Pinboard (flashboy)

"Wilson pointed out that clubs with an omnipotent manager lose much of the accumulated knowledge in the organisation when the man leaves. At City, the knowledge is spread across more people, and therefore always stays within the club."

flashboy — 2012-08-18T11:15:24+00:00

That single-point-of-failure thing keeps cropping up in unexpected places.

"But as has become clear, WikiLeaks was not like the Internet it lives on: It also had a single, internal point of failure."

flashboy — 2012-08-17T19:06:23+00:00

Oh network architect, network architect thyself, basically.

The Google decides to take on human trafficking and drug cartels

flashboy — 2012-07-18T09:26:41+00:00

Please please please let drug cartels be Googling "gaps border security location" and "us drug price by city"

Environmental Modification Convention

flashboy — 2012-06-21T22:44:01+00:00

"The Convention bans weather warfare, which is the use of weather modification techniques for the purposes of inducing damage or destruction."

When Twitter Stumbles, Sites Across the Web Go Down With It

flashboy — 2012-06-21T22:22:59+00:00

"At what point is a for profit-service so interconnected and critical that it should be thought of as something more akin to a public utility?"

"So the titanic showdown between Facebook and Google might not be the News Feed vs. Google+ after all... It might, in fact, be pictures vs. vision."

flashboy — 2012-05-30T23:21:44+00:00

"Google is getting good, really good, at building things that see the world around them and actually understand what they’re seeing."

The posh-ing of English football - FT.com

flashboy — 2012-05-27T18:40:10+00:00

"I never thought it would happen, but England’s football team is becoming middle-class."

Internal Time: The Science of Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You're So Tired

flashboy — 2012-05-27T18:38:21+00:00

"Debunking the social stigma around late risers"

Fear the zombie drone

flashboy — 2012-05-10T00:53:41+00:00

Good overview of the practical problems of opening the skies up to drones. File the term "lost-link event" away for future news panics.

Harvet Ismuth's 42 Essential 3rd Act Twists

flashboy — 2012-05-10T00:38:02+00:00

"Double Shyamalan"

Hari Kunzru on Damien Hirst and the economics of the art market

flashboy — 2012-03-18T23:48:28+00:00

"Sooner or later, his advisers will surely find a way for him to dispense with the actual objects altogether and he will package concepts in tranches, like mortgage securities, some good stuff with some trash, to be traded on the bourse in Miami-Basel."

"A helium party balloon should cost £75, to reflect the true value of the gas used"

flashboy — 2012-03-18T15:58:40+00:00

"We use it to make our voices go squeaky for a laugh. It is very, very stupid. It makes me really angry."

Oh, God: Klout Is Right

flashboy — 2012-03-16T23:28:30+00:00

"The current de facto scoreboard of the internet has done its baleful calculations and announced that a spambot is more influential on Twitter than the very creator of Twitter itself. Clearly this is outlandish! ... In case I didn't foreshadow this enough, here comes the smug contrarian argument: Klout, at least in this instance, is right."

Alexis Madrigal gets enjoyably angry about Harper's publisher John MacArthur's anti-internet screed

flashboy — 2012-03-13T16:30:38+00:00

"It is precisely because I value my writing that I want it to be online and free. I don't write merely to rub two pennies together; I write because I want to have an impact in the world. I want to work with my community to break stories and tell jokes, to highlight injustice and find better ways of solving problems... The Internet is where the action is: it's where all the elegant, dirty, pretty, lowbrow, brilliant ideas come together to commingle and evolve."

And probably the most comprehensive consideration of the Kony issue, the Invisible Children campaign, and the complexities of campaigning

flashboy — 2012-03-09T07:04:48+00:00

"If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems? Or to propose only the simplest of solutions?"

The most entertainingly withering of the Kony 2012 campaign takedowns

flashboy — 2012-03-08T17:27:16+00:00

"...a study of a bunch of vain and ignorant young people who can think and feel only in cliches and appear to be laboring under the notion that Mark Zuckerberg invented both compassion and democracy for them sometime around 2004."

How to Say I Love You - The Morning News

flashboy — 2012-03-05T18:33:17+00:00

"(59) Tell her how you feel while you stand at the foot of the huge bed and look upon her sleeping body, while cursing yourself for being a ghost whose words cannot be heard by the living."

"Here’s the thing: Twitter is part of the 'real world.' The Internet is part of the world."

flashboy — 2012-02-22T02:20:23+00:00

Yep.

Extinction Looms for Rare Frog Species, Now Down to One Individual

flashboy — 2012-02-22T01:15:05+00:00

"The last known Rabb’s fringe-limbed tree frog now lives by himself at Zoo Atlanta in Georgia after the zoo euthanized the only other member of its species." :-(

Quality vs. Quantity Online : CJR

flashboy — 2012-02-22T01:09:51+00:00

"Cats-make-you-crazy stories are hard to scale, while commodity content is much easier to replicate." (I'm not convinced you can't do both of these things simultaneously.)

How 'Radiolab' Is Changing the Sound of the Radio

flashboy — 2012-01-17T20:35:16+00:00

"The genre conventions of blogging are changing. Few old-style linkblogs exist and a whole culture has developed around the longread... This is the Radiolab effect extended: expect less pretension to authority, greater understanding of one's nodeness, but greater respect for the production culture of the pre-web era."

Video: Catvertising will redefine internet ads (Wired UK)

flashboy — 2011-11-14T19:07:36+00:00

"Use a video of a cat. Doesn't matter what type, just use a cat."

