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There’s a lot of truth in Matthew Crawford’s article The Case for Working with your Hands, although although the attempt towards the end to link it to the financial crisis is a little clunky. His general points about the value of manual work still stand, particularly where he implies1 that the education system in a [...] As I sit on the terrace looking up at the night sky over the Mediterranean, what’s going through my head? 1. I don’t do demonstrations any more – I’ve been charged by horses, clubbed with batons, narrowly avoided a lungful of something nasty and it didn’t really achieve much, to be honest. If I was out [...] I never realised that Bruce Sterling had married Jasmina Tesanovic and lived in Belgrade for a few years. Well done Bruce. In this talk, he reflects on what Balkan society can tell “us”, by which he means of course the West. There’s a lot of good observations (if slightly obvious to anybody who’s spent any [...] “What’s that coming over the hill? Is it a monster? Is it a monster?” – The Automatic You think of these migraines as something outside yourself. When you wake from an afternoon hibernation, you think to yourself, “Is it gone yet?” No, it hasn’t gone yet; it throbs and writhes just beneath the skin of [...] First: A teenager in the US state of Florida has committed suicide in front of a live internet audience. Abraham Biggs, 19, from Pembroke Pines, near Miami, killed himself hours after announcing his intention to do so on his blog. Second: A former police chief in Argentina, wanted for alleged crimes against human rights, has shot himself dead [...] The New Statesman presents findings from the Fear in the Mega-Cities survey (so far, so Dredd), which I’m afraid simply aren’t very interesting, and only one thing stood out for me. In Paris, Rome, London, New York, Cairo and Sao Paolo, “Losing loved ones” features in the top five fears, but not so in Moscow, [...] This week, legendary sports journalist Rod Curtis was my guest at the building site that I call home. Rod lives in Tirana, and drives the only car currently available in Albania, a black Merc. It’s been a pleasure having him here, except when he wakes me up at 4 in the morning staggering around the [...] I try to explain to him what it means and how it feels, and while I’m talking I wonder whether those two things are the same. Imagine that you speak a language that only one other person in the world speaks. You don’t even think about it as a language – it’s just the world you [...] Many technotopian scenarios can be described as “the geek will inherit the earth”. The most recent example of two rich white men wearing heavy-rimmed glasses pontificating about how indispensable they’re going to be after the apocalypse recently appeared on boingboing and worldchanging – two sites which have a lot to recommend them but also have [...] So while I was plastering around an electrical socket, I thought to myself, “Gypsum. I wonder what gypsum is”. Gypsum, my friends, is calcium sulfate dihydrate, a naturally occurring chemical with the chemical formula CaSO4·2H2O. Calcium sulfate is also “The traditional and most widely used coagulant to produce Chinese-style tofu. It produces a tofu that is [...] |
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