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‘It struck me that I had five years here. Five long years of baked beans on toast. Five years without curry laksa.’
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Via Scoble, one for mineralophiles and old school Mac fans: photography by the man who wrote MacPaint and Hypercard. I wrote a space invaders game in Hypercard once; admittedly, it sucked.
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‘Cats were domesticated in the Near East from local wildcats, according to a new kitty family tree based on DNA evidence from nearly 1000 animals.’
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via information aesthetics: “Powers of Ten” is a 1977 short documentary film written and directed by Charles & Ray Eames, depicting the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten.
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Archaeologists have found some of the oldest evidence of cultivated food plants in South America.
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via Language Log: A list of brand names in the Simpsons, like the ‘Turn Your Head and Coif’ beauty parlour.
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Just another photo I like at Shorpy: “Summer 1938. Drugstore in Newark, Ohio.”
Month: June 2007
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‘Home and independent game makers are getting a chance to put together titles for Nintendo’s Wii console.’
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via things magazine
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‘the Wikipedia logo incorporates the word “Wikipedia” written in a variety of writing systems. Some of the spellings are wrong.’
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‘Designers who can’t get enough of their Pantone chips can now drink out of them.’
Malachi Stilt-Jack am I
There’s serious flooding in Yorkshire at the moment. I found this brilliant photo on Flickr:
Surfer on Chants Ave!, originally uploaded by Dave Foy.
The Daily Mail asks an unusually reasonable question on their front page today—why do we keep building new houses on flood plains? The trouble is that Britain is a small, rainy island; there are a limited number of sites available that aren’t flood risks. And we need new houses because property prices in England are insane.
It seems to me that there’s a simple answer: start building houses on stilts.
palafitos, originally uploaded by wciu.
I’m serious about this; or at least as serious as I can be without the architectural or engineering background to judge the practicalities or it. To build houses where you know they’re likely to get flooded may be reckless; to build them the same way as you would on high ground is just stupid.
Stilt houses on Pulau Mabul, originally uploaded by Vueltaa.
It’s not just stilts; how about watertight windows and doors? If you can’t keep the water away from the house, at least you can keep it from getting inside.
» underwater restaurant by udannlin, used under a Creative Commons by-nc-nd licence.
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One for the WP users out there: ‘This is a zip file that includes only the files that have changed since the last (2.2) release. This will save you a lot of FTP upload time.’
Politician of the day…
… is Anna Lo, a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, about whom I know nothing except that she was on the radio today and has the most extraordinary accent I’ve ever heard. I remember hearing a Swede who had lived in Liverpool for some time, and that was quite something, but I think a Sino-Ulsterian accent tops it.