Letters Remain

  • Singles Night at the Library

    Not your usual venue for a singles’ night, but I do like this idea.

    Anyone hoping to spot a potential partner can pick up a pink badge signalling their romantic intentions at reception. Then they can stroll the aisles looking for a book, DVD, or something – or someone – else that takes their fancy.

    “This is a different type of singles evening because it’s not being held in a bar, restaurant or nightclub. It’ll offer many people looking for a partner an environment they’ll be more comfortable with.“

    However I do hope that this idea was born with the intention of bringing the public closer to their publicly funded libraries, and as a way to make ‘public space’ and ‘public libraries’ analogous (as opposed to someone’s ‘wacky’ idea!).

    For an interesting video on this topic (libraries as public space), I definitely recommend watching Joshua Prince-Ramus’ 2006 TED Talk on designing the Seattle Central Library.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Online Lectures from Around the World

    I’m a huge fan of the MIT Open Courseware site. Full of great material and insightful lectures, it helped me immeasurably when I decided to brush up on my Spanish.

    Thanks to the hive mind over at MetaFilter, a great list has now been produced linking to similar collections around the world. Check out the YouTube College Lectures discussion for all the suggestions.

    via Lifehacker

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Remove Tourists from Your Photos

    Holidaying soon? Avid photographer? Get annoyed by ‘tourists’ ruining your otherwise perfect pictures?

    Thanks to a Google Reader glitch this morning that has set the last two years worth of Lifehacker posts as unread, I’ve just spotted a wonderful post from dsphotographic on removing those pesky humans from your otherwise great photos.

    Every notable landmark seems to have one thing in common: visitors, and lots of them. But if you want that postcard shot or that image that shows how the location may have once appeared, you have a challenge ahead of you.

    via Lifehacker

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The “iPod Tax” and the Desperate UK Music Industry

    How did this one sneak in under the radar?

    The UK’s Music Business Group is requesting that a tax be levied on technologies that allow ‘format shifting’. To you and me that means that if you can transfer or copy your music from it, to it, or using it, it should be taxed. The reasoning behind this? Let’s have the BPI explain:

    Enormous value is derived by those technology companies and manufacturers who enable consumers to copy. UK creators and rights owners are legally entitled to share in this value – as they hold the exclusive right to reproduce their music – but are currently excluded from the value chain.

    Hands off Ctrl-C / Apple-C, pay up now!

    via BBC dot.life

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Travelling on a Shoestring

    I’m pretty sure we’re all agreed that travelling the world is a great thing to do. And when you can do it on a frugal budget (not a cheap one), it’s even better!

    That makes Plonkee’s latest post, 21 Resources for Budget Travel great in every respect – links galore!

    take the train, not the plane – possibly the most civilised form of transport available. I love taking the train when I’m on holiday. My current favourite trip was from Budapest to Vienna, so cheap and so easy. One of these days I want to travel on the Trans-Siberian express from Moscow to Beijing.

    My added tip? If you do consider using the train – even for a moment – you must check out The Man in Seat Sixty-One; the greatest site on the topic of intercontinental train travel (I have mentioned this site before).

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Unsubscribe from Human Rights Abuse

    Unsubscribe is an Amnesty International campaign asking you to ‘unsubscribe’ from the human rights abuses undertaken around the world in your name. Illegal detention and torture are just two of the acts that are common place in the so-called ‘War on Terror’, and guilty or not, people deserve better treatment than what they currently get in (illegal) prisons around the world.

    To raise awareness of this campaign, Amnesty produced two excruciatingly powerful films showing, for real, the CIA-endorsed torture techniques enhanced interrogation procedures currently used around the world on prisoners who are yet to face a trial (i.e. in the eyes of the law, they are still innocent)*.

    Waiting for the Guards depicts the horror of Stress Positions, held for a measly six hours.

    The Stuff of Life shows us – in a real and unambiguous way – that ‘waterboarding’ is torture, not an interrogation technique. (Currently only available on the campaign’s main page.)

    Whether or not you agree with the politics (although it’s difficult not to), these films are worth a watch – they are exquisitely directed and produced. The making of clip for ‘The Stuff of Life’ is also worth a watch.

    * Only 1 in 10 people at Guantanamo are expected to face charges (and a court) – the rest will be set free without charge.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The $1m Test-Tube Chicken (Meat)

    The X Prize Foundation is a non-profit institute that awards rather large prizes to non-governmental organisations who achieve a number of milestones, classed as beneficial to mankind. The most famous of these was the Ansari X Prize awarded to the first NGO to send a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice in two weeks – this was eventually won by the Tier One project, and they were awarded with the $10,000,000 prize in 2004.

    Today it appears that everyone’s favourite animal rights group, PETA, is getting in on the action too; they have offered a $1,000,000 prize to the first organisation to create and market in-vitro chicken meat within the next four years. As El Reg puts it:

    PETA announced today it will offer $1m to an organization that can successfully create and market “in vitro meat,” i.e. muscle tissue grown without the pesky animal attached.

    To collect PETA’s $1m carrot, scientists must develop a commercially marketable in vitro meat in just four years. At least they’re first setting the bar down to creating a chicken flesh substitute, which reportedly tastes like every non-traditional animal in the known universe.

    This brings to mind my favourite Threadless t-shirt… Meat is murder. Tasty, tasty murder.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Photographer’s Rights in the UK

    This morning I read an interesting BBC News article titled Innocent photographer or terrorist? that tackles the issue of illegal stop and searches of photographers and the growing incidence of this in the UK. A good accompaniment to my previous post, The Photo Police.

    It reminded me of this handy little booklet on Photographers’ Rights in the UK produced by Linda Macpherson in conjunction with The Camera Club of London.

    Some years ago it was said in a judgement that there is “no law against taking a photograph”. This implies a general freedom to take photographs that, sadly for photographers, does not really exist. There are, in fact, many legal restrictions on the right to take a photograph, and it would be more correct to say that one is free to take photographs except when the law provides otherwise.

    So the question is, when does the law provide otherwise?

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Oxfam: Reshaping the World

    Remember that great visual that accompanied Alisa Miller’s 2008 TED Talk?

    Oxfam in Action have produced a similar graphic covering the topics of world poverty, education, HIV infection rates, hunger, population, and trade.

    Ever wondered what extreme poverty on a global scale looks like? It’s not a pretty sight – as you can see on our clever interactive map. Oxfam is busy fighting poverty with partners and poor communities in more than 70 countries worldwide to reshape our world for the better.

    Click on the categories above to find out what kind of shape the world is in on some of the big poverty-related issues Oxfam works on.

    These maps were created by Mapping Worlds whose website also contains more great graphics – worth a look!

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Ethical Impulses & The Moral Instinct

    Evolution has endowed us with ethical impulses. Do we know what to do with them?

    In Steven Pinker’s New York Times article, The Moral Instinct, this question is raised and discussed as he takes us on a guided tour of ‘moral psychology‘ – a recently invigorated field.

    The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave. Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable (“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito bites”).

    via Mind Hacks (Pinker is the author of The Blank Slate and The Language Instinct, both books on my 2008 reading list.)

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    Lloyd Morgan