| sneedle flipsock |
2 April 2004: we wish to inform you... |
flipsockgrrl @ gmail .com |
This week:
We wish to inform you...April 2004 is the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. Survivors are again living next door to those who joined the killing, maiming, raping and plundering. Daily news stories report on progress towards justice but the truth and reconiciliation process is painfully slow--partly because of the huge numbers of people who need to be brought to trial in the Gacaca (village-based courts) and given an opportunity to apologise. Around 90,000 suspects are held in detention camps and about a quarter of these have confessed to their 1994 crimes. In the last 10 years Rwanda's economic growth rate has averaged around 6 per cent, inflation stayed under 5 per cent, the currency exchange rate has been healthy and tea output has increased. Refugees are returning from Uganda. Kigali has new houses and other buildings, paved roads and good lighting in public areas, and a new privately-owned radio station. Says an AllAfrica.com editorial, "Peace has returned to the nation of 8.2 million and thousands of troops that had been deployed to the Congo are back in the country. Some Interahamwe commanders have also given up their rebellion and returned to Kigali." Reading Philip Gourevitch's "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families" I was wildly impressed with Paul Kagame, a Rwandan who grew up in Uganda and returned with other exiles to take up arms against the Hutu and, by opposing, end the killing. Kagame became president in 1994 and remains in that position. Linda Polman is less impressed with Kagame, and with the UN's management of its peacekeeping role, and explains why in "We Did Nothing: why the truth doesn’t always come out when the UN goes in". 2 April 2004 | top of page Out and aboutSays m'colleague Warren: "Pretty amazing website about a woman who goes for a motorbike ride through the dead zone surrounding Chernobyl. It's like watching a science fiction movie about the end of the world." (Thanks, Warren) Coincidentally, I've just bought the DVD of "Edge of Darkness", after being persuaded by Chris Lawson's review of "State of Play" that it was a good investment. Found Magazine publishes "FOUND stuff: love letters, birthday cards, kids' homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, doodles--anything that gives a glimpse into someone else's life." I'm rather fond of the to-do list for 27 April 2003: mustn't forget the lizard. (Thanks, Rebecca) Berlin's Propeller Island City Lodge is as much a work of art as it is a hotel: have a look at those rooms and let your imagination run riot. The web site also has movies and music. (via Geisha Asobi) Have you tried googlephrasing? How architects can help you get fit. The Untitled Project collects photos of urban environments, stripped of all text. Derive for the illiterati? Officially sponsored fun in public places just doesn't work. 2 April 2004 | top of page Eh? Speak up!Old people say the wackiest things... Subscriber Teresa comments: "Hmmm. Is that like my mother asking for the HIV milk the other day? Mind you, after a good cackle, my brother called it the UHF milk. Sigh, I almost didn't have the breath to tell them it was UHT." (Thanks, Andrew and Teresa) BBC Online fights to justify, maintain role as public's voice. The Picturing Women exhibition offers "historical and contemporary representations and self-representations of women--how they are figured, fashioned, turned into portraits, and told about in words and pictorial narrative." The third season of Black Books is airing in England (yay). The Black Books web site has lots of goodies for the darkly amused booklover, including kids' reviews of Designing Web Usability, Vampires of Fear, The Naked Lunch, Mastering Regular Expressions in PERL, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Lloyd's Jurisprudence, Mahabharat and Spartacus International Gay Guide. Happy reading! (Thanks, Paul) "Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart reasons." "Gather up your vocabulary cards and parsing sheets... You may return my Smyth and pay any outstanding copy-charge fees by campus mail... You are no longer invited to my birthday... You are, put simply, a lazy student. Like the wren--who has his food dropped into his beak by his mother's claws, and then, by and by, grows, and, on the day he should be able to fly, prefers to fold his wings and nestle on the eagle's crest--so have you been in my weekly reading group. Well, no longer. Go." The language of vampires. Spelling reform: George Bernard Psschaughal accepts his Nobel Prize (via Language Log) Elmore Leonard's guidelines for writers: easy on the adverbs, exclamation points and especially hooptedoodle. (via Making Light) Stephen King on being an honest writer: "If I happen to be the writer of such a death bed scene, I'd choose 'Son of a bitch' over 'Marry her, Jake' every time. We understand that fiction is a lie to begin with. To ignore the truth inside the lie is to sin against the craft, in general, and one's own work in particular." Starting and running an online news community is "...an extremely healthy exercise for older people. But for younger people, it does a lot to promote their own self-assurance and their own self values because they're doing things together. They have to, they want to be heard on subjects that normally people won't listen to them about in homes and in schools, taking on the most difficult issues." 