cloudsoup

Ben Hammersley links to his mate a random bloke, Adam Greenfield:

This goes back to the joke I always make about opening a chain of coffeehouses called Faraday’s: under the condition of ambient informatics, we will need to consciously create platforms for the specific kind of conviviality we recognize as animating our “third places,” and we will generally have to do this by physically denying, buffering or mitigating the Hertzian overlay

A paragraph surely generated from the Postmodern Essay Generator and an unsubtle joke from the probably unreal Mr Hammersely, who, between bouts of noisly photographatising dangerous places (whhhhhooooooohhh) and producing hundreds of boringly same-y looking b&w photos of moody, thin girls in an OCD storm of snapping, manages to run marathons in deserts and get himself signed up to all sorts of potentially interesting projects which he then smears with his pale cast.

I think he should be written out.

Read the Linking to this Web Site paragraph (item 6).

Why not…

A planet has been found that’s only 1.5 times the size of earth and appears to have liquid water running on its surface… Wow. That’s pretty amazing. What interests me is twofold. Firstly, obviously, is there life. Secondly, if there isn’t, how easy would it be to introduce some?

Tom Coates, Plasticbag.org, Links for 2007-04-26

Firstly, this planet hasn’t been direcly observed. Its presence is inferred from the behaviour of its star. No liquid at all has been discovered and certainly not observed on this planet. Certainly no water. It does not ‘appear to have water’ on its surface; running, skipping, or doing anything else.

Secondly – how easy would it be to introduce some life? Well, at 20 light years the planet is 9,460,800,000,000 km from us, or thereabouts. If Tom climbed into his car and started driving now at a pretty sharpish 120 km/h (75mph) he should arrive in about 9 million years, assuming he didn’t stop off for a burger and a snooze.

Tim O’Reilly has generated code of conduct for bloggers.

A short while ago, O’Reilly wrote the following in an email to me:

some people think that calling people names (your most recent being, “a big douchebag”) is a substitute for discussion.

And when I pointed out to O’Reilly that he was mistaken, that I’d never called him, or indeed anyone, a douchebag, he wrote:

I do apologize. It wasn’t you. It was another commenter. I don’t know why I thought it was you. In a previous post, you even deplored the language used by some of the other posters. Sorry. (But you’ll notice, I made the point privately, and didn’t accuse you in public.)

O’Reilly did apologise but he didn’t properly check his facts before accusing me and he implies ill-mannered private behaviour is more excusible than ill-mannered public behaviour. And he might have a point.

But it isn’t what he suggests in his prissy code of conduct.

Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person. … simply imagine the person you’re speaking to as a real person, standing in front of you. Would you say what you’re saying to them if you were in the same room

Seems to me that O’Reilly is very prepared to be rude in private, which gives him a lot of leeway in public, doesn’t it?

One of the reasons I admire my friend Mena is that she is remarkably prescient

Anil Dash, a Vice President at Six Apart, co-founded by … Mena

Feedburner is a very useful resource on the web. For those not in the know, it allows you to use its cache of your RSS or Atom feeds as your public feeds. And it can convert RSS to Atom, and can present the feed nicely styled with CSS and it delivers usage stats to you.

Very useful.

So I was wondering, now I’m back with Drupal again, what the best way might be of using feedburner with the the numerous feeds Drupal generates.

I’ve seen some advice on mucking about with .htaccess, which i can happily do, but it’s not exactly friendly and as I’m looking for a project in order to get to grips with the new module system in Drupal 5, I’m wondering if there are enough hooks in th API to allow a feedburner module to tak over the job.

I’ll report back

Occasionally I have questioned his style and on one particular occasion I’ve thought his sense of the ethical ramifications of a particular line of research was a bit na�ve

Tom Coates on Ben Goldacre

Let’s see then. Tom Coates questions his style and has thought him naive over Goldacre’s blog entry on Gay Sheep. Another of Coates’s confused forays into science in the news occasioned by his own biases, unargued, unreasoned and unreasonable. Who cares if the self-inflated Coates thinks someone naive? I think Coates is a puffed-up bag of wind but does anyone care?

Here’s Ben Goldacre on ‘Dr’ Gillian.

Zeldman’s redesigned Happy Cog and his story about his science teacher suggests a tricksy, sly, and clever man. By the way, buy his book, I did (and I’m not getting an Amazon referral for that).

Looking over this post I realised where the title comes from. There’s a Roland Barthes essay in Mythologies called, The Iconongraphy of the Abbé Pierre which suggests he has a zero degree haircut, a haircut that doesn’t signify.

If you’re interested you could try Writing Degree Zero but it’s a bit of a tedious read, I recommend instead the very funny Mythologies, a collection of essays lighter and wittier than his sometimes pompous and turgid prose.