This is well bloody disturbing. His raucous laughter in this context seem like the pitiful screams of a tortured soul. [via]
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DRM drummed out?
Following on from Eliot Van Buskirk’s Wired column Who’s Killing MP3 and iTunes? (in which he pontificated on the future of the MP3 file format in comparison to DRMed alternatives like Apple’s AAC format as sold in their iTunes online store) there is the news that EMI has announced that it will no longer produce CDs with DRM.
One swallow doesn’t make a summer but this would seem to be an indication that even the record companies are coming to doubt the efficacy of DRM.
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Pizza or your life.
Frankie Flood a University of Illinois School of Art and Design student produced a number of beautiful but deadly looking pizza-cutters for his MFA Thesis Exhibition[via]
This is my favourite of his works featured.
PLF “Pizza For Life” 2002
Powder coated aluminum, stainless steel, and ball bearings
4″ x 9 1/2″ x 1 1/2″
This one looks like a particularly vicious weapon as used by an assassin in a steampunk novel. Cardinal Chang of The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters
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Re-writing the rules of online ID
BBC columnist Bill Thompson discovers that forgetting a password might be an opportunity for reinventing yourself.
An employee who forgot their password to log in to the corporate network would probably get a withering look from the support staff as they grovelled to have it reset.
By contrast it seems that young people who forget their MySpace logins are just as likely to make a new account as fret over their lost friends or painstakingly constructed homepage decorations.
Multiple personalities is the new black.
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40 million sheep in New Zealand
The second of the BBC’s Doctor Who spin off series The Sarah Jane Adventures has gotten off to a great start with their special pilot episode. Let’s just hope that they can keep up this level of quality for the series proper and not go the way of Torchwood.
Coincidentally a half-year review of the Torchwood team has been leaked on to the interweb.
To: All Staff
From: HR Director
Importance: High
Subject: Half-Year Review – Some Essential RemindersAs we are all aware, we at Torchwood have undergone a drastic downsizing and restructuring exercise during Q1 and Q2 of the current period. Painful as the process has been, the Board is confident that we have now turned the corner and that the organisation is poised to build on its strengths over the coming months to emerge as a strong and vital entity with continued assured growth potential.
Brilliant stuff.
Whilst idly surfing the web one day I discovered that there many more North Poles in the world than I’d thought. Not only do we have the Geographic North Pole, the Magnetic North Pole and the Geomagnetic North Pole, there are also North Poles in both the states of Alaska and New York and curiously a North Pole in the centre of London.
The curious 10 year old boy that lives inside me and loves watching The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures decided to email them to find out why it was called the North Pole station.
North Pole station [Incident:061229-000103]
Could you tell me please why it is called North Pole?Thanks
Matt Wharton
Dear Mr Wharton
Thank you for your e mail,
The North Pole International Depot in London is so called because the depot is linked by rail to the three main North London termini: Euston, St Pancras and Kings Cross.
Kind Regards
Julian
Well briefly this year’s Christmas episode of Doctor Who was in my opinion a load of crap and Catherine Tate was even more bloody annoying than I’d expected her to be. Yet another proof that RTD shouldn’t fucking write these episodes as if we needed more proof.
And yet I was still excited by the trailer for the forthcoming Third season of the show. I’m a fucking lost cause really.
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Boymongoose’s 12 Days of Christmas
The 12 Days of Christmas by boymongoose is so damn good I might just have to buy the album ready for next year.