2 April 2004 | top of page Design! Fabulous!'Mourning pictures' were hand-made 19th century expressions of loss: "[T]hey were also the product of an increasingly prosperous and self-consciously genteel society that was turning female mourning into a consumer lifestyle." Clothing designer Gareth Pugh has seen one too many Target ads. (via Geisha Asobi) "[T]he products that are created may become usable, but it won't guarantee they are well designed... Why? Because usability is an aspect of good design... Not the other way around." (via www.veen.com) Richard Florida's views on the new class war have been getting plenty of coverage in Australia recently. (You'd think he was flogging a book or something...) In a Washington Monthly article he explains how the US Republican party's 'anti-elitism' could ruin the American economy. From this side of the Pacific pond that's not necessarily a bad thing, provided we can avoid making the same mistakes. 2 April 2004 | top of page ScienceBiographer Nick Webb and the lovely Robin Williams reminisce about Douglas Adams, the science fan and writer with a brain the size of a planet and an inventive sense of humor. Listen soon, 'cos the In Conversation radio program doesn't do transcripts and audio files are only available for a few weeks. (Requires Real Audio) At Harvard University, researchers bet on fruit fly fights to expose underlying biology of aggression. (via Geisha Asobi) An astrology chart for bacteria. M'colleague (erstwhile, emeritus) Ian Musgrave has joined a group blog, Panda's Thumb, named for the Stephen Jay Gould book. Comments Ian: the site's "apparent aim is defence of science from the forces of irrationality, and committing bad puns..." The University of Leicester has a Celebrity Research Group. 2 April 2004 | top of page Splat!Penguin splat: the abominable snowman throws snowballs at the leaping penguins. You click to release the snowballs, aiming to splat the penguins into the target on the glacier. Cute, yet sick. (requires Flash/Shockwave) (Thanks, Andrew) Andrew also offers a "manic floating Nigella head that bites your fingers off! ...still, it's a strangely engaging game." (requires some sort of plugin that won't talk to my browser) Worth1000.com's Photoshop funksters rework Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons, making photographic versions of some classics. Larson doesn't want his work published on the web, so this is the next best thing. 2 April 2004 | top of page Where is the life?
"[T]he effort of sharing knowledge has to be less than the value of participating. People have to see tremendous immediate benefit. They have to see, smell, touch and taste how it's going to improve their work lives." Content management is a process, not a technology. Its main requirement is skilled people, not computers. Far from spelling the end of written expression, new communication technology is allowing more and more people to become writers. Ask rock band members why they have web sites, and they'll probably tell you it's "to connect with our fans!" While many band sites fail to make that connection, some bands, like Powderfinger and Grinspoon and their web development consultants, really do grok the web. "If you're 12 or 14 and you don't know HTML, your friends won't respect you," says Jamie Riehle, global manager of web publishing for Terra Lycos. "There is 'a cool geek factor.' Smart is cool again." About 200 million Chinese are using the web and privately owned sites "have begun to gingerly open up sensitive issues including SARS, AIDS, police brutality, and legal reform." The growth of the Internet seems to be influencing Chinese government policy as well. (via Poynter) A study by Spring S Hull finds that giving users a quick lesson in breadcrumbs helps people successfully navigate your web site. Hull suggests large organisations could save substantial staff time, and therefore money, by encouraging employees to use breadcrumb links on their intranet sites. Conversely, Mark Hurst observes that "merely organising a site into taxonomies and sub-sections, and displaying breadcrumb links to show the hierarchy of the site, does *not* by itself create a good user experience." For most Africans, Internet access is little more than a dream: those 200 people in Somalia must be really, really special. IA Jargonwatch: buzzwords from the world of information architecture. "I don't want tomorrow's technology today. I want yesterday's technology tomorrow... Call me old-fashioned, but I want stuff that works." 2 April 2004 | top of page Reading roomLuke Slattery reckons the future of book publishing "requires a return to an elitist, and conservative, concept of the book: the book as knowledge; as art; the book as it was meant to be." Of course, everyone has their own ideas about what elitism is and whether it's a good, bad or somewhere in middle. In two years Australia's highest-paid woman executive has ditched more than 100 brands from her employer's retail empire, introduced new house brands, struck exclusive distribution deals with suppliers like Cue and Country Road, closed some unprofitable shops, retrained 25,000 staff and killed off a 119-year-old brand name. The power of 30:1: the Resnikoff-Dolby 30:1 Rule suggests that "human beings process information in such a way as to move through levels of access that operate in 30:1 ratios... Something about these size relationships is natural and comfortable for human beings to absorb and process information." It's an interesting idea; beware confirmation bias, however. Reviewing Richard Dawkins:
2 April 2004 | top of page Lucky lastWhen will spring come for Haru Urara? Perhaps never, if she keeps losing races, but ya gotta love a horse who wears Hello Kitty headgear. (Thanks, Paul) There's nothing wrong with coming last: in fact, in San Francisco, you can be a joyful winner by building the model car that's last to cross the Walton Derby's finishing line (audio and video warning). (Thanks, Katherine with a K) 2 April 2004 | top of page |
2004 flipsocks:17 Dec: the
sock has flipped
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