Dadblog

Today, I fly off to Australia for three weeks. I’m not taking my laptop, because my wife’s already packed the kitchen sink and there is just no room for modern digital communications platforms. Have a good Easter.

Oh, and I’m turning comments and trackback off. So all you comment spammers out there: have a really awful Easter. Thanks you.

It is a source of some pride and lots of love that my nearest neighbour on Audioscrobbler for a few minutes this afternoon was a beautiful 26 year old from Iceland. Do you think she knows? Does she want to go through my CD collection? And does my wife know? She does now.

Ah but then a Rush track comes on and blows my profile out of the water. My nearest neighbour is now an American young woman calling herself dirtylaundry.

I mean, it’s great, this Interweb thing, innit?

If you didn’t know why you paid a licence fee and why this is a good thing, you do now: the BBC interactive human body.

(Via MetaFilter.)

I’ve been thinking about getting a new bike, so this post from BoingBoing was interesting:

Biomega, co-founded by my friend Jens-Martin Skibsted, is a Danish industrial design firm that continually reinvents the wheel with high-end city bicycles. Previously models were designed by luminaries like Ross Lovegrove and Marc Newson. (For more background on Biomega, read Mark’s excellent feature on the company in the October 2000 issue of Wired! Link) This latest beauty is a collaboration between Biomega, Vexed Generation, and Puma. Part of Puma’s Urban Mobility line, the foldable commuter bike is tricked out with an ingenious locking mechanism. The ‘down tube’ is a removable tension wire that works as a chain lock. Clip the chain and the bike is useless.
Link

Unfortunately, the Biomega site is a Flash-fuelled horror that repeatedly crashed Firefox. If I can find one of these bikes, though, I will be checking it out.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Thanks to MetaFilter for a list of links about everything you’d ever want to know about the Tube:

“Ever wonder what the London Underground Map [105 KiB PDF] would look like if it were geographically accurate [255 KiB GIF]? If you could morph [13.7 KiB Flash] between those two versions and Harry Beck’s 1933 map [112 KiB JPG]? What it will look like in 2016 [218 KiB PDF]? What if you replaced all the stations, even ones that are no longer used, with well-known personalities [46 KiB JPG inset]? If you knew exactly which carriage to get on so you’d already be at the Way Out (never ‘exit’ [23 MiB PDF]) when your train stops (or doesn’t stop)? If you had a similar schematic for buses [245 KiB PDF] or river boats [50 KiB PDF]?

Pass your Oyster card over the reader and go on a tour of interesting, imaginative, and subversive maps and diagrams of London public transport. And as you leave, remember to Mind the Gap, Stand on the Right [671 KiB JPG], and Always Touch Out.”

(Via MetaFilter.)

Excited about Dr Who? Then do the decent thing and read Warren Ellis on the first episode:

Well, it’s better than that brainless monstrosity of a TV movie that poor old Paul McGann battled through.

And, for the comics readers in the audience, that is indisputably a Bryan Hitch-designed TARDIS interior.

Christopher Eccleston, as the Doctor, is a delight. I imagine he’ll settle down as the series progresses, but right now he’s a walking mood-swing – Tom Baker’s mad grin and sudden command, Jon Pertwee’s physicality, Patrick Troughton’s impish side. And he’s got a great old leather jacket. He keeps his Northern accent, and when his new assistant asks him why he sounds Northern when he’s an alien, writer Russell Davies gives him the fine line: ‘LOTS of planets have a North!’

(Via Warrenellis.com.)

This is a good: a Business 2.0 article about the invention of MP3, with the startlingly good headline Ich Bin Ein Paradigm Shifter:

“Given that people didn’t actually want helicopters in their homes, Brandenburg and his team members dedicated themselves to replicating its effects through an algorithm. As a result of their efforts, MP3 fools the ear by eliminating the least essential parts of a music file. For example, if two notes are very similar, or if a high and low tone occur at exactly the same time, the brain perceives only one of them; the MP3 algorithm selects the more important signal and discards the other. To create MP3, Brandenburg had to appreciate how the human ear perceives sound. A key assist in this effort came from folk singer Suzanne Vega. ‘I was ready to fine-tune my compression algorithm,’ Brandenburg recalls. ‘Somewhere down the corridor a radio was playing [Vega’s song] ‘Tom’s Diner.’ I was electrified. I knew it would be nearly impossible to compress this warm a capella voice.’

Because the song depends on very subtle nuances of Vega’s inflection, the algorithm would have to be very, very good to select the most important parts of the sound file and discard the rest. So Brandenburg tested each refinement of his system with ‘Tom’s Diner.’ He wound up listening to the song thousands of times, and the result was a code that was heard around the world. When an MP3 player compresses music by anyone from Courtney Love to Kenny G, it is replicating the way that Brandenburg heard Suzanne Vega.”

(Via Business 2.0.)

Alas and alack: Tommy Vance has died after a stroke. It was TV who guided me through my own personal accidental history: an early love for heavy metal while all my friends were getting into proper music like The Clash and ska and New Order and stuff. My legacy from those denim-and-leather days is a continuing love for the barred power chord, a mighty collection of Rush on vinyl, and the memory of the Friday Night Rock Show on Radio 1, when TV’s mighty oaktree voice would bellow out details on the latest testosterone-driven guitar solo to a nation of quivering 13 year olds lying underneath covers. It was on TFNRS (which was, of course, the acronym) that I first discovered the NWOBHM (that’s New Wave of British Heavy Metal to you, son), and the opening soaring notes of Saxon’s 747 (Strangers In The Night), a stupidly simplistic song which still gives me goosebumps even though I pretend to be into desperately hip guitar music these days.

RIP, TV. May your Stairway to Heaven be a smooth one.

(Via Blackbeltjones/work.)

This is a fabulous idea: Plan unveiled for Oyster e-money:

“Users of Transport for London’s (TfL) Oyster card may soon be able to buy newspapers and milk and pay for car parking with their smartcard.

TfL is looking at ways of making small payments a feature of the cards held by 2.2 million people in the UK.”

(Via BBC News.)

How big a problem is identity fraud? I mean, really? According to the Daily Telegraph: “As the Home Secretary has linked the increasing threat of identity theft to the need for ID cards, new figures showed that the crime had grown by 600 per cent.”

But if you read the story, the absolute number of identity thefts in 2004 barely climbed over 100,000. Also, the story doesn’t come up with a definition of “identity theft.” The only anecdote the story covers is deceased people’s identities being used for credit card applications. Well, that just says to me that the systems for reporting a death are not very robust.

But this so-called identity fraud blight is being used as another reason to bring in identity cards. The argument runs, as it does with terrorism and house arrests, that the problem might become really big, so we should introduce cards to stop it in its tracks. But ID cards are a major, major change in our individual relationships with government; isn’t this a case of a hammer being used to crack a nut, what’s more a nut we don’t really know the size, shape of strength of?

Oh God, think I’m turning into a libertarian.

(Via Telegraph News | UK News.)