blog

The Pirate Bay released a fabulously entertaining press release yesterday, containing the memorable claim that “we’ve done what they [Hollywood] did”, meaning circumventing legislation to open up a restricted field to business and the public. Techdirt examined this claim, and found historical evidence for it. About one hundred years ago, Thomas Edison’s “Motion Picture Patents Company” tried to monopolise film equipment production, but Carl Laemmle’s Universal Pictures refused to bow down, and cinema-goers flocked to the “illegal” movies of Laemmle, and fellow independents.

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An essay I wrote on the London Riots was picked up by Sanford Housing Co-operative in their in-house bi-monthly print magazine “The San”. So popular was said essay amongst the readership that they invited me to make a regular contribution.

I present therefore, essay #2: Unfriend Facebook: Why Facebook Is Anything But Your Friend. Written in the light of recent Facebook changes, the essay highlights why these and previous Facebook features are bad for all of us.

I thought I’d expand my tweets about the #LondonRiots into an essay, analysising the root causes of the trouble. Even if I say so myself it’s a great essay, and I really recommend it.

You’ll find it here.

The copywriting I do for DotBrighton is the perfect writing gig for the world of 2011. As it is a voluntary, unpaid, restrictive, and unpublished role this might seem counterintuitive, so I’d like to explain why. It has a number of key things that are unexpectedly right with it.

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Lets all count to nen!

Zun, woo, twee, throur, fourve, fix, siven, seight, eine, nen!

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Many geeks I have met insist that the key to good design is simplicity. But they do not practice what they preach, for if they did they would realise that simplicity in most cases would mean not using a computer. A map - for instance - is a good deal simpler than a satnav. That means it is also more robust. And it is wholly decoupled*, unlike the satnav which relies on both electrical power and GPS data.

So if you’re serious about simplicity, put away the keyboard and grab pen and paper instead. And to illustrate my dedication to true simplicity, I’m going to end this post now, the point having been made.

:)

* - ie: aside from your brain, it doesn’t rely on anything else to work

The removal of the concert hall section of Brighton’s West Pier is an unforgivable act of council-sponsored vandalism. Brighton & Hove Council leader Mary Mears said ‘The removal of part of the West Pier will be a sad moment‘. She is gravely wrong, choosing to professionally downplay the scale of the political travesty that she and her colleagues have visited on Brighton & Hove. It is much worse than that, and I’ll tell you why, in unsentimental terms.

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When I am writing, I am constantly aware of a contract that exists between the reader and I. It goes like this:

• Writer: I promise to write something that isn’t shit
• Reader: I promise not be a cretin

It’s a simple contract but works well because it leaves both parties free to pursue their goals whilst putting the onus of quality on the other, thus ensuring that they are both playing at the height of their game; and it also opens both parties up to criticism but only to a degree that is fair, with each party regulating for him or herself what constitutes ‘fair’.

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It’s fine to take anyone’s idea you want and just use it without permission.

Well that’s it, that’s all I really wanted to say, but one has to justify these things, right?

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the necessity to develop and apply geometry to farming produced by the seasonal flooding of the nile found expression in a series of mathematical papyri. the great egyptian mathematician ahmose was responsible for the moscow mathematical papyrus:

moscow mathematical papyrus - courtesy of wikipedia.org

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