A footnote from Maciej Ceglowski’s post on the Australian rain forrest: Farmers and fishermen in Australia test the limits of human empathy. While I was in Cairns, for example, controversy ranged around the recent extension of the Great Barrier Reef marine park, opponents arguing that the expanded ban on fishing would harm the Cairns fishing … Read More

A man in the US was arrested, held against his will and finally convicted for shouting ‘bingo’ in a bingo hall. Apparently upsetting biddies is illegal now.

John Scalzi writes: “I put each letter of the alphabet into my web browser and posted the link it autocompleted to”. He then proceeds to write small blurbs for each entry. The following are mine. ad.nl/ad/nl/1001/Sportwereld/: the newspaper’s sports section. buienradar.nl: a satellite image that shows where in the Netherlands it currently doesn’t rain. Handy … Read More

Angus Croll wrote a couple of Javascript programs that calculate a fibonacci series, each program in the style of a famous literary author. Cool stuff.

Spoiler alert! There will be a bad word in this posting, and it will appear right after this sentence. Crap Cycling & Walking in Waltham Forest is back. This is one of my favourite blogs on the web, because of the bloody-mindedness of its sole blogger, Freewheeler. The blog is about the quality and quantity … Read More

A couple of years ago I posted a few seconds of an a-capella version of Aha’s eighties monster hit Take on Me AS SUNG BY PICKLES, and … you know? Youtube just keeps on giving. Turns out this version was not made by pickles in jars, but by a group called UMD Generics, and their … Read More

The Guardian has a nice (but short) gallery of an extinct cliché, photos of writers behind their typewriters. Via Eamelje. Photo of JG Ballard by David Montgomery / Getty Images.

Braille is not necessarily dying. But if you take the threats to print books and you sort of make a caricature of them, those are the threats to Braille books. Creating Braille books is extremely labor-intensive. They’re incredibly bulky. For instance, the Harry Potter series comes in 59 volumes, and they’re all almost a foot … Read More

So there I was at the 24-hour grocery story getting whatever sketchy garbage it is that I eat, and only one checkout was open. So there was kind of a line, and as I’m on deck to pay for my stuff I notice there is this woman just pleading with the cashier. She is trying … Read More

What went on before: fishing highlights the tragedy of the commons. Since there is no incentive for fishermen to limit the amount of fish they catch, they tend to catch too many. The supply does not have the time to restock, and the price of fish is low because everybody is selling fish. The classic … Read More