Links for 2006-04-05
Posted April 5, 2006 1:17 AM.
- Firefly < Serenity So this guy wants to prepare his friend to watch Serenity, and so makes him a thirty minute introduction to Firefly which he's now circulating for free on the internet, even though he's going to get crushed by the law.
- A bashed and broken Powerbook still mostly works - it causes me pain this, after seeing such a similar fate befall my work Powerbook... "Matt Johnson sent around this jaw-dropping picture of a Powerbook. There's no way to describe the scene in words so you just have to look at the photo."
- These poems showing the absurdities of English spelling are pretty astonishingly fun to read out loud fast But while I laugh, can I just point out how upsetting I find the Simplified Spelling Society. I'm afraid I believe that the systematic simplification of spelling strips language of its etymological roots and would diminish the language in resonance and associative power - that is to say, it would make the language flat, dull and unpoetic.
- People in Florida are too scared to send their children to London because of the threat of terrorist attacks Extraordinary, but entirely familiar. During the first Gulf War, tourism from the US to Britiain dropped enormously, despite the fact that the war could have little or no direct impact in London at all.
- Timeline of Apple Macintosh models from Wikipedia Nice bit of work this - classy and up to date. I can identify several major product lines that I've been lucky enough to own.
- My Life in the Bush of Ghosts - David Byrne and Brian Eno's classic album from 1981 - has a beautiful site for its upcoming reissue But more interestingly and more importantly, they're opening up two of the tracks, and all the various parts of them, up for a remix license so that people can use and sample them and put them in their own tracks - for free! Stunning. Beautiful.
- Various people have been writing up the various MacBook Pro noises that have plagued some early adopters Apparently some of them are fixable (and may have been fixed) with software, while others have been fixed in later versions. Many other users are not experiencing any problems at all...
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
"Why isn't 'drought' spelled just like 'route'"
Why should it be? (Answer: because they rhyme in American English)
"Where" and "were" are homonyms in much of northern England; should they be spelt the same? Should "there" be spelt "they're"? Or "their"? Should "heir" be spelt "air"? And "our" "hour"? (Answer: no!)
Arbitrarily changing spellings like this would lead to more confusion.
The Americans have already done it once anyway - removing "U"s and changing French-originated "re"s to "er"s, so that "liter" is pronounced "leet-er" and not "lighter", which makes no sense whatsoever to me.
Written English is not a phonetic transcription of spoken English - lots of people who can speak very competently are hopeless at written English - spelling, punctuation and grammar particularly. The International Phonetic Alphabet is for phonetic transcriptions when they are needed.
English is a mess. Trying to make it not a mess, so it's easier to learn, would stop it being English. It would just make it easier to learn English wrongly, and that's easy enough already.
→ Posted by: Greg K Nicholson at April 5, 2006 4:00 AM
never! actually, it's been almost 6 months and i've not gotten a single request to take it down.
→ Posted by: Justin Ruckman at April 5, 2006 4:25 AM
I'm actually binging on Firefly for the first time (Woolies is selling the box set for £27.99 right now), and have Serenity queued up to watch straight after. IT IS SO AWESOME. I have no idea how I missed it.
→ Posted by: Natali at April 5, 2006 11:25 AM
I'm glad I fall into the last category of MacBook Pro owners... I only ever get blissful silence!
...excet when the processors are getting really hammered, and the duvet is preventing heat wicking away from the underside, then a discrete fan kicks in. But I accept that as a small price to pay for being able to play WoW in bed. :-)
→ Posted by: Becky at April 5, 2006 1:55 PM
And we can't forget when the US bombed Libya with aircraft based in the UK. Some people in the States cancelled visits to Britian because of fear of reprisals.
Most Americans are not that thick and have a good concept of risk but I'm guessing the school board are not able to quantify risk.
→ Posted by: Jane at April 5, 2006 6:34 PM
Upon reading the article about people in Florida being too scared to go to London, I find that the article is really about *one* high school in Florida that doesn't want to send their band to London. This is completely not what I expected given your lead in.
I'm also curious as to the data that supports your additional evidence of US travel to Britain decreasing during the Gulf War. Lots of economic factors affect travel including recessions (I believe there was a mini one in the US during the early 90s) and exchange rates. It would be hard to isolate the Gulf War as the sole independent factor for decreased travel of US citizens to Britain -- although it might be possible for the Gulf War to cause economic factors that were the real culprit for decreased travel.
→ Posted by: Nicole at April 5, 2006 6:38 PM
And the issue of the replaced track in My Life... not worth mentioning?
→ Posted by: David at April 7, 2006 5:52 PM