully enough people with manage to resist the lure of simple/shiny in favour of real ownership of their phones and utility. That said, I can see why teenagers might be lured, hormones in hand as it were, to the iPhone.
On the rather different subject of the British in Wartime(tm), I recently came across a review of war-story too unbelievable to publish but which nevertheless filled the brains of Brits young and old - The Falklands Conflict. As our reviewer takes great pains to point out, the mere fact that this tripe actually happened is no reason for such stupendously unbelievable codswallop to allowed into print.
Continuing the theme of distances being a long way, we must consider that to define out end-points for a journey we either require a useful coordinate system for referring to the surface of what might charitably be called a deformed oblate sphere, or named destinations. The Atlas of True Names attempts to make this timeless by listing locations not by their mundane, workaday labels but by their eternal essences. Specifically, it lists places not by their modern handles, but by what those noms de guerre mean. Some of the results are really rather lovely.