Interesting Links for 27-01-2012
Jan. 27th, 2012 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- Depression makes it more likely you'll do overtime
- Cars Kill Cities
- Android and iPhone neck and neck in the US smartphone market
- Apple still dominates the tablet market, but Android narrows the gap
- Pressure is being applied to raise the tax threshold for low earners further and faster
- Do the weather forecasters used by the Daily Mail actually exist?
- This is how I feel about people on minimum wage paying tax
- Why McDonald's second biggest market is...France
- Neil Gaiman on Lewis, Tolkien and Chesterton
- Tetris Furniture
- Douglas Adam's letter to the studio exec responsible for getting Hitchiker's to the screen.
- US government covering up an epidemic.
- I laughed a lot at this video of programming language strangeness. If you're a geek you might do too.
- Mail Online overtakes NY Times as top online newspaper. Now that's terrifying.
- Graphene can now distill alcohol. Is there anything it can't do?
Of course, I'm still waiting for anything graphene related to make it into the shops.
Tags:
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- apple,
- cars,
- cities,
- code,
- cslewis,
- dailymail,
- depression,
- design,
- disease,
- douglasadams,
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- gkchesterston,
- graphene,
- hh,
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- neilgaiman,
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- politics,
- poverty,
- programming,
- psychology,
- ruby,
- tablets,
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![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 01:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-28 07:28 pm (UTC)But also? Despite my dislike of the editorial content, it is probably the best designed, most accessible and most likely to get me reading elsewhere newspaper site I can recall ever going to. Whoever they hired to design that deserves a huge amount of credit.
And yeah, working on the minimum wage thing. And if it comes through that'll be two party policies directly inspired by a former UKIP press officer.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 11:10 am (UTC)Wasn't graphene first discovered from pencils? The graphite occasionally sheds graphene flakes as you write.
I think I may have found your product :)
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 11:30 am (UTC)Lovely, but without numbers I'm clueless as to what this actually entails. How much is min wage p.a.?
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 11:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 11:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 11:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 11:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 11:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 12:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 07:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 08:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 12:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 11:40 am (UTC)"Cars kill cities" chooses an annoying example. (Is there a term for that rhetorical trick?) Instead of mentioning important errands which involve moving a substantial amount of mass (buying food, taking babies and toddlers anywhere), the example repeatedly given is picking up dry cleaning.
In re the hidden epidemic-- damned if I know. Sometimes real problems (agent orange, fibromyalgia) get ignored.
I'm not a geek, but the programming video was still pretty funny, even if I probably missed some of the fine points.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 11:47 am (UTC)And yes, it looks like people who do overtime get depressed later. No proof of causation, but burnout is far too common.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 12:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 12:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 12:55 pm (UTC)My city deliberately uses a zoning system to ensure that residential, business, retail, and industrial areas all be as separate as possible. You cannot live near where you work, nor buy food near either your home nor your job.
Then they provide bus service between the zones only on the hour, and not before 7 am nor after malls close. They can't understand why the bus system is lightly used, so the keep withdrawing routes and runs.
Lately they've been on a kick to try to reduce car/pedestrian fatalities - a problem that better urban design would have greatly prevented!
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 12:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 01:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 06:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 12:25 pm (UTC)*buy small amounts often, say by stopping at the grocery store on the way home from work and getting dinner. Thus the amount bought fits easily onto a bike.
*order online, get food delivered. Yes, this uses a van, but one van delivering to ten people is less than ten cars.
*own a bike trailer. Now I can fit a whole LOT of shopping onto a bicycle.
I don't myself have a child but I know people who do and who get them places on foot (child in buggy/sling/etc), public transport, and bicycle (many ways of attaching children to bicycles exist).
I think that it is a failure of city planning if it is not generally possible for an able-bodied person who lives and works in the city in good health to walk all the places they regularly need to be (home, food shop, child's school, work, gym, wherever else you go) and a failure of public transport policy if it is not generally possible for anyone who is capable of moving around outside at all to move between those places. The prevelance of car-use where it is not strictly needed leads to cities being designed with car-use in mind, making them ever harder to use without a car.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 12:42 pm (UTC)Yes, thank you!