Everyone's favourite mind-controlling parasite Toxoplasma gondii gets even weirder

flashboy — 2011-11-03T02:34:40+00:00

Not only does it turn rats into risk-addicted death-cult sex robots, it turns them into HOT risk-addicted death-cult sex robots.

Sport must take a stand against the menace of banter

flashboy — 2011-10-22T23:26:44+00:00

"As a sporting chorus, banter has something close to a built-in obsolescence. The native tone of the football fan is in reality something closer to boredom, frustration and quiet loathing. Banter is still an intrusion into these closely guarded places. It is a forced marriage, the sound of people who don't really like sport talking about sport. This is the secret sadness of banter."

Smart cities get their own operating system

flashboy — 2011-10-01T01:31:39+00:00

Can't wait for the first time a city gets the Blue Street of Death.

The Downfall of Horse_ebooks

flashboy — 2011-09-26T19:24:12+00:00

"Nothing Horse_ebooks had been or even remotely intended to create could have matched this response: smart people debating, condemning and mourning the loss of a vaguely defined artificial voice and sincerely declaring that they preferred the early work of a spam bot better than its compromised new stuff."

BBC News - Are viruses the way to green manufacturing?

flashboy — 2011-09-25T23:58:48+00:00

Logging out of Facebook is not enough - Nik Cubrilovic Blog

flashboy — 2011-09-25T23:29:41+00:00

Well that's not good.

"If we do not have causality, we are buggered."

flashboy — 2011-09-22T23:22:16+00:00

It remains to have been seen whether he will be regretting going to have said that previously.

The sky is the limit for print-your-own drones

flashboy — 2011-09-22T00:33:38+00:00

3D printed aerial drones for £1,200, targeting the "civil market", courtesy of Southampton Uni.

Good, balanced (ish) article on Italy's WTF prosecution of seismologists over the L'Aquila earthquake

flashboy — 2011-09-21T22:20:59+00:00

Emphasises that the case is about risk communication, not earthquake prediction. Scientists come out of it looking fine; government official, much less so.

Gang Used 3D Printers for ATM Skimmers

flashboy — 2011-09-21T13:26:55+00:00

So the Occupy Wall Street protest was basically a complete failure, even by it's own most minimal standards

flashboy — 2011-09-21T00:57:30+00:00

The question is, I guess, why, when it could have been so potent a target. (Obvious answers: no clear goals; high barrier to participation; bad timing; twats.)

Meet Philly’s New Android-Powered Newspaper: The Arnova 10 G2

flashboy — 2011-09-12T21:24:22+00:00

Interesting!

Inquirer tabbing the mobile digital reader - Philly.com

flashboy — 2011-09-12T20:32:46+00:00

"Philadelphia Media Network Inc., owners of The Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News... said last week that they would begin the "soft launch" Tuesday of a new digital product: a deeply discounted Android tablet loaded with discounted subscriptions to replica editions of The Inquirer and Daily News and a new multimedia Inquirer tablet app."

In which Ben Hammersley hits various important people with the big stick of truth

flashboy — 2011-09-12T10:52:50+00:00

"We can bitch about it, but Facebook, Twitter, Google and all the rest are, in many ways the very definition of modern life in the democratic west. For many, a functioning internet with freedom of speech, and a good connection to the social networks of our choice is a sign not just of modernity, but of civilisation itself... It is the central platform for business, culture, and personal relationships. There’s not much else left. To misunderstand the centrality of these services to today’s society is to make a fundamental error. The internet isn’t a luxury addition to life; for most people, knowingly or not, it is life."

Steve Jobs’s Best Quotes

flashboy — 2011-08-30T01:34:43+00:00

“It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.”

Warren Ellis » Not Even Our Bridge

flashboy — 2011-06-12T18:30:03+00:00

"A better example that these streets are not our streets won’t be found in Britain today."

The Cypherpunk Revolutionary

flashboy — 2011-03-28T01:35:34+00:00

Detailed portrait of Assange that strikes me as somewhat less flattering than either the author or Wikileaks seem to think.

The data journalism motherlode

flashboy — 2011-02-27T20:37:21+00:00

Vast haul of useful links, tools, examples and more about data journalism and visualisation.

Mutate or Die: a W.S. Burroughs Biotechnological Bestiary

flashboy — 2011-02-26T13:34:55+00:00

Creating new lifeforms by using a genegun to fire gold dust coated in DNA from William Burroughs' preserved faeces into a load of sperm.

D Nye Everything: Everything old is new again

flashboy — 2011-02-21T03:29:11+00:00

Gadget recursions.

wrbray.org.uk

flashboy — 2011-01-22T14:45:32+00:00

"This website is dedicate to the postal activities of W. Reginald Bray... His lifelong passion was to send items through the post that, in one form or other, challenged the Postal system. He even had himself 'delivered' on more than one occasion having paid the requisite postage."

"Some Skepticism About Search Neutrality" (PDF)

flashboy — 2011-01-20T02:47:18+00:00

Elegant demolition of most of the main arguments for regulating Google on net neutrality-style grounds. (Shorter version: the whole point of search engines is that they aren't neutral.)

Brighton Argus’ new out-of-town subs fall at the first hurdle

flashboy — 2010-12-20T17:48:35+00:00

On the first day that the Brighton Argus operated without local subs thanks to cost-cutting measures, they managed to spell "Brighton" wrong. Twice. In the same article.

We can save Delicious, but probably not in the way you think

flashboy — 2010-12-20T10:26:19+00:00

"Delicious may or may not have a future as a service, but regardless we can still 'save it' by extracting and preserving its collective memories." Interesting stuff from a former Delicious worker.