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 12:52 pm (UTC)Also I assume that if you have a large family it is harder; but at the same time I would tend to assume that a large family contains more people who can go to the shop and carry things home from it.
(these days we are totes lazy and get that nice Mx Ocado to deliver our noms direct to our door; the main advantage of which is that I no longer buy a big bag of pasta when there are already two bags of pasta in the cupboard).
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 01:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 06:42 pm (UTC)I couldn't imagine my life if I lived in a modern new build car centred suburb but I suspect I would have been hospitalised by now.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-28 01:23 am (UTC)people who drive tend to swear that things are very difficult without a car.
people who do not drive tend to point out that they manage those things perfectly well without a car.
I am of the latter camp.
as a career cyclist with one successfully raised child, I can assure you that those things can be done extremely easily without a car.
I'm also [as a student of both civil and mechanical engineering] horrified by the amount of space devoted to parking in the given example. Especially having designed car parks.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 03:46 pm (UTC)If the Mail is still free to access online, then there's one reason it surpassed the Times.
As for the "cover up", well, no; "Morgellon's Disease" has never been well supported by research literature, and certainly anyone other than the True Believers has found that the foreign matter samples were from textiles or other common environmental substances.
-- Steve is certainly not dismissing the syndrome, but thinks that "delusional parasitosis" is a better term. Now to find out why these folks' neural nets are falsely signalling the creepy-crawlies...
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 04:01 pm (UTC)And Morgellon's Disease is clearly real - you must be part of The Conspiracy if you're denying it! Aieee!
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 04:42 pm (UTC)-- Steve wishes he was part of The Conspiracy; his retirement fund could do with some top-up with Illumaniti money.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 06:19 pm (UTC)As you'd imagine, I take the opposite view and would reverse the two newspapers in that statement!
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 06:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 07:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 07:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 08:04 pm (UTC)I care more about the SNP's position on corporation tax than I do the love-life of Justin Bieber or who was a bitch backstage at the X-Factor, but the latter two examples are going to sell more papers/magazines and so be important to people. (although I, like you, would have a different view of what's important)
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 08:22 pm (UTC)It's a fairly important point made in that BBC website article that we're talking about the website, not the newspaper. The website does show some content from the newspaper, but an awful lot of the stories on the website don't appear in print. The print newspaper doesn't have much in the way of celebrity gossip for example.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-29 02:11 pm (UTC)Thinking about it, most of what I despise about The Daily Mail comes from their commentators, things like Jan Moir's piece on Stephen Gately, from their unceasing scare stories about cancer, and from looking over Julie's shoulder at the website.
As the Guardian also publishes comment pieces I find horrific, from writers like Julie Bindel, or things that I disagree with severely (most opinion pieces around economics), I can't overly-fault it on that front.
My memory of the paper itself is that it was horribly alarmist, and terribly bigoted. Pieces like this don't help with that view. But having not picked up a copy in 20 years, I have no idea what it's like outside of the bits that I see paraded as examples of its badness.
I'll take your word for it that it's not generally that bad (until I find myself in a dentists waiting room with a copy of it to analyse, of course!)
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 06:35 pm (UTC)"I know it's true; I read it in the Daily Mail" is sufficient rebuttal while being more entertaining than anything I could come up with off-the-cuff, so I'll just stick with that.
-- Steve is gradually becoming less amazed with the remarkable run of the Weekly World News, given how little its coverage differs from that of the Daily Mail.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 07:58 pm (UTC)Unless you were awkwardly phrasing a sentence where you meant "People with depression are likely to have done overtime", perhaps?
I was going to go "wait, are you talking about me?" if it was linking depression as a cause of staying at work for long hours rather than vice versa :-D
no subject
Date: 2012-01-27 08:24 pm (UTC)